Protester boycotts Careers Event

Durham doesn’t do protests right? Well apparently that’s not quite the case.

On Monday, a Durham undergraduate caused raised eyebrows when she walked out of a Graduate Recruitment presentation by a major high street bank. After calling into question the company’s ethical values, she then confronted the surprised bank representatives with statistics about the company’s involvement in the global arms trade, and then promptly left the room in protest.

While everyone else sitting there trying my best to act like a very employable prospective graduate, this girl clearly had another agenda.

She cited figures, including that the bank in question had over £400 million of shares in the global arms industry, and was the principal banker for a company said to have manufactured weapons that were used against innocent protesters, including children, during the recent Arab Spring uprisings. Apparently “There’s not enough you could pay me to work for a bank like that.”

However, in these careers presentations, it’s unlikely that the people who come to student events would be able to even influence you getting a job, let alone company policy.

In this case, the event was being run by two graduates who started with the bank last September, so complaining about the ethics of certain big business arrangements to them seems unlikely to have much effect.

This unnamed protester’s main argument was that she couldn’t work for a bank that was involved in the shady business which is arms trading. If she doesn’t like these aspects of a capitalist business, maybe she shouldn’t be looking at working for a bank, the ultimate capitalist establishment, at all.

By attributing the evil caused by weapons to the bank that deals financially with the company who makes them, surely you’re wasting energy that could be directed at the real perpetrators of the violence you’re opposing.

‘Banking on Bloodshed’, the report which exposed the bank in question – along with practically every other high street bank – was published in 2008 by the charity ‘War on Want’.