University managements are victimising union reps as part of their assault on all university workers, so help support the fightback for wages not warfare, reports Louis Bailey

The British weather was confused on Wednesday 10 June, sunny one minute, raining the next but the students and staff at Soas were clear. They stood with the workers of Soas. Lenin Escudero, a cleaner and Facilities Staff Branch Committee Rep for Unison has been dismissed on unscrupulous grounds. Similarly, Consuelo Moreno Yusti, also a Committee Rep for Unison at Soas, has been suspended pending an investigation.

These are clear attacks by Soas management to take out the leading Unison reps to weaken the power of local organising. Both were at the heart of the successful campaign run back in 2018, where the union and activists succeeded in bringing cleaners in-house. Some years later, the same people are now having to come out again to defend themselves. In university and wider in society, it is clear that no job is any longer safe.

Soas’s track record on union busting and its treatment of staff is appalling and frankly racist. In 2009, the university invited nine cleaners into work early for a ‘meeting’. In fact, the workers found themselves at the mercy of immigration officers who had hid in the university. This act alone is a disgrace but sadly is part of a pattern of behaviour.

Universities are falling apart at the seams following the Browne report of 2010 which encouraged the policy that universities should be administered like businesses. Thus the only logical conclusion is students and studying become commodities, and any university which cannot maintain a sufficient profit will have to ‘market exit’, effectively closing down without any government support.

This business strategy of restructuring to cut off the ‘dead weight’ of a university to save money is not only a Soas story. It is happening across the country. We are seeing 600 staff up for redundancy at the University of Nottingham. Goldsmiths is seeing their marking and assessment boycott leading to an all-out strike as management have stopped all the pay to staff involved in the boycott. Feyzi Ismail is a striking Goldsmiths lecturer and spoke at the rally.

Adverts for the army are everywhere, and while social institutions close or have their funding cut, cadet centres are not being closed down. How is it that this government can find money for weapons but not our wages? Lenin and Consuelo give more to society’s day-to-day functioning than one hundred tanks, drones, or F-35s ever could.

The fights at Soas, at Nottingham and at Goldsmiths are one in the same. Staff are fighting for a functional education system run for students and staff’s wellbeing, not for profit. We must support all these causes and be arguing for a national response to this crisis as the government could change course if it wanted to.

Join the picket lines and rallies as and when they come up; check our events page. Also, join the International anti-war conference to continue the work of creating a society against war and for workers.