Students Target Unethical Career Corporatism

On Mon­day 20th Octo­ber the annu­al AISEC Careers fair com­menced at Not­ting­ham Uni­ver­si­ty, fea­tur­ing many organ­i­sa­tions with despi­ca­ble or at least dubi­ous eth­i­cal cre­den­tials and social-respon­si­bil­i­ty records, includ­ing BAE Sys­tems, Rolls-Royce, Qine­tiq, E.On, BP, RBS, MoD and the army. The fair also fea­tured some stu­dent activists and Grim Reapers who had made an appear­ance in order to remind fel­low stu­dents of the dead­ly con­se­quences of work­ing in the arms trade or cli­mate change indus­try.

AISEC claim to be ‘the inter­na­tion­al plat­form for young peo­ple to dis­cov­er and devel­op their poten­tial so as to have a pos­i­tive impact on soci­ety.’ The organ­i­sa­tion also claims to envi­sion “Peace and ful­fill­ment of humankind’s poten­tial.” Despite this, at Not­ting­ham, the organ­i­sa­tions’ main endeav­or appears to be to give a plat­form to arms deal­ers! For more see: http://www.aiesec.org/

Con­cerned about the pres­ence of such uneth­i­cal cor­po­rate enti­ties and the glar­ing hypocrisy of AISEC, a group of stu­dents came togeth­er with the aim of rais­ing aware­ness of the uneth­i­cal nature of many of the com­pa­nies at the fair and oppose the gen­er­al pres­ence of mech­a­nisms of the cap­i­tal­ist death machine.

The morn­ing began with flier­ing at var­i­ous stalls, col­lect­ing of shiny cor­po­rate merch, and using up the rep­re­sen­ta­tives time. Not­ting­ham Uni­ver­si­ty Secu­ri­ty were being their usu­al oppres­sive selves and tried to pre­vent the stu­dents from flier­ing near the glossy cor­po­rate stalls. Threats of call­ing the police were also issued. The stu­dents also had a per­ma­nent stall next to the army (cour­tesy of One World Week) from which alter­na­tive infor­ma­tion about com­pa­nies, per­son­al dis­cus­sion and careers guides could be dis­sem­i­nat­ed. When the army rep left his stall, a cou­ple of stu­dents kind­ly stepped in to fill his role and invite stu­dents to ‘join the impe­r­i­al death machine’.

In the after­noon four Grim Reapers appeared and went to pay a vis­it to the stalls of BAE and Rolls-Royce, much to the amuse­ment of passers-by and bewil­der­ment of cor­po­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, a rather unam­bigu­ous ban­ner was dropped in the main access stair­well of the build­ing read­ing ‘BAE KILL’. The four reapers loi­tered at BAE and Rolls-Royces stalls for an hour or so hand­ing our fliers and chat­ting to stu­dents and reps, before doing a mini-tour of oth­er dubi­ous cor­po­rate out­fits in Port­land Build­ing (E.On, BP, Qine­tiq). Uni­ver­si­ty Secu­ri­ty react­ed ini­tial­ly with ‘you lot have to leave or we’ll call the police’, one BAE rep inter­vened to assure secu­ri­ty “it’s cool, they’re Ok”. Secu­ri­ty lat­er changed their line to ‘please take off your masks it’s caus­ing intim­i­da­tion’, and final­ly, meek­ly asked ‘can you please stop film­ing’, before even­tu­al­ly leav­ing the stu­dents to do their thing. A com­bi­na­tion of knowl­edge about basic rights and the fact that they were armed with a video cam­era suc­cess­ful­ly pro­tect­ed the pro­test­ers from any sil­ly games that secu­ri­ty may have wished to play. Thank­ful­ly, this time, free­dom of expres­sion and the right to protest pre­vailed.

Some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions were had with some of the rep­re­sen­ta­tives. One BAE rep was heard to pro­claim ‘Free Pales­tine’, despite work­ing for a com­pa­ny that has pro­vid­ed parts for Israeli mil­i­tary equip­ment (notably elec­tron­ics for the F‑16 fight­er air­craft) and also sub­con­tract­ed work to Israel. The same rep also con­fessed feel­ing slight­ly guilty about work­ing for BAE, despite being at the Careers fair pre­cise­ly with the pur­pose of try­ing to con­vince oth­ers to do the same thing! A Qine­tiq rep­re­sen­ta­tive admit­ted that he felt the stu­dent pro­test­ers were doing a good thing, and was ulti­mate­ly some­what envi­ous of the pas­sion they clear­ly had for this issue. He also sug­gest­ed that the stu­dent s should be tar­get­ing Air­bus and the MoD addi­tion­al­ly.

An event­ful time was had by all, espe­cial­ly BAE’s reps! E.ON were the only com­pa­ny to active­ly com­plain about the stu­dent protests (as far as we know), the moody gits! Clear­ly var­i­ous ted­dies were thrown out of var­i­ous pow­er-sta­tions. On Tues­day, the sec­ond day of the fair, the vast major­i­ty of the REALLY immoral com­pa­nies were not present.

For an awe­some video of the action see: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VfJ8geHkaRk