Biggest strike of outsourced workers in UK higher education history

Max Hunder and Daria Mosolova report on Tuesday’s protests to end the outsourcing of staff at UCL.

An icy Tuesday morning saw hundreds of workers and students march through campus to demand that UCL bring cleaning, catering, and security staff back in-house. Around 900 staff members are currently contracted through outsourcing firms and therefore do not receive the benefits promised and provided by UCL to direct employees.

“It’s not fair the way we work now,” Maia Leia, a cleaning supervisor who has worked at the university for 18 years, told me. For her, as for most of those on the picket line on Tuesday, the biggest issues are holiday and sick pay: “If we are sick, we don’t get paid. I had an operation and needed time to recover, but I had to go back to work because otherwise I wouldn’t receive one penny.” According to IWGB, the nascent union organising the strike, outsourced workers only receive the legal minimum of holiday and sick pay entitlement, unlike their directly employed colleagues.

The march was attended by Gordon Nardell QC, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster seat, and Guardian columnist Owen Jones. Pi News spoke to Owen at the march. He stressed the importance of “grassroots, militant unions, which are doing an incredible job of organising disproportionately migrant workers and workers from minority communities”, leading the charge against an “unprecedented, generation-long squeezing of wages” and giving larger, more established unions a “kick up the backside”. Asked what he would say to students who are apathetic to or dismissive of the strikes, Owen replied “when you end up at the end of your education, saddled with debt, a lot of you are going to end up being driven into low-paid and insecure work, and at that point the tables will well and truly be turned!”

UCL has already acted to meet some of the striking workers’ demands: an official press statement announced that from 1st December this year, UCL “will offer [outsourced] staff the same holiday entitlements as UCL’s directly employed staff”. The statement goes on to say that UCL will also “achieve parity on other employment benefits including pay scales, overtime, sick pay, maternity and paternity payments and carers pay” by August 2021, although with the caveat that all these promises are “subject to further negotiation and agreement with UNISON, with which UCL has recognition agreements in place”. However, the workers and IWGB organisers who spoke at the protest were adamant that this time frame was unacceptable.

There was also a lack of trust on the picket line, both towards the university and UNISON. The former lost the faith of many veteran employees like Maia Leia when, having originally hired them as in-house staff, it informed them they would now be contracted through Axis or Sodexo, while the latter has been accused of undermining in-house protests by smaller unions at Goldsmiths and the LSE. These campaigns, as well as ones at KCL and SOAS, have now achieved their goals, with the universities agreeing to bring staff in-house, leaving UCL increasingly isolated in its current policy.

Many at the protest felt that the disproportionate number of BAME and migrant workers among the ranks of the outsourced staff was no coincidence. John Moloney, Assistant General Secretary of the PCS union, which represents over 180,000 civil servants, was there to show solidarity with the IWGB strikers and told Pi: “[UCL] think they’re disposable staff…I think they do make calculations about people of colour, and make calculations about women — about what they will take and won’t take. In the past they’ve thought they’re passive and therefore can be pushed around.”

The picket was also a way for many of the students and staff in attendance to express wider discontent with the way UCL is being run. Michal, a lecturer at SSEES, was hopeful about the plight of the IWGB workers striking on Tuesday, but rather more pessimistic about the general direction of the university. “Hopefully UCL will bring these staff in-house, and it will be really shocking if they don’t. It would be a good thing for our beloved leader to leave for us, a polishing of an otherwise turd-like legacy,” he remarked.

Matthew, a final-year student, insisted that strike action like this would be a regular occurrence unless significant changes were made to the way the university is run: “There needs to be a complete overhaul of the management system, we need to give more choice and decision-making power to the people who actually study or work here, because I think they know best how to run the university.”

Biggest strike of outsourced workers in UK higher education history

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