ACT NOW! LabourStart solidarity message

LabourStart, 'Where trade unionists start their day on the net', have today launched a campaign to help Save London Met through their website. To send a message of protest to London Met management, follow this link. Please then send this on to all of your contacts. Let's show the temporary LMU management that the world is watching them and that we're not alone. Text below:

Act NOW!
Stop job cuts at London Metropolitan University

This is a campaign to Save London Metropolitan University. The threatened job cuts (550 Full Times Equivalent posts); the continued outsourcing and privatisation of in-house services; the closure of key libraries and popular courses; the attacks on union reps, and management's refusal to enter meaningful negotiations; all of the above will mean the beginning of the end of London Met Uni (LMU).

To email the following message to the current interim managers (which you can alter), simply follow this link:

Dear Acting Vice Chancellor and Head of Human Resources,

We are saddened to learn that London Metropolitan University is in crisis and you intend to make large-scale redundancies which will no doubt make things worse. We gather the crisis is entirely of your own making and not
a result of the recession.

Plans to axe up to 550 full time equivalent posts were set out by your last Vice Chancellor, Brian Roper, who has since resigned without explanation.

We call on you as temporary managers to halt plans to make such damaging cuts to the staff and reverse the policy of aggression towards your unions.

We believe that the untested, controversial changes of the scale that you have outlined – including the outsourcing of IT services, increased workloads for teaching, increasing student to staff ratios, the closure of critical educational facilities such as libraries and entire courses – these plans are a recipe for disaster and should not be rushed through by an interim management team.

Indeed, we would like to know: who exactly will take responsibility for the financial crisis at your institution? We note that, despite leaving, Brian Roper did not take responsibility for the current crisis and we
further suggest the current team of interim managers might also shoulder some of the blame.

We support the calls of Jeremy Corbyn MP for a public enquiry into how this all came about.

Whoever is culpable for the current mess, it is certainly not the staff nor the students who are currently being told to pay the price.

We call on you to halt the current plans to cut jobs and outsource, and to start listening seriously to your staff rather than constantly attacking their democratically elected union representatives.

Yours sincerely,