This meeting is open to all students and staff so please forward this to your non-UCU colleagues and students through staff and student email lists.
The joint unions at Queen Mary (UCU, Unison and Unite) and the Students’ Union invite you to a Student-Staff Assembly on 15 June 2020 at 4pm. The Assembly will be the first opportunity of this kind for students and workers across the university to discuss how the crisis is affecting them, and to form a coordinated response to what many of us feel is a lack of engagement on the part of Senior Management.
Speakers include
British Medical Association
British Medical Association Students
African & Caribbean Society
#Coronacontract
Authors of ‘Can you hear?’ letter (History Dept)
QMUL PhD Pandemic Organising Group
Unison
Incoming QM Student Union President
#QMFurlough Now
Decolonise QM
#coronacontract Permanent staff pledge to support casualised staff
Senior Management’s response to the crisis has affected us all. They have refused to furlough hundreds of student staff, leaving them with little or no income, despite the Students’ Union being eligible for the scheme. Hundreds of casualised workers at Queen Mary face redundancy in the coming months. Facilities staff were asked to return to work before seeing evidence that it was safe to do so. Indebted students have, in some cases, been forced to continue paying for student accommodation they can no longer enter. Permanent staff are facing dangerous levels of stress and overwork as they are burdened with the teaching work of their former casualised colleagues. PhD students have been left without funding extensions and, in many cases, without any other form of income. Existing inequalities based on race, gender, class, disability and age have worsened and put many of us at substantially higher risk today. Widespread disappointment and dismay has also been expressed at the university’s totally inappropriate response to the demands of Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police officers.
We do not feel that Senior Management has engaged in any meaningful consultation with us in their response to the Covid-19 crisis, nor to issues of structural racism within the University, with which the pandemic is intimately connected. We have tried to communicate our concerns through every possible channel, but we are forced to admit that they are falling on deaf ears. Ultimately, we are Queen Mary. It is our labour, participation and goodwill that makes our university work. If Senior Management will not listen to us, we have no choice but to coordinate between ourselves to push for a just response to this crisis.
All strongly encouraged to join – postgraduate and undergraduate students, academic and non-academic staff, whether you’re in a union or not. We need to show who holds Queen Mary together.
Registration needed at:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItdu-trz0tEtWCFyUmOxlWZWIQqTsolWmQ
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
qmucu.org 