Students occupying Glasgow University’s Hetherington Research Club building, have called for a mass protest on February 16 to oppose devastating cuts.
This is when the University Court – a kind of Trustee Board – will review proposals to axe altogether courses in nursing, anthropology, social work and several modern languages. History, archaeology and classics will be merged into a single department. Evening and weekend classes for 5,000 adult learners will disappear, and at the university’s Dumfries campus, liberal arts courses are to go.
In a particular blow to Glasgow, where drug abuse continues to be a massive health and social problem, the university is considering the future of its Centre for Drug Misuse Research.
The proposals aim to save £3m. The university says it has to cut a total of £20m from its budget by 2012-13. It is looking for voluntary redundancies, but compulsory redundancies are not ruled out, as libraries, student support and other departments are told to save between 11% and 15%.
Glasgow’s proposals will be repeated across Scotland in the coming months. Already research budgets have been cut by £67m for next year with newer universities suffering the brunt.
After the University Court meets, managers say they will consult “within the context of the university meeting its strategic ambitions”. Those ambitions are nothing to do with education as a whole. The slick managers running universities today are enthusiasts for the role of the market and the need to service big corporations. Glasgow Principal Anton Muscatelli is a classic example.
The Glasgow branch of the UCU union, which represents lecturers, said economic factors should not be the only criteria for deciding what happens in a university, and that the management must also take on board the views of students and the wider community the university serves.
Staff at the Department of Adult and Continuing Education are now “fighting for survival”, and Liam Kane, one of the lecturers, accused the University of contempt for their work when in fact “the students we are teaching are the people who pay their taxes to pay for the University in the first place”.
“Their strategy appears to be all about internationalisation, foreign students and research, but we are providing real education to real people in challenging subjects,“ he said.
Occupation spokesperson Caron Bell, a student on the threatened anthropology course, said: “This latest round of cuts amounts to only £3 million in so-called savings, as part of a plan to save £20 million over the next three years. What department will be next? This wholesale attack on education will be resisted, both by staff and students. The occupation is the first stage of a long battle to defeat these cuts.”
Nursing student Stuart Tuckwood added: “The staff in the Nursing Department are dedicated and hard-working and do an excellent job of developing talented nurses who go on to provide a high standard of care......we will not be ‘axed’ quietly. We will fight [this] business model for the University every step of the way.”
The only way to halt these cuts is to unite the community as a whole with staff and students to challenge the management’s right to carry them out and at the same time consider a new approach to education and governance. A resolution passed by last month’s National Assembly for Education provides a model for doing this. It says:
This National Assembly for Education urges communities throughout Britain and Europe to build inclusive People’s Assemblies that can:
unite students, education workers, trade unionists, community groups and all those resisting austerity and ConDem cuts, as well as climate change activists, campaigners for human rights, migrant support networks and anti-racist groups
develop an alternative democratic voice and long-term presence to effectively challenge corporate/financial power and its grip on the existing political system.
Penny Cole
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Institute of Occupational Medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Institute of Occupational Medicine. Show all posts
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Thursday, July 01, 2010
A dirty business
From Bhopal to the Niger Delta, Grangemouth to the Gulf of Mexico – humans and animals are paying a high price for the profitability of the petrochemical industry.
Two successive chief executives of the Octel chemical works in Ellesmere Port, Merseyside, are accused of bribing Iraqi officials to buy and use toxic fuel additives.
Iraq, it turns out, is the last country in the world to add tetraethyl lead (TEL) to petrol. It’s banned in most places because it causes brain damage to children.
The company admits paying kickbacks to officials in Iraq and Indonesia, so their countries would go on using TEL. The US Justice Department has extradited Octel’s Iraqi fixer and now wants to prosecute former CEO Paul Jennings.
Wherever you look, the situation is the same. A report issued yesterday showed that more than 4,200 Londoners are dying each year because of long-term exposure to traffic pollution. And yet Mayor Boris Johnson is planning fewer restrictions on emissions, cuts in public transport and massive fare increases.
