London School of Economics - Shame on you

Owen Jones in The Guardian

It is a university that prides itself on being a forum for debate about social injustice and inequality. The London School of Economics was founded by Fabian socialists at the end of the 19th century: they believed education was key to liberating society from social ills.

Last week I was due to attend a debate at the LSE on the expansion of secondary moderns (which is what selection in education really means). At the request of cleaners on strike over their terms and conditions, I withdrew at the last minute. And here is the perverse truth: well-paid speakers will turn up at this prestigious institution to debate the great injustices of modern Britain. Then in come the cleaners – all from migrant or minority backgrounds – to clear up, victims of some of the very injustices that have just been debated.

Like most universities, LSE outsourced its cleaners years ago. It’s cheaper, you see, because the cleaners can then be employed with worse terms and conditions than in-house staff. In this way a university with a multimillion-pound budget can deviously save money on those who clean the libraries, the lecture halls, the offices.

An in-house LSE worker has up to 41 days’ paid leave, six months’ fully paid sick pay, and good maternity pay and pension rights. Cleaners, on the other hand, have the statutory minimum. If they fall ill, they are paid nothing for the first three days, then just £17.87 a day. For a cleaner paid £9.75 an hour – living in one of the world’s most expensive cities – that’s simply not an option. “They can’t afford to be sick,” says Petros Elia, general secretary of the United Voices of the World (UVW) union. Cleaners turn up ill to work instead.

No wonder they describe themselves as “second-class”, “third-class”, or “no-class” workers. The response of LSE’s management is a sobering indictment of industrial relations in a society in which the employers have the whip hand. Cleaners and their supporters have been threatened with arrests and injunctions. “LSE’s mottos is ‘to know the causes of things’,” says Michael Etheridge, the Unison branch secretary, “and yet on the issue of outsourcing it has, as an institution, been wholly ignorant.”

That these cleaners have stood up for themselves – in the face of such hostility – is courageous, and an inspiring precedent for other workers in low-paid, insecure Britain. They’ve come from a variety of different countries; some have only worked at LSE for a few months. But they have organised, and thrown themselves into a determined struggle that now has the university authorities on the run.

Rattled, the LSE has been forced to offer concessions: beginning with 10 days’ full sick pay, then 15, then 20. But UVW and Unison – which represents some of the other cleaners – are clear. This is not a strike simply about improved conditions: it is about being treated the same as other workers. Only parity will do. Unison has been offered a package of improvements, including sick pay of up to 65 days and four weeks of additional maternity pay, and a pledge to work “to reach full parity … in the near future”. But continued pressure on LSE to accept the cleaners’ demands is clearly necessary.

It is a saga that tells many stories about modern Britain. It’s about how, disproportionately, some of the lowest paid and most insecure work is done by migrants and minorities. It’s about a race to the bottom in terms and conditions. It’s about how the law is rigged in favour of bosses. But it’s also about how – with determination and organisation – workers can indeed win.

Mildred Simpson was born in Jamaica and moved to Britain in 1989: she’s worked at the LSE for 16 years. A few years ago she was made a supervisor: back then, there were 25 supervisors, but the number has been slashed to 13. For no extra pay, she is expected to do the jobs of two people. This, for her, is a fight for equality. “We’re doing all the dirty work while they’re drinking their champagne and drinking their coffee,” she says. But she has a message to other workers too. “Fight as well as us as much as you can, for your rights, for pensions, for better working conditions, to be recognised.”

Britain’s universities grant their management lavish salaries: the Former LSE director Craig Calhoun was on a salary package of £381,000 a year and spent tens of thousands on overseas trips. It’s not just cleaners who are mistreated. Academia is becoming increasingly casualised and insecure. At Birmingham University, for instance, a shocking 70% of staff are on insecure contracts. Academics are overworked, struggling with bureaucracy, and often lacking the basic security of knowing how many hours they’re working each week.

Unions have been dramatically weakened in Britain. That has fed into a general sense that injustice is permanent, a fact of life like a weather system, rather than the consequence of human decisions. If there is no apparent collective means available to overcome injustice, then inevitably we become resigned. But if some marginalised, hitherto voiceless cleaners can put one of the world’s most prestigious universities on the backfoot, they set an example to others. This is a country that has endured the longest squeeze in wages for generations, while wealth at the top and in the boardroom has boomed; where our workforce is increasingly stripped of security and fundamental rights. That might be the current direction of travel, but it can be changed. And those cleaners at LSE show how.

Why we prefer our immigrants to be invisible

The treatment of cleaners at the University of London highlights our shameful treatment of immigrants

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 21 June 2014 18.05 BST

Independent Workers of Great Britain pickets outside the University of London Commonwealth Hall. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Demotix/Corbis

The story of the University of London's cleaners ought to be a modern Made in Dagenham. Immigrant women were scraping a living on a poverty wage from an employer who wanted them to clean up other people's mess and get out of sight when they'd finished. They fought back and, in a rare uplifting moment in these dismal times, won. They forced the university to raise their pay from £6.15 to £8.80 an hour and give them decent holidays and sickness leave.

