open-top bus | >Re-PHOTO

On the IWGB ‘3 Cosas’ Battle Bus – 2014

On the IWGB ‘3 Cosas’ Battle Bus: On Tuesday 18th January 2014 I got up uncharacteristically early and joined a packed rush hour train into London, something I usually like to avoid. The bus to Russell Square was also slow, held up in busy traffic, but even so I joined the morning picket at the east gate to the entrance to the Senate House car park before 9am and was taking pictures.

It was a bright winter morning, but not much above freezing and not the kind of day anyone sensible would go on an open-top bus ride around London, and though I’d layered up well for the event it was still chilling.

But those on the picket line on the second day of the 3 day strike by the IWGB for union recognition and better conditions had already been there since 5am, beginning while I was still sleeping in a warm bed and were still in good spirits. Cleaners, maintenance and security staff who work in the University of London were joined by student leaders and students from the University. Of course many of the workers would normally have been at work in the early hours.

Although these workers work at the university and carry out work essential for the running of the university, the university does not employ them. Most low paid workers – cleaners, maintenance and security staff, catering workers and others – at the University of London are no longer directly employed by the University, but work in the University on contracts from contractors.

Outsourcing these workers enables the University to evade its responsibilities towards this essential part of their workforce who suffer from poorer conditions and pay and aggressive management from the contractors that any responsible employer would be ashamed to implement. Most were only getting the legal minimum in terms of pay, pensions, sick pay and holidays, well inferior to comparable fellow workers directly employed by the University.

In the past these precarious employees had belonged, if at all, to traditional unions such as Unison, who had taken their fees but done nothing to improve their conditions, often seeming to them to only be concerned in keeping the differential between those on the lowest pay and higher paid staff.

It was only when these workers, many of them Spanish-speaking, joined the newly formed grass roots union, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, that they were able to achieve some gains thanks to noisy public protests and strong negotiating by the union which by 2013 had won them the London Living Wage, considerably more than the national minimum wage. They achieved this despite both the University of London and the employers refusing to recognise the IWGB, continuing to recognise the more compliant Unison to which few if any of these workers belonged.

In 2013, having won the London Living Wage and started the now famous 3 Cosas or “three things” campaign for sick pay, holiday pay and pensions, as well as continuing to press for union recognition.

This 3-day strike, following another strike the previous November, was the latest action in this campaign. Union recognition was particularly important for those working at the Garden Halls of residence in Bloomsbury which the university was intending to close in the coming Summer. The IWGB was demanding these workers be given priority for vacancies that arise elsewhere in the university, with preference being given to those with the longer periods of service, but the employers were refusing any cooperation.

Waiting for us in the driveway was an open-top bus, and after I had been there around an hour most of the strikers and supporters boarded this ‘battle bus’ to go on a protest tour of various sites in London, with just a small picket remaining. I had been invited to go with them on top of the bus to take photographs.

“The sun shone on the workers as the bus drove away, followed by a group of student supporters on bicycles. I was on the upper deck taking photographs as the workers waved their red IWGB flags, chanted and listened to IWGB Branch Secretary Jason Moyer-Lee, Branch Chair Henry Lopez, President of the Independent Workers of Great Britain Alberto Durango, Branch Vice-Chair and leading member of the 3 Cosas Campaign Sonia Chura and University of London Union Vice-President Daniel Cooper as they used a powerful public address system to address the public and workers about the fight for union recognition for the IWGB and comparable conditions of service with directly employed University of London workers for outsourced workers at the university.

In between the various speeches and chants, including some in both Spanish and translated into English, there was loud music to draw attention and also to keep the strikers happy.”

The first stop was in Cartwright Gardens outside the University’s Garden Halls of residence where there were several speeches from the top of the bus. Somehow we went on to drive past the Unison headquarters on Euston Road in both directions, to booing from many of the workers, and on the second pass an IWGB flag was caught in the branches of a tree and left flying in front of the Unison building.

The route had been planned to stop outside the offices of The Guardian, but it, like most London buses, was running late due to traffic congestion, and it continued on to go very noisily through Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall, before a complete circuit of Parliament Square before stopping to let us get off outside the Supreme Court.

There was then a rally on the pavement in front of Parliament, with short speeches by Labour MPs John McDonnell, Andy Burnham and Jeremy Corbyn who had come out to join us.

