Rallying in Southend to build for the University of Essex strike
Workers at the University of Essex are fighting back against bosses’ plans to shut the Southend campus and axe hundreds of jobs.
Bosses want to axe 200 academic and 200 professional services jobs—a cull of one in ten of the workforce. UCU union members plan to strike for seven days from Thursday of next week.
Hundreds of workers and students rallied in Southend on Thursday to build support for the action.
All three campus unions, UCU, Unison and Unite, backed the protest. Speakers included the Unison’s newly-elected general secretary, left winger Andrea Egan, and UCU general secretary Jo Grady.
Unison members at the university are balloting to join their co-workers on the picket lines.
Helen is a UCU member and lecturer in social work at Southend. “I left the front line of social work so that I could come on here to teach the next generation of social workers,” she told Socialist Worker
“I never expected to have to apply for another position. We don’t even know if we’re going to be offered the opportunity to be redeployed or if we are just being made redundant.”
A UCU member who works in the nursing team told Socialist Worker that “400 lives have been upended here at the end of the day”.
“They do need to go back to the drawing board because they are just ruining so many people’s lives and education as well,” she said.
University management informed workers of the plan just before Christmas. It wants to issue redundancy notices by May and has since announced plans to close the Southend campus over the summer.
Around 800 students are expected to transfer from Southend to Colchester from September. Ash, a student at the Southend campus, told Socialist Worker, “We’ve come in solidarity with both staff and students.
“At this university, we have a lot of mature students. There are people with childcare commitments. They’ve got rent and tax to pay and families to take care of—so, for them, Southend is the only choice.
“Closing it down and expecting them to move to Colchester is really unreasonable. There’s going to be a lot of people that are seriously considering just dropping out of their studies completely.”
Jordan Osserman is branch co-president of the University of Essex UCU. He told the rally, “We’ve done our homework. We’ve submitted a very detailed, financially-sound set of alternatives that would secure our university’s future without closing Southend and without redundancies.
“We have presented this to management, but the real issue isn’t our intelligence. It’s power.
“These managers know that the sector is in crisis. Their priority is to save their skins—to keep their salaries, their titles, their career prospects—even if it means putting hundreds of us through the trauma of this process.
“But our strength is in organising. Our strength is in standing together shoulder to shoulder as we are right now with Unite and Unison and students—and the entire labour movement.”
They've been on strike over pay for nearly a year
Workers want to shut the South Kensington site if they don’t get a deal
Unite union rep speaks on deal
The whole trade union movement must rally behind the strikers