But no one will make a film about the university cleaners because it lacks the prime ingredient for a feelgood story: a happy ending. Instead, their experience tells a more hypocritical tale about the British attitude to immigrants. Public opinion is set against them. But for all the outrage, Britain still wants foreigners' money, and employers and the middle and upper classes still want foreigners' labour – as long as it is cheap and as long as the workers do as they are told and do not make a fuss.

In 2011, no one noticed the University of London's Latin American cleaners. They travelled on the early-morning buses or trains, when most of London was still in bed, and spent their days doing shifts for two or three different employers. To the academics and students they served they were next to invisible: seen but not noticed; essential but neglected. On the surface, the cleaners, porters, caterers and other contract workers must have looked easy to intimidate. I met Sonia Chura, their leader, and two of her comrades last week. They were all barely five feet tall and couldn't speak English. They were in a strange land that cared nothing for them. "What can they do to us?" their masters must have thought.

As it turned out, they could organise an unofficial strike, get back pay they were owed, attract the attention of the radical press and go on to win better pay and terms and conditions. Their achievement is all the more remarkable because their own union, Unison, did not support them.

Anyone who hopes for a stronger labour movement knows that trade unions must start recruiting the cleaners, shop workers, security guards, carers, maids, nannies and cooks who make up the new working class. By necessity, they must appeal to women and tackle the admittedly formidable task of organising new immigrants. Yet Unison turned on the cleaners.

It found technicalities that allowed it to declare an election in which immigrants ran for union positions invalid. When cleaners protested outside Unison headquarters, its officials locked the doors and called the police. If you want to understand why the British trade union movement is dying faster than grass in a heat wave, the vignette of Unison demanding that the cops control its members tells you all you need to know.

The cleaners did not give up. They joined and helped develop a tiny new union – theIndependent Workers of Great Britain. It is run by Jason Moyer-Lee, another figure who might have stepped out of an inspirational film. He was an American graduate student in London who was appalled by the way employers treated foreign workers and devoted his time to helping them, first in Unison and then in the new union

Now he must help save their jobs. The halls of residence the women cleaned will be closed. The contractors refused to say if they would move the activists to new work. Nor would the University of London, the umbrella body that comprises the London School of Economics, University College London and many another fine liberal institution. I asked its spokesman if the university would guarantee that the women would not be punished for asking for £8.80 an hour. That was a matter for the contractors, he replied. I pointed out that the university paid the contractors. If it said they must keep the activists, the contractors would obey.

"Of course," he said in a sing-song voice, "we absolutely believe in workers' right to peacefully protest." He made the University of London sound like a noble place, while avoiding a promise to ensure that the women were kept on. I later found he had dodged the question for a good reason. As the wretched man was speaking to me, the contractors were telling the activists that not one woman who organised a protest would get a permanent job. I hope they drag them and the university through every employment tribunal they can find.

But even if they lose a tribunal case, the Home Office will not be able to drive them out of Britain. Like so many of the Latin Americans here, they originally moved to Spain. The Spaniards gave them citizenship that allows them to work in any European country. They fled north to avoid the depression the euro crisis brought. As long as Britain stays in the EU, they are safe. They will find other work, too, if they abandon any thought of campaigning for decent treatment. Employers want compliant labour, whether immigrant or native. As immigrants are the easiest to exploit, they will always be popular

It is a nice coincidence that their struggle is taking place in a university. Foreign students are in the opposite position to contract workers. They have money; cleaners do not. Britain wants their cash, but it also wants to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Universities depend on foreigners to subsidise British students – nearly 20% of the output generated by universities comes from non-EU students. Theresa May, however, has driven down the immigration figures by ending the old system that allowed foreign students to pay off debts by working for two years in any job they could find after graduating. The number of foreign students keeping the academic "business" rolling in grew at 5% a year in the last decade but is falling now. I wouldn't be surprised if it fell much further. "We want your money, but we don't want you," isn't the most enticing sales pitch.

The richer parts of London have become creepy places. The streets are deserted and the houses dark. Foreign oligarchs have bought up homes as an investment, thus fuelling the Osborne housing bubble, which provides us with what growth we have, but they don't live in them. What a metaphor for how Cameron's Britain wants its immigrants. If they are poor, it wants them to be invisible, flitting uncomplainingly from one menial job to the next. If they are rich, it wants them to hand over their money and leave. Either way, it doesn't want to see them.

My Weltanschhaung - 10/2/2012

I am pleased at the new Cameron proposal, - 'Elderly people should be encouraged to go back to work and move into smaller homes'. Thats one more supply side policy. The principle behind it: the purpose of every human being is to contribute to society until death and the Cameron policy exemplifies it. So retirement will only be for the rich, this policy is a third world policy indeed. But who will hire them, I ask? Also, had Britain become a third world country?

I am also pleased that tax breaks are planned for those who employ cooks and cleaners. This is a good way to boost GDP, after all the cooking and cleaning services provided by stay at home parents are free and are not included in the GDP figures.

Its funny the interesting stories seem to appear only in the Daily Telegraph.