#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.