We've made it policy
Last year our President, Martha Mitchell (at the time SSA College Officer) passed a policy through Union Council to support People & Planet's Fossil Free Careers Campaign.
This campaigns calls for Sheffield Hallam University's Careers Department to:
- Refuse all new relationships with oil, gas or mining companies
- Decline to renew any current relationships with oil, gas or mining companies after the contractually obligated period ends
- Adopt a publicly available Ethical Careers Policy that explicitly excludes oil, gas and mining companies from recruitment opportunities.
Oil, gas and mining industries cause immense environmental and social harm. Their operations are accelerating the ecological emergency, wrecking the climate, polluting the water and permanently destroying landscapes. They are displacing people from their homes and lands, destroying livelihoods, demolishing sacred indigenous sites and leaving workers and communities with severe health problems.
There is no future for jobs in these industries: they are dead end jobs for students and graduates. Even the most conservative science states we need to dramatically scale down resource extraction if we are to avoid the worst impacts of the climate and ecological crisis.
We believe that our university careers department needs to stop putting new workers into oil, gas and mining industries and take responsibility for building the sustainable, ethical workforce we need to trasnition to a just and equitable energy system and low carbon economy.
This campaign does not stop students from having a career in these industries, it purely stops these careers being advertised at Sheffield Hallam University.