WHEN one hears of a 99 per cent vote in favour of something one usually assumes it was taken somewhere like North Korea.
Imagine my surprise when I noted that 99 per cent of staff at the City of Glasgow City voted in favour of taking strike action in pursuance of a wage claim.
This contrasted so much with the upbeat and rosy picture of life at the newly-merged college which its principal, Paul Little, gave to the Scottish Parliament's Education Committee in recent weeks (“ MSPs are left ‘baffled’ as college reforms progress unevenly in cities”, The Herald, March 2).
College staff are not daft. The new college is obviously far bigger than is now required (it was planned in a more benign funding regime and given the go-ahead by a Scottish Government desperate to commit a capital budget for purely cosmetic political reasons). This decision was ludicrous given that significant capital investment had already been made in the facilities in Glasgow's two other colleges.
It will, in time, devastate the revenue budgets of the other two colleges in the city and place in real danger community-based provision made in some of Scotland's poorest communities.
Staff anger is also rightly directed at the Scottish Government, which led them to believe that their quest to restore national collective bargaining in the college sector would be fully funded. Instead what they have got is a grotesquely diminished further education budget which is bizarrely also expected to support an unnecessarily large new campus in Glasgow city centre.
To make matters worse the “savings” in college provision have been used to maintain spending levels in higher education where it is now reported that university principals have, at a time of austerity, apparently paid themselves a 16 per cent wage rise. And all of this comes when Holyrood's Public Audit Committee has rightly been highly critical of the redundancy settlements made to senior staff in colleges who were surplus to requirement as a consequence of the Scottish Government's merger policies in further education.
The next time I see a report of a 99 per cent vote in favour of Kim Jong-un's policies in North Korea I've now learned to be just a little more careful to see if there isn't maybe just a reason for such behaviour.
Ian Graham,
6 Lachlan Crescent, Erskine.
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