We marched to the Embankment and boarded the bus again for a short journey, leaving the bus just around the corner from the Royal Opera House, where everyone kept quiet as we approached the building and then rushed in. The IWGB had been campaigning there for some time for the London Living Wage.

This is another workplace where the management had refused to recognise and have talks with the IWGB, preferring to recognise Unison. The IWGB were confronted there by the Unison Health & Safety rep who told them the management had now agreed to pay cleaners the Living Wage but hadn’t yet told them. Doubtless this was another victory for the protests by the IWGB, though of course he refused to acknowledge this.

We piled back onto the bus and went to the offices of the new employer of the outsourced workers, Cofely GDF-Suez, who had taken over from Balfour Beatty Workplace in December. Police were there and the front and back gates were both locked. The workers held a brief rally outside the gate in Torrens Place.

I was invited to go back on the bus to a late lunch with the workers at the Elephant & Castle – but it was already after 2pm and I didn’t relish the thought of another long bus ride. So I said goodbye and began my journey home to work on and file some of the many pictures I had taken over the day.

You can read more about this in posts on My London Diary, where there are also many more pictures.
‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket
‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus
IWGB at Parliament
IWGB in Royal Opera House
IWGB at Cofely GDF-Suez

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US

Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US: The headline I wrote for the events of Wednesday 7th November 2012 could well have been written for this year’s US elections where Trump’s whole career in politics has been supported by fossil fuel companies.

Huge lobbying by these companies and a deliberate campaign of misinformation and pseudoscience, financing studies which cast doubt or contradict the scientific consensus of global warming happening because of fossil fuel use has resulted in US governments not taking effective action against these polluters.

According to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, the Republican Party is controlled by the fossil fuel industry and as well as huge subsidies also gets “the license to pollute for free.”

Under the Democrats the US has finally taken some limited action with promises to phase out fossil fuel use but the government in 2022 still supplied around $15 billion a year in subsidies to the industry.

The protest in 2012 was calling on President Obama “to stand up against the lobbying, dirty money and media lies funded by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies.” He didn’t.

You can read more about the protest, which began outside the London offices of the Koch Brothers, Koch International in Fenchurch St at the heart of the City of London with a huge banner ‘KOCH BROTHERS – DIRTY MONEY – FUNDING CLIMATE DENIAL’ on My London Diary.

A high wind made it difficult to hold up the banner while the protest continued with speeches. But the big banner certainly attracted a great deal of attention, though soon they had to take it down as it became impossible to hold. But there were plenty of placards showing heads of prominent US right wing politicians and media commentators, each with their names and some ridiculous quotations related to climate change, as well as those of Obama and Romney and the two Koch brothers, along with some smaller banners.

There was another big banner of the side of the open-top bus which the Campaign Against Climate Change had hired to take the protesters to the US Embassy.

I went with them for what was probably the most uncomfortable bus journey of my life. It was cold in the strong icy wind and the bus bumped and lurched ridiculously.

It was hard to keep standing as I took pictures and I had to hold on with one hand all the time, using the other to take pictures. There wasn’t a great deal of light and getting sharp pictures at 1/30 f4 (full aperture for my wideangle zoom) was difficult with the bouncing and vibration of the bus.

Somehow I managed, and Phil Thornhill managed to to use the megaphone, at least during some of the halts in traffic. But I was very pleased (and very frozen) when we arrived and got off the bus in Grosvenor Square.

Police at Grosvenor Square tried to herd the protesters into a small pen in a dark corner, but they refused and were finally allowed to go in front of the locked main entrance gates, with those faces and their quotations peering over the hedge from the gardens behind the main actors and speakers.

More on My London Diary at Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Kick Boris out of Uxbridge – 2019

Kick Boris out of Uxbridge – When Boris Johnson was coming to the end of his wrecking spell as Mayor of London he decided he wanted to confer the same benefit on the country and the first step in that was to become an MP again. So in the 2015 election he was elected as the member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, a safe Tory seat on the edge of West London.

*Anarchists came to join the FCKBoris protest on Saturday 16th November 2019*

He got roughly the same percentage of votes – just over 50% – there in 2017, but the Labour candidate managed to cut his majority considerably, and there were hopes in 2019 that this trend might continue. Unfortunately it didn’t and Johnson increased his percentage of the vote by 1.8% while the Labour vote went down by a little more.