The study by the Institute of Occupational Medicine found that whilst Central London is most polluted, it is in the suburbs with denser populations that most people are dying. Worst affected were areas such as Penge, and parts of Bromley and Beckenham.
It can be no accident that this is the part of South-east London which is not served by the Underground. Johnson, by the way, claims to be a “green” Mayor.
The build-up of toxins in the air, on land and in the oceans threatens the survival of every life form in the eco-system, quite apart from other ecological threats, as another report emphasises.
It discovered that sperm whales feeding even in the most remote oceans have shockingly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, which spells danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.
The report of the Voyage of the Odyssey, a research ship of the Ocean Alliance conservation group, revealed high levels of cadmium, aluminium, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales from polar areas to equatorial waters.
The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.
And now a new toxin is being hurled thoughtlessly into the biosphere. In drought-stricken areas the practice of “cloud seeding” is becoming more common. It sounds very sweet, but the reality is different.
This unproven practice disperses particles of silver iodide into the atmosphere to try to induce rain. There is absolutely no evidence that it works. But what is known is that in areas where cloud seeding is being carried out, the silver iodide accumulates in animals and the environment.
What these stories and report reveal is an uncontrolled attack on human health in the name of profit. As the recession deepens, corporations are certain to take even more risks at our expense.
Governments, central and local, will do nothing to halt this dirty business because they are in thrall to the industry. Pressing for regulation and control is not an answer because corporations will always find a way round any restrictions. Replacing shareholders with owners in the shape of communities and control by local assemblies is a much more viable way forward.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Two successive chief executives of the Octel chemical works in Ellesmere Port, Merseyside, are accused of bribing Iraqi officials to buy and use toxic fuel additives.
Iraq, it turns out, is the last country in the world to add tetraethyl lead (TEL) to petrol. It’s banned in most places because it causes brain damage to children.
The company admits paying kickbacks to officials in Iraq and Indonesia, so their countries would go on using TEL. The US Justice Department has extradited Octel’s Iraqi fixer and now wants to prosecute former CEO Paul Jennings.
Wherever you look, the situation is the same. A report issued yesterday showed that more than 4,200 Londoners are dying each year because of long-term exposure to traffic pollution. And yet Mayor Boris Johnson is planning fewer restrictions on emissions, cuts in public transport and massive fare increases.
The study by the Institute of Occupational Medicine found that whilst Central London is most polluted, it is in the suburbs with denser populations that most people are dying. Worst affected were areas such as Penge, and parts of Bromley and Beckenham.
It can be no accident that this is the part of South-east London which is not served by the Underground. Johnson, by the way, claims to be a “green” Mayor.
The build-up of toxins in the air, on land and in the oceans threatens the survival of every life form in the eco-system, quite apart from other ecological threats, as another report emphasises.
It discovered that sperm whales feeding even in the most remote oceans have shockingly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, which spells danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.
The report of the Voyage of the Odyssey, a research ship of the Ocean Alliance conservation group, revealed high levels of cadmium, aluminium, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales from polar areas to equatorial waters.
The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.
And now a new toxin is being hurled thoughtlessly into the biosphere. In drought-stricken areas the practice of “cloud seeding” is becoming more common. It sounds very sweet, but the reality is different.
This unproven practice disperses particles of silver iodide into the atmosphere to try to induce rain. There is absolutely no evidence that it works. But what is known is that in areas where cloud seeding is being carried out, the silver iodide accumulates in animals and the environment.
What these stories and report reveal is an uncontrolled attack on human health in the name of profit. As the recession deepens, corporations are certain to take even more risks at our expense.
Governments, central and local, will do nothing to halt this dirty business because they are in thrall to the industry. Pressing for regulation and control is not an answer because corporations will always find a way round any restrictions. Replacing shareholders with owners in the shape of communities and control by local assemblies is a much more viable way forward.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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