SOAS, an example of the marketised university – bringing exploitation and oppression to our campuses
Immigration officials rounded up outsourced cleaners working at the School of Oriental and African Studies on Friday without any recourse to representation by a union or lawyers, and nine staff have been put into fast-track deportation, with three already deported by Sunday.
From Solomon’s Mindfield:
by Sadie Robinson
Students and workers at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) have organised an emergency protest for 8.30am on Monday 15 June to defend cleaners at the site who are facing imminent threat of deportation.
Cleaners at Soas were rounded up by immigration officials at an early morning meeting last Friday.
The raid follows campaigns by the cleaners to win union recognition and the London Living Wage.
Nine of the cleaners were subsequently held, including one woman who is six months pregnant. Their Unison union rep, Sandy Nicoll, said he was prevented from having any contact with them.
By Sunday three had already been deported. Others may be deported on Monday morning.
There is widespread anger and shock at the raid and at the speed with which the workers are being removed from Britain, with no opportunity to challenge the rulings or get legal advice. Many people saw the raid as the “kidnapping” of their fellow workers.
Some 200 students and workers protested outside Soas on Friday evening. “I’m so ashamed of this institution today,” said Sandy. “It’s not an accident that immigration raids are taking place in workplaces where cleaners have been organising to win better pay and conditions.
“London can’t run without low-paid migrant workers to do work like cleaning – but if they try and fight for rights then they’re out.”
“Our union met today and unanimously passed a motion to back whatever campaign there is to stop the deportations of these cleaners. The cleaners are an important part of the union.”
Graham Dyer, the UCU union president at Soas, was also at the protest. “I came in this morning to take part in a demonstration to support Stalin (a former worker at Soas who has been victimised by management after organising campaigns to improve workers’ rights), only to find that the cleaning staff had been taken by immigration officials.
“The UCU is outraged. It’s clear that management have been complicit in allowing immigration officials to come onto our campus.”
Sam, a student at Soas, spoke poignantly to the crowd about the raid. “Just imagine what it’s like,” he said. “You get up and go to work expecting to come home later and empty the washing that you’ve left in the machine, pick up your kids, etc. But no. Instead you get taken away to be deported.
“I’m almost speechless at management’s behaviour.”
The message is clear. Rather than being the standard bearers of a progressive vision of our society, universities are now the sites of the most oppressive apparatuses of our society.
Follow http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com/ closely.
New list of sites (blogroll) by subject
My rather long blogroll has become a little unwieldy of late, so I’ve decided to reorganise it using more fine-grained categories than before. I hope they’re of use to people. If you click the headings, you’ll be taken to Google Reader where you can import the bundles automatically. You can also try this below:
Most disappointing elections ever
Everything that needs to be said about the EU elections has already been said elsewhere.
But the Iranian elections?
I’ve taken a particular interest in Iran ever since being approached by the “former terrorist” group and possible recipient of US Black Ops funding, Mujahadin-E-Khalq outside UCL Waterstones last April, so I was keen to see what was going to happen in this election.
Seriously, a 4 year old could cover up the fraud better than that. See Juan Cole’s post.
I’m willing to acede that Ahmedinijad could have won the general election in a runoff, but with no substantial vote differences across regions and between cities and rural areas, there’s no way he gained a majority of the votes with 4 candidates, and an extremely strong challenger.
The MSM needs to get its act together. The Iranian neocons have rolled back the reforms of the Rafanjani and Khatami period, and the supreme guardians don’t care too much for reformers, since reform means curbing state largesse,which challenges their resource base. Obama effect?!? And you’re focus on youth in cities ignores what’s happening elsewhere. Not that you perform any differently when looking at US domestic politics, hey?
And to state-owned English language PressTV: you’re not AlJazeera, so f**k off. That includes Gilligan and Galloway. Twats.
Kinder democracies? Consensus versus majoritarian and poverty reduction
Lijphart’s basic argument is that there are two major types of democracies – majoritarian democracies, based upon the Westminster model, and consensus democracies, to be found in Europe. He claims that consensus democracies provide better outcomes for people on a variety of indicators. I decided to try our one indicator, not mentioned in Patterns of Democracy [1] – poverty reduction.
Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study [2], and plotting the executive-parties dimension of democracies from Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy produces the following graph:
My poor grasp of statistical tests tells me that scoring higher on Lijphart’s first dimension is positively correlated with effective poverty reduction at the 5% level, and that’s with the United States as a huge outlier.
|
Estimated Regression Coefficient |
Standardised regression coefficient |
Absolute t-value |
Countries |
|
|
Poverty Reduction (around 1990)* |
10.67 |
0.75 |
3.38 |
11 |
* Relative effectiveness of income redistribution systems in poverty reduction around 1990, where poverty threshold = 60 per cent of median equivalent disposable income.
Make of that what you will.
[1] Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 1999).
[2] J. Fritzell and V. M. Ritakallio, “Societal shifts and changed patterns of poverty,” Luxembourg Income Study working paper 393 (2004).
Update: Replaced Excel graphs with plots from R.
Evaluating the result that “British Muslims just don’t like gays”
The Guardian reports that The Gallup Coexist Index 2009 finds that exactly 0% of British Muslims tolerate homosexuals, compared with 19% of German Muslims and 35% of French Muslims.
Now, before everyone goes all Geert Wilders, some problems.
Given that migrants to France, Germany and the UK come from specific ethnic groups, are we missing some correlation between ethnicity and religion? Have we got some true control variables, rather than just asking non-Muslims.
Also, seems like British Muslims are doing pretty badly economically, with the second lowest unemployment, and very low expectations of social mobility:
I wonder how well non-Muslim groups in a similarly dire economic position would fare on moral questions.
In addition, perhaps British immigrant groups are secularising faster than their continental counterparts, especially if they are actually LGBT.
If I had the data, it’d be interesting to see if you could run it through some sort of multivariate analysis and see if other variables correlate higher on moral issues than others.
Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Martin Robbins has a post on a more smeary opinion poll about Muslims eeking out of the ironically titled Centre for Social Cohesion.
A question…
Why isn’t anyone translating Isabelle Stenger’s Cosmopolitiques?
On careerism in the NUS
Everything you need to know about the future careers of the NUS executive:
Bobbies on the beat – the simple answer to Baltimore’s problems. And AfPaks too…
On Friday, Jeff Krinkle and Alberto Toscano gave a talk on cognitive mapping in The Wire.*
As someone commented, one of the ideals Simon and Burns hint towards, is a return to bobbies doing the beat, getting to know their communities.
Isn’t it odd, that this is exactly what is being suggested be done in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the International Crisis Group? Is there some sort of relationship between the “failed city,” the “failed state,” and intervention?
* Shouldn’t Alberto just get a blog instead of posting through IT?
Predictions for this week’s G20 protests
Wednesday will see a good turnout from a broad cross-section of the Left (from liberals to hard-lefts). Small, but isolated damage to property. Some occupations. Heavy police presence will contain everything else.
No thousands-strong armies of disaffected youth. Not enough time has elapsed in the financial crisis for anarchist social movements to scale their size. British groups in the Left are historically unable to come together, due to the dominance of some major sectarian organisations. Without the emergence of actors than can broker or arbitrate between various groups, you will not see a larger movement. Put People First might be one such actor, but not right now.
Council rep diary
This week, election results came in and I’ve been re-elected for another year as a General Representative Council. Thank you to all those who voted.
On Wednesday, myself and Trevor Dallimore-Wright (Disabled Students Officer) met with a representative from Birkbeck East, Stratford Campus to have a look at provisions for students.
On Thursday, myself, Sean Rillo (Chair of Council) and Rob Park (Caring Responsibilities Officer & Student Governor) met with Mousa Baraka from London Citizens concerning getting ULU to sign up to the London Living Wage.
On Saturday, I joined a few students and staff on the Put People First! rally.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide if I agree with the final line...
A memoranda to the IUSS Select Committee hearing on Students and Universities is currently being written, and we hope to make a final copy available later this week.
On our mailing lists, I’ve been quite interested in voting systems, after some calls to switch back from Single Transferable Vote to First-Past-the-Post, a move I would consider rather short-sighted and disastrous in the long run.
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