After Johnson’s resignation the by election there in 2023 was a close run thing, with the Tory vote down 7.5% and Labour’s up by 5.6% and the Tory candidate just scraping in with a majority of 495. Most commentators saw the result as being caused by the unpopularity of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ low emission zone extension which was to include the area later in the year overcoming the incredible unpopularity of the Tory government.

But in 2019, many felt Labour had a chance in what had for many years been a safe Tory seat with a solid blue vote of around 50%. And among them were a group who called themselves FCKBoris who came to campaign there against him on Saturday 16th November 2019.

I went there to photograph them and others went to protest with them. Uxbridge is only around 7 miles from where I live, but it isn’t a place I often visit, not least because public transport on the edges of London isn’t too hot. There are no direct links and my fastest route is on a bicycle. But I was feeling lazy and instead took three buses, with waits at each change. Two years later we now have a sightly faster service, at least in theory.

Arriving in Uxbridge I came across a fairly small group of people wearing orange woolly hats and handing out fliers with the message ‘Boris Doesn’t Want You to Vote…’ and telling people who were not registered how to get themselves on the electoral roll.

A few of London’s anarchists had travelled out from London to join them, bringing posters encouraging people not to vote but instead to revolt and some with photographs of the Bullingdon Club and the message ‘FUCK OFF BACK TO ETON’ – Johnson’s old school only a few miles away.

There were just a few other placards and banners, and also an open-top bus wth a large banner with the message #KICKBORISOUT from which a hefty sound system pumped out a rhythm that kept many of the campaigners dancing both on the street and on the top of the bus where I joined them briefly.

But the effectiveness of the bus was greatly reduced by the pedestrianisation of much of the town centre with an impenetrable one-way system and soon a police officer came along to tell the driver very politely that he couldn’t park where he was. And soon the bus and protesters set off slowly to march to Brunel University, accompanied by a handful of police.

And it was perhaps the university and its students which was the main focus of the campaign with the message directed more at them. Although students can register to vote both at home and where they live during the universtiy term, relativley few generally bother to do so. So much of the messages of this protest were aime at them, though there were some posters which might have had a more general appeal, such as one describing Johnson as “UNFAITHFUL, LIAR, SELF-SERVING, WIFE BEATER? DRUNK?” and saying ‘Don’t trust Boris Johnson. Don’t give him your vote‘.

They were joined at Brunel by a few more protesters with posters including one wearing a rainbow flag and carrying a ‘Queers Against Boris’ poster and with FUCK BORIS written on her forehead,

But otherwise once on the campus it seemed pretty deserted and people didn’t know what to do. Finally they formed up again behind the bus which drove off back towards the centre of the town. But I decided I’d walked enough and sat down at a bus stop for a long wait for a bus to Heathrow where I could wait again for a bus home.

Probably the campaign had very little influence on the result of the election on 12th December, where the Tory campaign was almost entirely on their promise to “Get Brexit Done”. Johnson’s majority here was 7,210 and he went on to make the worst of all possible deals we are now suffering from, largely because of a Tory conviction that bluster and intransigence is the best form of negotiation.

More at Kick Boris out of Uxbridge.

University of London 3 Cosas Strike

Eight years ago on Tuesday 28th January 2014 low paid workers at the University of London were on the second day of their 3 day strike. Their union had organised a day of action around London and I had been invited to come and photograph it, having photographed a number of their previous protests.

University cleaners, maintenance and security staff were demanding that the University recognise their trade union, the IWGB (Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) and give them better pay and conditions, comparable with other university staff they work alongside. The ‘3 Cosas’ were sick pay, paid holidays and pensions – all areas where these staff were only being given the legal minimum (and sometime not even that.)

As I wrote in 2014:

“although these workers work at the university and carry out work essential for the running of the university, the university does not employ them. Most low paid workers – cleaners, maintenance and security staff, catering works and others – at the University of London are no longer directly employed by the University, but work in the University on contracts from contractors Cofely GDF-Suez (who took over the former contractor Balfour Beatty Workplace at the end of last year.) The policy of outsourcing these workers seems largely intended to evade the responsibilities of London University towards an essential part of their workforce.”
3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus

It meant an early start for me, although the pickets had been outside Senate House for four hours when I arrived at 9am. Living outside London though on its edge I seldom arrive before 10am as it doubles my travel costs and I’ve never been a happy early riser. Fortunately the weather was good, a bright winter day and I’d dressed for the weather with thermal underwear, thick socks and a woolly hat, though it was still pretty chilly on top of the open-top bus.

