NUS External Trustee in being-an-exploitative-boss shocker

Posted on March 30, 2010
Filed Under Inside NUS, News

Remember when the NUS leadership sold the idea of the Trustee Board to us? They talked about filling the (semi-elected) External Trustee posts with NGO activists, education sector trade unionists and other such inoffensive individuals. The reality has proven somewhat different.

No-one epitomises what the NUS Trustee Board is all about better than Kate Davies, CEO of Notting Hill Housing. A woman with no background in the student movement or broader labour movement, Kate is straightforwardly a member of the boss class. No ifs or buts.

So it should really surprise no-one that she is currently engaged in a series of savage attacks on her workers, including abolishing paid carers’ leave and reducing the time that workers demoted to a lower pay-grade can remain on their old salary from two years to six months. A consultative ballot found 95% of workers in favour of launching a full-scale strike ballot.

The cuts Kate and her fellow managers are attempting to drive through at Notting Hill Housing are part of the same ruling-class cuts project that we’re all attempting to resist in the education sector. Is this really the type of person we want in an influential position at the highest level of our movement?

More info here and here.

PS: Kate herself earns a tidy £165,000 per year.