Support the 3Cosas strike!

The 3Cosas Campaign is one of the most powerful and exciting campaigns by outsourced workers in UK university history. The UCL Living Wage Campaign has and will continue to support the campaign. On Wednesday 27 and Thursday 28 November, over 100 outsourced workers at the University of London will be going on strike. How can you support them?

• Don't cross the picket lines. This means not entering Senate House on either strike day. This may seem a lot, but it's the most important thing: the point of the strike is to show how essential the labour these workers do is to the running of the university; if the university stops running, the strike is stronger. Senate House is closed on Wednesday 27 because of Foundation Day, so really this means going to a different library on Thursday 28.
  
• Support the picket lines. Workers will be outside the gates of Senate House 6am to 1pm tomorrow and 6am to 3pm on Thursday. If you're around, go down and tell them you support the strike. The workers call themselves 'the invisibles' because of the way they are treated by employers; moral support from students is hugely appreciated.
  
• Donate to the strike fund here. If you're part of an organisation, you could present this model motion to donate to the fund. Every bit will help!

Why the Provost should read the UCL website

“Living wage tied to better mental health in London”, the UCL website proclaimed on 10 October. This conclusion, drawn from a recent study of the  effect of the London Living Wage (LLW), should come as no surprise to supporters of the £8.55 hourly wage, but recent comments by new UCL Provost Michael Arthur – whose welcome speech took place the day before – suggest that the senior management should listen more to what the experts at their own university are saying.

The findings of the study, that employees have better mental health “when employers set a higher minimum wage based on realistic living expenses,” were followed by supporting comments from top UCL academics. Mel Bartly, a professor of public health at UCL, told Reuters that "children of economically stressed parents often struggle at school and suffer long into their adulthood," and that "there is no net benefit to society as a whole of having groups who are in poverty." These unequivocal conclusions in favour of the living wage were, however, not sentiments echoed by Provost Arthur when he spoke of the LLW a day earlier.

On 9 October, UCL's new Provost Michael Arthur opened the Lunch Hour Lecture series with an introductory address, followed by a question and answer session. The UCL Living Wage Campaign tweeted to ask the Provost about the LLW and outsourcing; our question (which you can view in our previous article) wasn't asked, but the substance of it was covered by a similar question from a UCL staff member (beginning at 45:20, here):

Will Professor Arthur show a genuine commitment to the London Living Wage, and why does an organisation the size of UCL need to outsource?

Arthur's response was not without ambiguity. He said, with some uncertainty, that UCL has “committed” to the LLW, a decision that was “worth it” because UCL is an “ethical organisation.” But he said that the LLW had “probably cost us £2 million,” and that he wouldn't “sign on the dotted line” to maintain the LLW “in perpetuity,” speculating that there may be situations in which UCL management “would like some flexibility”. In a similar way, he said that while he hadn't outsourced a single sector at Leeds, and while he agreed with the questioner, he nonetheless argued that outsourcing provides “flexibility” and to undo it at UCL would be “difficult.”

Despite saying that the university would only move away from the LLW under “very, very extreme circumstances”, he attempted to flippantly dismiss the notion that management should adhere to the minimum pay required to stay out of poverty with the words: “I am not completely comfortable with a group of academics in Warwick setting the finances of UCL.” As well as suggesting ignorance about the LLW, which is set by the Greater London Authority, this (perhaps unintentionally) opened up another line of questioning: who does determine the finances of UCL, and why is poverty pay even seen as a option?

Rather than cheering on the campaign, which would show genuine dedication to decent standards of living for all Londoners, Arthur effectively offered no promise to continue to pay the LLW on campus. Nor did he mention the fact that it was only after considerable pressure from the UCL Living Wage Campaign that management offered its present “commitment”.

This failure to embrace the LLW should raise some very serious concerns about the future of the Living Wage among both UCL staff and LLW campaigners. It also exposes worrying flaws in Arthur’s rhetoric on workers’ rights. 

What kind of “ethical organisation” wants the flexibility to be able to stop paying its staff the Living Wage anyway? Why try to discredit the LLW as the set minimum requirement needed to stay above the poverty line in London? What is £2 million to a university which ran a surplus of £26 million in 2011-2012, and holds reserves of over £290 million? Is it not a price worth paying for decent standards of living for all of its workers? Or does flexibility, which means profit, trump ethics and the mental health of UCL’s staff? 

Despite UCL academics providing yet more evidence of the benefits of the LLW, Arthur seems to be unconvinced that a permanent management commitment to paying it is ethically valuable. The pressure is still on to fight for good pay and conditions on the UCL campus.

