skip to main |
skip to sidebar
 |
| Sue Ledwith |
Ruskin College, Oxford, UK has long been a home and heart of education for trade unionists worldwide. But no longer.
Just as organised labour is under siege from globalisation everywhere, with the rise in precarious work and falling membership, so Ruskin is under assault. This is a call for solidarity in support of the tutors who have been made redundant as their degree courses for international trade unionists were cancelled.
A petition has been signed by more than 1 000 supporters from the UK, from across the global north and from the global south, expressing shock and anger and urging a management rethink. Some want the unions, TUC, Labour Party and other affiliates and allied organisations to challenge the College’s actions: ‘Let’s have some action NOW,’ wrote one signatory.
 |
| Vasco Pedrina[1] |
Since the 1980s, we have witnessed the political breakthrough of neoliberalism with its massive wave of privatisations, deregulation of the financial sector and of employment relations, as well as the partial dismantling of social security systems. That wave was followed by the enormous expansion of financial markets, along with their speculative excesses. All of that was a result of severe economic crises; resulting in a catastrophic social impact and very ominous political consequences, marked by the upsurge of extreme right-wing populist parties. As a result, the European Union whose social model has suffered hitherto unimaginable blows is on the edge of collapsing. As predicted a few years ago, by the great historian Eric Hobsbawm before his death, we are going through a long cycle of world economic crisis. The consequence would be a great danger of a renationalisation of policy aims, leading to the extremes of the last century, which was deeply scarred by two terrible world wars and their human and social destruction.
