Invest in Staff, Divest from Genocide
As the University rents out its spaces and reaps profits from the festival season, staff and students have come together behind the campaign JOBS NOT GENOCIDE to fight against a senior management that complicitly continues investing over 50 millions in companies and assets involved in Israel’s genocide, mass atrocities and colonisation of Palestine, while it simultaneously pushes ahead with plans that could see more than 2,000 jobs cut, with an estimated 1000 already lost. The University College Union (UCU) branch has been in dispute with senior management, in response to these job cuts and threats of further compulsory redundancies. While senior management purports that the University’s financial situation is ‘dire’ and requires cutting costs by £140 million, a deeper look at their finances suggests otherwise.
The Joint Unions Finance Working Group (JUFWG)’s analysis of the University’s financial reports demonstrates clearly, that this narrative pushed by senior management about financial pressures and the need for job cuts has been manufactured. The University continues to make profits. Any financial pressures that exist are due to spiralling depreciation from irresponsible capital spending, while management uses misleading metrics to justify job cuts and reduction and quality of student’s education.
In response to senior management’s irresponsible financial decisions, staff went on strike, including a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) this Spring and Summer. In retaliation, senior management punished staff legally participating in MAB with a 100% pay deduction. Workers taking part in MAB went unpaid, effectively locked out of their workplace. For some this has been going on for three months.Our fundraising efforts and local strike fund have allowed us to support all our members on MAB to 80% of their normal pay until now, thanks to incredible solidarity and salary-sharing among union members within and outside this branch. We have won delays after delays, but management is closing in. Mass redundancy announcements are around the corner; the branch is planning to escalate to a sweeping strike wave to force management to change course. We are fundraising to ensure that unpaid staff and staff fighting for their jobs and for democratic and transparent governance in this university can make ends meet – even as we face wildly punitive measures from management.
Meanwhile and for the third consecutive year, the University has refused to abide by human rights due diligence and democratic processes in place to respect staff and students’ demands for divestment from Israeli companies and companies such as Blackrock, Google (Alphabet) and Amazon, who profit from Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
The University was named in UN Special Rapporteur’s report on the economy of genocide, as one of the most financially entangled universities in the UK in enabling the most egregious violations of human rights standards in Palestine. The University’s recent Race Review highlighted the contemporary as well as historical complicity with settler dispossession and elimination in Palestine. Arthur James Balfour, the author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration—the imperial policy which triggered the historical process of colonial dispossession of Palestinians and denial of national self-determination—was Chancellor of the University.
Investments in companies that provide the Israeli military with targeting and confinement technologies used to kill, displace and segregate Palestinians constitute a continuation of the University’s contribution to harm and mass atrocities in Palestine. This continuation contradicts the Race Review recommendations and demonstrates the University’s senior management contempt for democratic processes, given that the University Senate, our local UCU branch and the student union all voted in favor of human rights and international law due diligence and immediate divestment. When senior management sought to give its “reform” of the responsible investment process a veneer of democratic legitimacy, the overwhelming majority of the almost 2,000 respondents who participated in the University’s consultation expressed support for disinvestment from companies implicated in genocide and other international crimes. Senior management simply ignored these overwhelming mandates.
In addition, in 2025 the Scottish Parliament voted for a full boycott of Israel. The University’s active complicity in supporting the Israel’s mass atrocities is antithetical both to this boycott and the minimum ethical, legal and democratic governance standards expected of an academic institution that defines itself as world-leading.
Investments in colonial harm in Palestine coincide with the University’s plans to harm its own workers. Despite continuing to turn in a massive profit year on year and an impressive and fast-expanding real estate portfolio across the city, not to mention the fact that higher education institutions are meant to be NON-PROFIT, the senior management team insists on going forward with mass firings of workers. These excessive cuts to jobs will destroy the livelihood of university workers and families, threatening the quality of education of thousands of students, and ruining the reputation of the university.
Under the guise of “agnostic investments,” senior management treats investments in companies providing technologies of oppression to an occupying power whose continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was found unlawful by the International Court of Justice in 2024 as “neutral” investments. In doing so, the University is reiterating its willingness to contribute to the historical dehumanisation of Palestinians. Under the guise of “cost-saving,” senior management dehumanises its workers by treating them as an excess after their having contributed, for the unpteenth year, to financial gain for the University.
In both cases, the voices that make up our university community, have been systematically and consistently disregarded. The University has tried to cover up its anti-democratic practices by avoiding scrutiny. For instance, it has refused to share the agendas, minutes, and papers informing financial restructuring with Senate members (the Senate is the University’s supreme academic body). In another instance, it requested payment for a Freedom of Information request concerning correspondence with UK Lawyers for Israel, a prominent pro-Israel lobby group that denies genocide and has mocked starving Palestinians about famine “reducing obesity,” while putting pressure on the University to repress student and staff anti-genocide protests.
Staff and students stand behind a single message: INVEST IN STAFF, DIVEST FROM GENOCIDE.
We invite all Edinbugh workers, students, festivals’ managers and staff, as well as festival goers, to write to the University and tell it to listen to the university community, and invest in people and jobs rather than ethically-bankrupt and complicit companies.
