In response to various misinformation circulating about the occupation of Appleton Tower, we would like to share the following:
Appleton Tower has been occupied in order to support the UCU during this current industrial action. Our demands are UCU's demands and include:
• No pension cuts
• Close the gender, disability and ethnic pay gaps
• An end to casualisation - which includes ending zero-
hour contracts, worker arrangements for teaching staff,
improving job security, taking outsourced staff back in
house and guaranteed hours for postgraduate teaching
assistants
• Decrease workload & stress
• Increase pay in line with inflation
We added a sixth demand which intersect with previous ones: an end to the hostile environment on campus which affects international staff and students. The hostile environment is a series of policies and norms outsourced to institutions such as universities, which disproportionately harm people who are marginalised by multiple systems of oppression, especially people of colour. It is maintained not only by policy, but by interpersonal interactions such as racist and xenophobic microaggressions and apathy. Although this is not an official strike demand the UCU works extensively on reducing the hostile environment for international staff.
Regarding access to Appleton Tower we feel it’s important to stress, again, that we have always let in students for independent study and are very happy for them to be in the building. We have also negotiated with technicians and are letting them in to keep the servers running and want to reiterate that the DICE machines have never and will not be switched off.
This occupation is focused on disrupting classes in solidarity with striking staff members & we would like to remind everyone that strike action, as a tactic & a reality is disruptive on purpose. We understand that Informatics students are upset but we want to emphasise that the disruption caused is a result of the university’s unwillingness to meet the demands of the union and anger should be directed at them.
Prior to occupying Appleton Tower, we made extensive plans and are not taking this action lightly. Much like striking, this is a final resort. We are a group of students from a variety of disciplines within the university and we believe that an occupation is a reasonable escalation because the current workings of the University of Edinburgh are untenable and rely on underpaid and overworked people and as such have to be disrupted in this way. The issue is the university, not the staff and not the students. The exploitation of all of us in the name of education has to end.
Members of the Appleton Tower Occupation have had extensive meetings and conversations with informatics students & have worked hard to negotiate in good faith with many - listening to their wishes and attempting to come to a compromise. In regard to the Hack the Burgh event, whilst we disagree with the corporate sponsors of it, we fully intend to allow it to take place as we understand massive amounts of labour have gone into organising it. After compromises were reached to allow the event to go ahead, we were informed that the event will no longer be in Appleton Tower. It will furthermore not be downsized. This was unexpected because we were complying with the requirements asked of us for the hackathon to happen in Appleton.
Most recently The Tab Edinburgh has published an article which references an open letter mainly from informatics students directed to us about the current occupation. We feel it is important to underline that the Tab reached out to us for a statement just 3 minutes before they posted the article & the open letter was only delivered to us after it was posted too. This prevented us from addressing the misinformation in the article and from having our side of the story represented.
The article claims that “[i]n a meeting on Wednesday occupiers said they would retreat to the second floor of the building for the duration of the hackathon weekend, however they later backed down on this commitment”. This is inaccurate and reprehensible journalism. We want to stress that the information stating that the Hack the Burgh hackathon would continue as planned was available prior to The Tab publishing their article, so there is no excuse for the lack of fact checking.
Friday 28th February