King's College London strike against education cuts

I will be attending the rally today at the King's College campus in Waterloo in support of the strike by the lecturers union, UCU, against massive cuts in educational spending at King's. The campus is in the Vauxhall constituency and as a trade unionist and parliamentary candidate it has my full support.

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 1pm KCL 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