The sound of a shrill alarm bell reaches the ears of the eleven people attending a meeting in a basement at the Fuglesangs Allé campus in Aarhus. It’s a wet and chilly Tuesday morning in the middle of January.

“Umm – should we be doing something about that?” asks someone after a while.

Gitte Bak Ditlefsen is the union representative for about 100 clerical staff working in the central administration at AU Finance and Planning. She hesitates for a moment, as if she’s just wondering about the question. Then she says, “No, there’s no fire alarm in this building!”

The others laugh a little, reaching for their coffee cups. One of them says,

“It’s like crying wolf. We’re so used to the bell going off that nobody reacts any more.”

The meeting is for all the staff representatives from one of the two local liaison committees at AU Finance and Planning. This morning they are discussing how to deal with the topics which are to be raised by the local management at an extraordinary liaison committee meeting in an hour’s time.

The cuts are not a false alarm

The bell ringing in the building might have been a false alarm. But the redundancies announced in November are not. One of the points on the agenda will deal with the general criteria used by the management to decide who they can fire – and who they can’t. 

Everyone nods in agreement when Ditlefsen, who is also vice-chair of one of the liaison committees, says,

“It’s up to the management to decide on the criteria for firing people. They’re the ones who’ve spent all the money and they’re the ones who want to fire people, so it’s up to them.”

“Having said that, we must also keep a close eye on who they’re planning to fire. Is it all the elderly employees, for instance? Or all the new employees?” she continues.

“It’ll probably be the people who they want to get rid of,” says someone else. And judging by the silence that ensues, this is a point of concern which is not new for the other people in the room.

Start at the top

The agenda will also include a discussion of various ways to prevent redundancies. The meeting quickly decides to suggest a variety of measures: stopping the practice of paying people in lieu of their sixth holiday week, cutting down on overtime, and asking the management to stop using external consultants, for instance.

“We could also suggest that they start firing people at the top to get it over with a bit faster,” is one of the final proposals.

The spirit of Christmas?

After the extraordinary meeting of the local liaison committee, we meet Gitte Bak Ditlefsen again in her office, which she shares with three others. It’s still full of Christmas decorations. She looks around and says,

“We haven’t had time to clear them away since the Christmas holiday.”

The four colleagues are part of the AURUS group in the accounts office at AU Finance and Planning, and one of their jobs is to check the documents submitted by staff in connection with their travel expenses.

“We also do the paperwork for people who can’t manage it themselves,” smiles Ditlefsen. Like her three colleagues, she has heard a great deal of criticism of the AURUS system.

“We’ve got a hotline that people can write to if they need help, and we get plenty of mails from dissatisfied staff,” she says.

“But people are getting better at filling in their travel expense reports. And we don’t have to remind them to submit the relevant documents quite so often as we used to. This might of course be due to the fact that people who don’t submit the relevant documents by a certain deadline will be docked in salary!”

I want my voice to be heard

It’s not long since Christmas, but Ditlefsen isn’t in the mood to hand out any presents to the management. This becomes apparent when our discussion continues over lunch.

“I don’t want to be a manager, but I do want my voice to be heard even though I’m just a grassroots employee. That’s why I decided to become a union representative, because it gives me the chance to change things I’m dissatisfied with,” she explains.

Ever since Rector Brian Bech Nielsen announced that the university would be making extensive cuts, Ditlefsen has been spending most of her time preparing for the upcoming redundancies as well as she can by trying to find out about the management’s intentions. This involves attending meetings of the local liaison committee at AU Finance and Planning, the administration’s liaison committee, and the board of clerical staff at AU.

“I’m a union representative, so I’m not first in line for the chop. But I’m fully aware of the unsettled atmosphere – the people I share an office with are under threat.”

Even though a sense of unease has crept into the accounts office, none of her colleagues have asked her for any help so far.

“I think this is because we work in an accounts office. We know it’s pointless to speculate until we get some firm figures on the table.”

A sympathetic ear

Gitte Bak Ditlefsen knows what it’s like to support colleagues who have been made redundant.

“But I’ve never been in a situation like this, with the management announcing wide-ranging redundancies.”

She’s not entirely sure how she will react when dealing with people who have been fired.

“I think I’ll be fine, but you can’t be completely certain how you’ll react to other people’s reactions. My role is to lend a sympathetic ear, to support people, to stay calm and listen carefully to what the manager says. That’s because I think the person who’s being fired might find it difficult to concentrate on what the manager is saying.”

“And I think my role also involves battling to ensure that the people affected get as much assistance as possible to help them face the future.”

FACTS

In May Gitte Bak Ditlefsen will have worked at AU for 17 years. For the past eight years she has also been a deputy or full union representative.

AU job experience
1997-2002: Previous accounts department at AU

2003-2009: Department of Molecular Biology

2010-2011: Faculty of Science

2011- : Travel expenses/accounts office, AU Finance and Planning

Union representative
2005-2008 Deputy union representative, Faculty of Science

2008-2011 Union representative, Faculty of Science

2011- : Union representative, AU Finance and Planning

Translated by Nicholas Wrigley