Porterhouse Blues
Campus chiefs are selling your safety short.
For the University to claim that the current porters’ crisis (and in terms of student welfare, it is a crisis) was ‘unforeseeable’ is at worst a lie, at best a sign of gross incompetence. That there is widespread opposition to the new contracts being imposed on porters by management is common knowledge. Anyone who takes two minutes to chat with their college porter could tell you that a contract requiring people who have structured their lives around a nine-to-five job to work twelve-hour shifts is unacceptable, and will lead to staff leaving.
Ken Batten gave me this watch as a golden handshake
Cartoon by Sam Waddington
But such an information gathering exercise clearly proved too much for Ken Batten, Head of Security, and Keith Lilley, Director of Facilities Management, who have remained holed up in Heslington Hall throughout. They forced the contracts through despite significant opposition, and then had the audacity to tell a YUSU Senate meeting that the resultant staff shortages were ‘impossible to anticipate.’
If a private company forced a contract on its employees that led to a 39% shortfall in staff and the closure of three out of seven departments, that company would go into liquidation. Fortunately for Messieurs Batten and Lilley, the padded world of the University means that they get to play at being businessmen without the inconvenient obligations of either having to be honest with shareholders (in this case the students, as it is our rents that pay the porters’ wages) or being any good at their jobs.
We need to be very, very careful where we go from here. Batten told Derwent JCRC on Monday that the lodge closures are ‘a temporary measure’ and that they are hoping to have the situation restored to normal by April 28th. Perhaps. But why, then, were there no ads for porters posted in the jobs section of the York Press on Wednesday, nor on the University website? To dismiss the idea that management intend these closures to become permanent would be naïve. This is not the first time that portering has come under attack. In 2002 it took a massive student occupation of Heslington Hall to save 24-hour portering. Rich Croker is right to draw a line in the sand, and refuse to accept anything short of full restoration. We all need to keep a close eye on management’s actions, and be prepared to toe the same line if necessary.
