A cleaner speaks at the end of the ‘3 Cosas’ protest at the Senate House
London relies on its low paid workers to keep running. People like the cleaners are essential workers, but they get treated like dirt – one of their slogans is “We ain’t the dirt we clean for you” Politicians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson support the idea of the London Living Wage – the minimum hourly rate needed to live on in London – but do little if anything to persuade employers to pay it. Those who are on low pay also usually get very poor conditions of service, with usually the legal minimum provisions for sick pay and holidays. Few if any are in pension schemes.
The cleaners, catering workers and security staff at London University are not employed by the university. The university – and banks and other companies – have high ethical standards and give their employees decent levels of sickness pay, holiday entitlement and pension schemes. But working in those same institutions are people who don’t get these – the university has delegated their employment to contractors, washing its hands of its responsibilities towards them.
Green Party leader Natalie Bennett came to speak in support of the ‘3 Cosas’ campaign
It enables the university to feel good about its employment practices, but get the dirty work done on the cheap. The ‘3 Cosas’ campaign, in which the cleaners are supported by students and many staff employed by the university points out the hypocrisy involved. Either the university should directly employ everyone who works there, or if it uses contractors, should insist that they pay the living wage, give workers there comparable conditions to those it gives its own employees and manage them with respect.
So I like to photograph these protests, because these are people who are being mistreated and deserve support. They also campaign in a way that is both effective and visually interesting, making it easy to photograph. The rise of grass-roots trade-unionism is also an interesting phenomenon, and I think points to problems within the trade union movement, which for various reasons has unfortunately largely failed these lower paid workers, a matter of some regret to me as a trade unionist (I belong to two unions and was for many years a union rep at my former workplace.)
The latest response by the University, which followed an incident in which a student was arrested after chalking a slogan across the foundation stone (and charged with criminal damage as well as two charges of assaulting a police officer when she was being arrested – she has pleaded not guilty to all offences) has been to ban student protests in the areas in which most of the pictures here were taken, the Senate House cloister entrance and the East and West car-parks, and to threaten to prosecute students (and presumably others) who protest there as trespassers.
I don’t know what effect this will have on future protests, but feel that instead of making such threats they should be addressing the issues that have led to the protests.
More about the protest and more pictures at London University Cleaners Protest.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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