#askprovost

Tonight, the UCL Living Wage Campaign tweeted the UCL Provost, who will be taking questions from Twitter at his Lunch Hour Lecture tomorrow. The question we've asked him is a simple one:

Will UCL treat its ancillary staff with dignity & respect during the new Provost's tenure, rather than low pay & outsourcing? #askprovost RT
— UCL Living Wage (@UCLLivingWage) October 1, 2013

The previous administration's record was a shameful one of low wages, outsourcing, a 34-month delay in implementation the LLW, and abuse of the right to organise. To take just one example: in 2009, UCL's cleaning contractor Office & General fired a cleaner after he was seen at a cleaners' protest at SOAS. He was reinstated after tribunal, but with reduced hours and at a different site... which O&G promptly lost the contract for!

Will we see anything different under the new regime? Only time will tell; a good start would be to address our question, and take a keen interest in the material conditions of UCL's workers.

You can help by retweeting us!

This may well be the closest the Campaign has come to asking a direct question of a UCL Provost. In September 2010, Malcolm Grant cancelled a meeting with the UCL Living Wage Campaign, immediately after declaring (overnight) that the LLW would be implemented. For the next three years we were ignored, while management failed to implement the LLW. In 2011,  two activists who challenged Malcolm Grant on this failure at his Lunch Hour Lecture were disciplined by the university.

Victory for the Campaign!

Three years to the day after UCL's ethical malpractice first reached the mainstream media, the UCL Living Wage Campaign issues a statement on the current state of affairs.

All UCL staff, including cleaners, are now paid the London Living Wage. But outsourcing, the root cause of the problem, remains on campus.

On 1 August 2013, UCL finally implemented the London Living Wage (LLW) for all staff. Cleaners, porters and catering staff are now all paid £8.55 or over. But, while poverty pay has been technically eradicated from UCL, the underlying causes (managerialism and privatisation), remain, as well as specific concerns like the underpayment of postgraduate teachers, or overworking of staff.

It has taken almost three years for UCL management to implement the LLW, a pledge made in September 2010 in the face of widespread criticism from the university community and in the media. That commitment was forced from management through a vibrant campaign that brought together students and staff, culminating in extremely negative, but justified, publicity for UCL in the Evening Standard (see also here).

London’s cleaners are some of the most abused workers in the city. Paid poverty wages, they are often unable to live near their workplace. Consequently, many make night bus commutes to work before doing 10-hour days (or more) in 2 or 3 insecure, poorly-paid jobs. It is therefore wonderful news that cleaners at UCL have seen a pay rise of almost 50% over three years. However, this statistic disguises the fact that it is only now that their wages are above the poverty mark. If, in September 2010, UCL accepted that the LLW was the minimum subsistence wage in London, and therefore a minimum moral standard, why did it take three years to implement? We can only assume that the commitment was cynically made.

Money is not a problem. Financially, UCL is one of the wealthiest universities in the country. It: 

• made £85million in budget surpluses between 2009 and 2012
• held £290,000,000 in reserves in 2012
• tripled the number of senior staff paid over £100,000 between 2003 and 2012 
• increased the Provost’s pay by 75% during Malcolm Grant’s tenure  

Meanwhile, UCL’s cleaners spent most of that period on the minimum wage. When they first received small pay rises in 2010, cuts were made to working hours to mitigate the cost. And in 2011, UCL Estates forced through the outsourcing of 100 cleaners and security staff who remained in-house, continuing the very process that had led to the cleaners’ poverty wages. 

The twin reasons for this, managerialism and privatisation, remain. The outsourcing (to profit-making private companies) of key service contracts like cleaning drives down wages and conditions, because it introduces another profit margin and a duplicate layer of well-paid managers. These companies remain on campus: Office & General, Chartwells, ISS and CIS, to name just the biggest players. The fight continues.

Still, there is great cause for celebration. The UCL campaign has finally achieved its aim, and outsourced workers across Bloomsbury are fighting back against low pay and abuse. The 3Cosas Campaign at the University of London, for example, has won the LLW and is now campaigning for fair terms and conditions for outsourced staff. 

Come and celebrate with the UCL Living Wage Campaign at the joint Bloomsbury campaigns’ ‘Latin Fiesta’ on Friday 4 October from 6pm in the SOAS JCR!

The Campaign will have a stall in the Jeremy Bentham Room at the UCLU Welcome Fair on 26 and 27 September, to distribute this message and talk to new students. If you’d like to volunteer on the stall, our contact details here.

We will be organising a meeting later in Term 1 to determine the direction of the campaign from now on.

Check out this brilliant song: Spare Us A Thought - Support Living Wage

The UCL Living Wage Campaign is back for another year of fighting against low pay and oppression in the workplace. We've got a statement coming in the next few days, but meanwhile check out this brilliant song and video from Casual Films. You'll be humming it all weekend!

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