Created on: 24 Mar 2026
Striking lecturers from the City of Glasgow College (CoGC) Welding and Fabrication department will join with supporters to stage a demonstration outside a meeting of the College board on Wednesday.
The lecturers are currently engaged in a programme of strike action over Health and Safety issues in the department at the college’s Riverside campus, including the lack of adequate safety measures to protect staff and students from welding fumes, which are known to be carcinogenic.
The solidarity demonstration will take place at the College’s Cathedral Street entrance on Wednesday 25th March, from 1500hrs – 1630 hours. Speakers at the demonstration will include striking welding lecturers and representatives of the Health and Safety charity Scottish Hazards.
Ahead of the demonstration, the General Secretary of the EIS has also written directly to the college Principal, raising significant concerns about both the college’s approach to protecting the Health and Safety of staff and students engaged in welding and, also, the college’s response to the dispute which ‘amounts to a litany of Fair Work breaches’ and has served only to further inflame the dispute.
In the letter to Principal Paul Little, EIS General Secretary Andrea Bradley says, “Our members have a statutory right to raise health and safety issues; and the College has a statutory responsibility to respond appropriately to health and safety concerns raised by staff… it is deeply troubling that rather than engage with our members, listen to their justified concerns and put in place the necessary and very reasonable measures requested, the College appears, instead, to have sought to intimidate our members into silence, even labelling concerns in respect of insufficiently mitigated risk from carcinogens in the air in the welding workrooms as ‘alarmist’.”
Ms Bradley’s letter continues, “Clearly, BAE Systems do not consider the risk of carcinogenic poisoning to be inconsequential- they send their apprentices to CoGC to undertake learning in welding, fully equipped with the requisite respiratory protective equipment…It is a matter of consternation, and indeed key grounds for this dispute, that CoGC’s general safety standards for staff and students, fall far short of matching BAE’s commitment to ensuring the health and safety of their apprentices.”
Ms Bradley’s letter goes on to describes the college’s response to the dispute as, “A litany of Fair Work breaches; a wrecking ball attitude to industrial relations; and, above all, a failure to grasp the seriousness of our members’ health and safety concerns, and the legal responsibilities that CoGC has an employer of people- people who have rights at work, and people with family and friends who love and care about them and their safety at work.”
A copy of Ms Bradley’s letter to the CoGC Principal can be found here.
Solidarity demonstration: Wednesday 25th March, 1500hrs – 1630 hours, CoGC, Cathedral Street.