The bus turned out to be a 1960 Routemaster which was sold by London Transport in 1986 but only converted to open-top in 2001. (I’d long thought that there was a plentiful supply of such vehicles after drivers attempted routes under low bridges, but apparently not, although a couple of bridges near where I live have had quite a few victims over the years.) Compared to modern buses, Routemasters offered a very bumpy ride with considerable vibration, and taking pictures on the upper deck required some faster than normal shutter speeds and most of the time working one-handed while clinging on with the other.

Space on bus tops is also quite small and moving around impeded both by the seats and the other riders (I think it’s a more appropriate term than passengers) and though they were very cooperative the top of the bus was pretty full. Most of the pictures I made were taken when the bus was stopped either at junctions or for short protests and my fisheye lens proved really useful.

The bus trip began at Senate House, and then began an extensive tour around central London, making a tour of various university sites where IWGB members were striking. There was a great deal of booing as we passed the Unison headquarters on Euston Road, as many of the workers had left Unison in disgust as they felt the were not supporting the demands of low-paid workers. The IWGB had intended to stop outside the offices of The Guardian newspaper, but had been held up too much by London’s traffic and drove past and on to Parliament Square.

Here we jumped off the bus and marched to Parliament where the IWGB had arranged to meet Labour MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn for a short rally (and Andy Burnham sent a short message of support.)

There was a short shower before the bus came to pick us up on the Embankment, taking us to a side street near the Royal Opera House. Everyone kept quiet as we got off, then rushed around the corner and into the foyer. IWGB members there had voted for a strike the following month for union recognition and the London Living Wage.

In the foyer we were met by a man who introduced himself as the Unison Health & Safety rep and told the IWGB President and the other protesters that the ROH had already agreed that the cleaners will get the Living Wage, but had not yet told them. The Opera House recognises Unison, despite the workers almost entirely being IWGB members. It’s a ridiculous situation but one which is allowed under our poor trade union laws, though not one that makes sense for either workers or employers.

After making their views clear the IWGB members left quietly and got back onto the bus for the final visit of the day, to the Angel Islington, where Cofely GDF-Suez (who took over employing the workers at the University of London from the former contractor Balfour Beatty Workplace in December) has its offices. As at the Royal Opera House, there were plenty of police present and waiting for the protesters, but here they managed to lock the metal gates on the two entrances to Angel Square as the bus arrived, leaving the protest to take place in front of one of them in Torrens Place.

From here the bus was going on to the union offices at the Elephant and Castle and I was invited to join them for a very late mid-afternoon lunch but unfortunately I had work to do on the many pictures I had taken and had to leave them and make my way home.

IWGB at Cofely GDF-Suez
IWGB in Royal Opera House
IWGB at Parliament
‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus

3 Cosas – 28 Jan 2014

It was the second day of the 3 day strike by the IWGB for union recognition and better conditions for outsourced workers at the University of London, and the union had hired an open-top bus to take their campaigners around London to protest.

The ‘3 Cosas’ campaign was calling for Sick Pay, Holdidays and Pensions for the workers, who were only getting the minimal statutory provisions from the cost-cutting contracting companies who employed them. They worked alongside people who were employed directly by the University who enjoyed considerably better conditions of service.

Although the majority of the workers were members of the IWGB, the University and the contractors refuse to talk with this union. The University management instead recognises a union that has few if any members, using this as an excuse not to recognise the union the workers belong to.

After a lengthy tour of London, stopping at some of the workplaces and elsewhere for speeches from the top of the bus, we came to Parliament Square, where there was a short rally and MPs John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham came to show their support.

I’ve written about the day at some length on My London Diary so I won’t go into much detail and repeat myself here. There are of course many more pictures, rather too many, as I got a little carried away and there was so much to photograph.

While the idea through the morning had been to draw as much attention to the strike and protest noisily, the next event was a suprise protest at another location where the IWGB were campaigning for union recognition and a living wage, the Royal Opera House. The bus stopped a short distance away and then members rushed into the foyer to hold a noisy protest there.

We then left and went for a final protest outside the offices of the contractor who employ many of the workers at the University, Cofely GDF-Suez. There the gates were locked and the protest took place on the street outside.

More pictures and text from the day:
‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus
IWGB at Parliament
IWGB in Royal Opera House
IWGB at Cofely GDF-Suez

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.