Saturday Evening, May 7th, I went to one of London’s best-known arts venues, the Barbican Centre, in the City of London and owned by the City, not to listen to a concert or view and exhibition, but for yet another protest in a long-running fight to get the prestige venue to treat its cleaners with proper respect and dignity and give them decent pay and conditions.
It wasn’t the first protest by cleaners that I’ve photographed there, and over the years the cleaners have made some progress, achieving, more or less, the London Living Wage through previous protests. But one of the problems with outsourcing of cleaning contracts (and other outsourcing) is that at the end of the contract period, new contracting companies come and put in lower bids – and the only way they can achieve these is by screwing the workers harder. Since the hourly rate is now more or less protected, that means increasing workloads, getting the cleaners to clean more and more, so they can cut hours and make staff redundant. And when Servest took over the contract that is exactly what they tried to do.
The Barbican managers try to claim they have no responsibility for the pay and working conditions of people Servest get to work to keep their centre running, a ridiculous and totally untenable position. And while Servest aren’t quite employing slave labour and whipping them to work harder it should be a condition of any contract that the Barbican make that workers are treated fairly and reasonably – and the Barbican should insist that this is so.
There are workers at the Barbican who are little different from slaves. Certainly under the previous contractor there had been workers on ‘Workfare’, under which those who had been unemployed for over three months were given the choice of working unpaid for companies or organisations or being “sanctioned” – losing their benefits. There are no whips involved, just the threat of destitution.
I’d got the message from the cleaners’ union , the United Voices of the World (UVW) that the cleaners, who had kept their protest secret except for trusted supporters from the Bakers Union, Class War, SOAS Unison, Unite Hotel workers branch and IWGB Couriers branch, would be meeting a short distance away and then walking together into the Barbican, hoping to rush past security.
When we met up it was still pretty light on the street, but I changed the D700 to ISO 2000 to be ready for going inside, and changed from my normal 16-35 f4 zoom to the one stop faster 20mm f2.8. As the group neared the entrance they broke into a run, and we all made it inside, except for a small group including the workers at the Barbican who stayed to protest outside the main entrance – going in could have resulted in disciplinary action – and Servest were already singling out union members for redundancies.
Inside the lighting was even lower than I remembered and I took the ISO up another stop to ISO 4000 on the D700, while relying on auto-ISO on the D810, where I had the 28.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 in place, as usual working in DX mode. The 18-105mm would have been more useful, though it is no faster, as there is rather a large gap between the 20mm and the 42mm equivalent of the 28-200, but I only thought about that after I’d left home. Generally the auto-ISO chose ISO in the range ISO 4000-10,000, and the results, though noisy were usable after some fairly aggressive noise reduction in Lightroom.
After around 15 minutes of noisy protest, stating the cleaner’s case to people waiting to go into events and in the foyer areas, the police arrived, and after a little argument the protesters agreed to go out by the way they had come in, keeping up their noisy protest as they slowly made their way out through the busy areas to where the others were protesting in front of the main entrance. The protest had made quite a stir and despite their disclaimer I think it certain that the Barbican would be putting pressure on Servest to try to avoid further happenings like this.
Cleaners invade Barbican Centre
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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