The world of business is ruthless, and they weren’t competitive enough.

They could have utilized the fact that every year students get rid of their old textbooks and could have bought them back off the students and resold them.

They would have even generated far higher profit margins this way.

Instead students sell them online or simply don’t sell them as it is an annoying procedure.

If you are unwilling to change and adapt to your environment then you will not survive; they should stop whining and try and think of some new strategies.

Also, they didn’t have an online strategy! Unforgivable in this day and age!

Have QUBSU nothing better to do than spoil student’s fun?

Gone are the days when QUBSU used to actually make a difference

Simon at Theatre Breaks

http://www.theatrebreaks.co.uk/2011/londonmusicals/the-lion-king-theatre-breaks-in-london

Once again, as with many comments on these forums, your approach is too simplistic. You must look at the context and the comparison between public and private sector. Many in the private sector do not command such a high salary as £32k and 90% don’t receive a pension. I don’t know what your experience of the Public sector is, but recent statistics certainly back up my experience.

Sickness absence is much more prevalent in the public sector, where employers are four times more likely to cite stress as the biggest cause of long-term absence than their counterparts in the private sector. A survey of 500 employers carried out by Group Risk Development (GRiD), the trade body for the group risk industry, found that one third of public sector respondents said their average employee takes more than five days off sick every year, compared to 15.9% in the private sector.

I think tank study carried out for the telegraph found that over their lifetimes people in the private sector worked 23 per cent more hours – the equivalent to a further 9.2 years extra work – because of their later retirement, shorter holidays and lower likelihood of going on strike/sick.

Almost 7 million working days have been lost since 1996 in public sector strikes

Longer hours in the private sector come on top of lower salaries, with the middle pay packet 12 per cent smaller.

The study also found that the more generous final salary pension schemes public sector workers enjoy added the equivalent of a further 15 per cent to their salaries.

In your opinion, that is why the crisis was so bad… once again, you consider too simplistic an approach. The crisis was so bad in the UK due to a failure of the tripartite system of regulation created by Gordon Brown, but also because a decade of fiscal imprudence, meant Britain was more exposed than most countries to the international banking shock. An unsustainable boom has been followed by a deep bust.Your contention that I am hypocritical is, frankly, nonsensical. There is such a thing as balanced and non invasive regulation. @patn @brycey

You cannot compare a general election and a strike, everyone in the population who is registered/elligable to vote has the opportunity too, we cannot force them. However not everyone was ballotted in the strike and those who were responded poorly to it. One would think that is the Public servants cared so much about it, they would bother to vote! @brycey

Poor private sector pensions is not a reason to weaken public sector pensions; it’s a case to strengthen those of the private sector. Also, the cost of pensions is, in relation to GDP, set to peak and then fall before 2030, before the majority of those affected will have reached retirement. With regards to your assertation that spending was out of control even in the Blair years, the fact is that until 2008 the defecit was, as a per centage of GDP, lower than it had been under the previous Conservative government. The crash was so harsh in the UK because of a lack of regulation in the financial sector. Your economic approach favours the liberal free market and low levels of regulation so a criticism of this approach, as your letter implies, is extremely hypocritical.

Pat Nee. LLM Student.

Given that the Lib Dems didn’t openly support the current level of cuts, it’s fair to say that only around a third of those who voted, voted for the current level of cuts. Some mandate. A recent independant/ comres poll shows that more than half of Tory voters think that the cuts should be at a lower pace and a BBC poll (I’m not sure with which company) showed that 61% of the public support the strikes. Your suggestion that the strikes are undemocratic is therefore rather weak.

Pat Nee. LLM Student.

(cont)

The American economy rebounded out of it’s recession and in 1983, unemployment was reduced by more than 2.1% within a year and the Reagan boom raised more americans out of poverty than any similar boom since World War II, Inflation stabilized, and interest rates remained low as well.

Under Mrs. Thacther the real gross domestic product grew by 26.8% between 1979-89. She successfully nationalised many industries back to private investors, making them more profitable and made significant tax cuts. She also broke the crippling power of the trade unions which previously had stood in the way of economic progress and modernisation. Thatcher government policies (after initial flirtation with monetarism) rightly focused on reining back the State and injecting competition and free market principles and sale of council houses (right to buy schemes) all of these marked a major transformation of the mixed economy.

The freedom of speech she enjoys today is a result of the bravery of the British Army. I suggest that she revises her tone in future. Personally I would have her arrested for high treason.

In this case, not even a job, but 2 more weeks of more-than-likely poorly paid dogsbody work, which is too short to actually gain anything more meaningful than an opportunity to brown-nose. Of course, its lots of cheap advertising for Deloitte (trust me, its for their clients, not for future employees) and for our own ‘Jedi’, and potentially some brownie points for the other competitors.

The fact is that 15 years of the yuppy-recovery style of management has just left us more in the shitter than before, with a vanishingly small percentage making out like Flint while the rest of us languish under insurmountable debts, mortgages several times more valuable than the buildings they lean on, minimum wages that come nowhere near to matching consumer-facing inflation, while jobs are consistently pumped out of the country for ‘business profitability’ (read:shareholder gain), and people are running out of grand ideas for where the other million or so people are going to actually work. Maybe turn Wales into a global call centre…

In closing of this rant; The ‘original’ Apprentice, and the QUB carbon copy, both do the same thing; foster a self-centred, vacuous, greedy, manipulative, and almost-illegal-but-powerful-enough-to-change-the-law-around-me theory of ‘business acumen’ that is going to put us further and further into commercial, personal, and national debt.

The country needs to be educated beyond the Catholic and Protestant situation.

Director- Left replaced with acting director
Deputy director finance- Left p/t person in place
Marketing manager: Left Work being covered by temp
Ents manager: Left work being covered by temp
Democracy manager: Left work being covered by temp
Advice centre: 3 staff members compared to 5+ in other SUs

Now my question to the President and other officers, are you happy wth this? If you are then don’t complain when academic members of staff are let go replaced with short term contracts/temps etc.

All this happened before the new cuts are expected, what the hell is going to happen when the University decide that we need to make real cuts.

Exceptional my ass!!!