Stop the Cuts at the University of Cumbria,MMU, KCL

Mass lobby outside the MMU Board of Governors Friday to call on the Board to stop the attack on Support Staff jobs and conditions that is currently being carried out by their Management.

Patrick Gannon
MMU UNISON

To members of Stop the Cuts at the University of Cumbria

Jon Bryan 26 March at 23:44 Reply
Dear all

The following link has the report and a video clip from yesterday's rally and march

http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/forty-join-rally-to-save-cumbria-university-s-newton-rigg-campus-1.688933?referrerPath=home/2.1962

KCL
Full story at the link:

https://sites.google.com/site/righttoworkconference/home/future-events-1/kingscollegelondontuesday30marchcelebrateresistancetoeducationcuts
***Rallies 30 March: 1pm KCL, 6pm
LSE***

Tuesday 30 March will see the first ever local strike against our
management by
UCU members at King's College London. We have voted overwhelmingly to
take
industrial action against a £27m cuts programme that has put 205 jobs at risk
of redundancy, with more to follow.

Whole departments are set to close - Engineering, Dental Mictobiology,
American
Studies, Equality and Diversity - with other areas also under threat -
Palaeography, Logic, Linguistics, the Institute of Psychiatry,
Biomedical and
Health Sciences.

All this in a College where 202 staff earn over £100k a year, with a
combined
salary bill of £29m, and where a £100k salary cap would save £9m a year. Management have by-passed the proper channels of consultation to impose
redundancies. Most staff learned that the country's oldest Engineering
department was to close via the College's website, before any formal
consultation had taken place.

All this helps explain why King's staff returned the highest proportion
of votes
in our union's history (85%) for some form of industrial action. But
this fight
is not about King's alone. If our management's redundancies are not
stopped, it
will give confidence to every management team in higher, further and
adult
education, who believe that the top-down management model in place at
King's
can impose cuts on everyone, everywhere. More seriously, it will
convince any
future government that education is a soft target as they try to recoup
the
billions spent on the banking sector.

Speaking at King's four days before the strike Tony Benn told students
and
staff that, 'What you're doing is educating College management in the
importance of education.' At a time when Peter Mandelson is attempting
to
prevent young people from going to university, and the Chancellor of the
Exchequer is contemplating cuts that will be 'worse than Thatcher', we
also
need to educate the present government, and its successor, about the
importance
of education. So our fight is also your fight.

We are calling on everyone to join us on our picket lines (7pm to 5pm)
on
Tuesday 30 March. We want our strike to be a lively celebration of
resistance
to cuts and a demonstration of our resolve to protect our colleagues'
jobs and
our students' education.

Join our rallies on Tuesday, open to everyone:

Tues 30 March 1pmKCL
Strand and
Waterloo site entrances
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/campuses/strand.html
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/campuses/waterloo.html

Tues 30 March 6pm London
School of
Economics, U8, Tower One, Ground Floor http://www2.lse.ac.uk/mapsAndDirections/findingYourWayAroundLSE.aspx

Please send donations and messages of support to: ucu@kcl.ac.uk

For more information on our dispute see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ucu