Sandy Suspended – SOAS Shut Down: SOAS administration in 2015 made plans to slash £6.5million from the funds for the next educational yr by reducing 184 programs and making employees redundant. The plans would even have seen outsourced employees given even worse contracts by the personal firms using them.
Administration, headed by interim director Baroness Valerie Amos, a former adviser to Tony Blair have been additionally trying to deliver the scholar union to implement the federal government’s divisive ‘stop technique’ and to cease the democratically agreed educational boycott of Israel and the appointment of a liberation co-President of the College students Union.
College students responded angrily after a leaked doc revealed the extent of the cuts and started an occupation of the Brunei Suite on the SOAS web site in early October 2015. The suite was not part of the college’s academic programme, however a money-making enterprise rented out for industrial makes use of and the scholars additionally needed it for use by and for the SOAS group.
Throughout the occupation they used the suite for various talks, discussions and numerous inventive occasions. Administration responded by spending a number of thousand kilos a day on further safety – and once I visited SOAS the one solution to enter was by means of home windows and too athletic for me.
Amos accused the scholars and employees supporting the occupation of bullying and intimidating behaviour instantly earlier than she then tried to intimidate them by suspending Unison department secretary Sandy Nicoll over a completely unfaithful allegation that he had allowed college students to occupy the suite.
The suspension introduced a direct offended response from employees and college students on the college who referred to as for a day of motion on twenty ninth October. Many instructing and administrative employees refused to cross a picket line and administration locked the doorways, cancelling lectures in the primary constructing for the day whereas a protracted and spirited protest came about exterior.
Round 60 Unison members and 20 from the UCU got here outin an uofficial motion to help him, together with most of the college students together with pupil union leaders. Messages of help for Sandy got here from schools and commerce unions across the nation. A protracted sequence of audio system additionally got here to provide their help in individual.
There was great heat help when Sandy Nicoll himself got here as much as converse, with individuals shouting out, cheering and clapping in a really rapturous welcome. Sandy was suspended on a completely false cost and there appears to be little probability of the college getting again to regular enterprise till he’s reinstated.
On the finish of the rally, a lot of these current took half within the ‘Strikey-Strikey’ dance, a model of the hokey-cokey in a big circle the place on the of every verse everybody runs like made into the centre. Afterwards, as I used to be leaving, individuals set off smoke flares and paraded with banners and a violin and drums.
Early in November Sandy was reinstated following various protests and unofficial walkouts. The large solidarity he received from employees on the college was a response to his years of help for employees at SOAS and elsewhere, notably within the lengthy and ultimately profitable Justice for Cleaners marketing campaign to get them introduced again into direct employment.
I used to be happy when certainly one of my photos from this protest of Ed Emery enjoying his fiddle was buried as part of the SOAS centenary time capsule in 2016. I used to be there on the day it was buried however for a protest by the cleaners and left to do different issues earlier than the burial.
Extra photos at SOAS Shut Down after Sandy suspended.
Tags: educational boycott, banging pans, Brunei Suite, bullying, course cuts, cutrs, Ed Emery, schooling, false cost, fiddle, intimidation, London, monetisation, occupation, Occupy SOAS, outsourced employees, peter Marshall, picket line, stop technique, protest, redundancies, Sandy, Sandy Nicoll, SOAS, SOAS centenary, strikey-strikey, pupil occupation, college students union, suspended, suspension, time capsule, commerce unionists, UCU, Unison, Unison department secretary, College, College of London, Valerie Amos, violin
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