[-empyre-] from Laura Borras

[Jason Nelson]

Laura Borras response.....

It is very exasperating because they never gave me the opportunity to
be personally interviewed, to present my own point of view, and to answer
those who accused me of whatever I may have done and that I have never
been said. My dismissal has been sudden and immediate and has happened
just one week before my Master students had their qualifications. That's
why right now they are in the middle of a big trouble in the virtual
classrooms because they are against this decision and they consider it a
vulneration of their rights as students. They have payed a lot of money
(6.000€) for this Master to be treated like this. In this moment there is
a team of 20 lecturers that have refused to go on teaching if the affair
is not solved or I'm not in the Academic Direction of the Master any more.

But besides this there are all the things that the university doesn't seem
to have had into account taking this decision that (besides what the
President says, was not unanimous). I'm talking about the 50 students of
the Master that I created that have been neglected, the organisation of
e-poetry to which I had obtained more than 30.000€ in research projects
and actions and that they are keeping now and so attempting to its
celebration, a subject that has been cancelled in the undergraduate level
and the students have been unattended, several PhD students and Master
Thesis neglected too, not to talk about innovation and research projects
besides e-poetry such as the GPS, that was funded by the Spanish Ministry
with 90.000€.

So this answer is very disappointing since it's final reason is to make
everybody believe that I am a bad person or that I have done something
terrible for a institution, when the truth is completely different.

Because they know that:
1. - My dismissal has been unfair and unjustified.
2. - I have not received any explanation of the reasons and never received
any sort of warning before (as some other colleagues have received during
the last difficult months). I just want to let you know that the Spanish
law considers that 3 warnings allow a legal dismissal and so the worker
has no right for an severance pay. Anyway, the UOC has a completely unique
juridical nature that keep all their workers in a "office collective
agreement", which means that there is no distinction for academics between
workers. So the standard procedure for academic staff is not the same that
in other universities in Spain. This leaves us in total defenceless.
3. - But in my case, there is no any academic nor labour reason that
justifies this dismissal. Because of that they have recognized, from the
beginning, that it is a "legally inapplicable" dismissal and have offered
me a compensation of 45 days for worked year, the maximum that allows the
Spanish law.
4. - The reasons used in the dismissal letter are: "an evident, continued
and voluntary decrease in the level of work" which is completely false and
can be easily checked.
5. - They are using this excuse of the confidentiality in a very perverse
sense, since I have not established any pact of silence with anybody. I
don't have anything to hide and I haven't signed any confidentiality
clause.

I use the occasion for greeting you and thanking you wholeheartedly. Next
week I will have an interview with the Catalan responsible for
Universities, which has been informed by several of my colleagues about
the situation, and specially the Director of the National Research Plan of
which Experts Panel I take part. But I'm quite downhearted. It's so
unfair! 10 years of work that they want to erase! It's so hard to cope
with this.

Anyway, I'm working hard to try to keep the e-poetry going on.
You ask me if you can do anything else, but the only thing would be to
keep asking them for the academic reasons for the dismissal, the defence
mechanisms that I had to react to this situation, or the guarantees of the
whole process. You can also use e-poetry as an alarm of such an incredible
behaviour for an Academic institution..

Thank you very much for your help.

Laura