Pancakes and Pickets: Tuesday 4th March 2014 was very much a day of two halves for me, starting with the City of London at play in Guildhall Yard and going on to the School of Oriental and African Studies where cleaners were beginning a two-day strike demanding an end to bullying by their employer ISS and to be brought back into direct employment and treated with respect by SOAS management with equal rights to other employees.
City of London Pancake Races
Guildhall Yard
It was Shrove Tuesday and The City of London’s 10th annual pancake races took place in Guildhall Yard between teams representing the livery companies, wearing guild robes, white gloves and hats.
As might be expected in the City this is a highly organised event, complete with clipboards, stop-watches and judges, and with a series of rules about dress and behaviour, with points being lost for various infringements.
Various of the guilds contributed their expertise: Gunmakers used a small but very loud cannon to start each heat, Clockmakers timed the races, Fruiterers provided lemons, Cutlers plastic forks, Glovers white gloves to be worn by each runner, and the Poulters, who had started the event, the eggs to make the pancakes.
This event supports the annual charity Lord Mayor’s appeal, and in 2014 Fiona Woolf, the 686th Lord Mayor of London, had chosen Beating Bowel Cancer, the Princess Alice Hospice, Raleigh International and Working Chance. As well as the more formal races there is also a fancy dress competition and race with one entrant from each livery company in costumes based, some with great ingenuity, on the charities.
As I commented, “competition was extremely fierce and the regulators had plenty of work to do keeping up with the infringements. If only they had paid as much attention to what the banks and other city companies were doing!”
This was an event I photographed in several years, but I think 2014 was the final time. Like many events it had become more difficult to cover as more and more photographers came to cover it, some making rather a nuisance of themselves, leading to more restrictions. In earlier years there had only been myself and a few friends and we were welcomed and able to work freely.
SOAS Cleaners strike for Equal Treatment
SOAS, Thornhaugh St
It was the start of a two-day strike by cleaners at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, part of a long ‘Justice For Cleaners’ campaign to be treated equally to other staff at SOAS and to be brought back ‘in house’, employed directly by the university.
They were then employed by the outsourcing cleaning contractor ISS, a multinational company with a reputation for bullying workers. The previous day some ISS managers had assaulted students who had stopped them trying to bring in scab workers to do the work of the cleaners.
ISS director Paul Cronin had also threatened to stop paying the cleaners the London Living Wage which they gained through industrial action several years ago.
Outsourcing always results in a poorer level of service, with employers cutting hours of work and giving workers poorer conditions of service, making high profits at the expense of low paid workers.
Reputable employers could not possibly be seen to employ people on the poor pay and conditions of contracting companies, but SOAS seemed happy to benefit from the exploitation of people who work in its building by others despite the poorer service for students and others.
And as the Justice for Cleaners campaign stated “SOAS is known around the world for promoting dignity and equality. Yet, its maintenance, cleaning, security and catering all have less rights than other workers, because they are outsourced. At the moment SOAS is built on inequality and exploitation.”
The strike ballot had an over 60% turnout out and all who voted back the strike. I was told that many had arrived by 4am to start the picket and by 6am virtually the whole normal morning shift were there taking part.
I rushed away from the pancake races to get there for the lunchtime rally, where there were speeches supporting the strike from students and trade unionists. The cleaners are members of the SOAS Unison branch.
Many students and teaching staff had refused to cross the picket line; lectures and tutorials were rescheduled, no registers were taken, and library fines and deadlines were postponed. But for the following second day of the strike the cleaners had asked students and staff to work as normal so that the effect of the building not being cleaned could be seen.
After the speeches there was music and dancing, with the event going on until the picket ended at 5pm. Then the union bar which had been closed for the strike was to open for students and cleaners to have a party. But I left much earlier.
The campaign to bring the cleaners at SOAS back into direct employment continued and after ten years they were finally brought back in house in 2018.
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