Join Black Lives Matter UK, India Labour Solidarity and the IWGB Union for an open meeting on

systemic racism and outsourcing.

As part of the broader corporatisation of higher education in the UK in past decades, many

universities have outsourced essential parts of their operations to multinational subcontracting

companies. By their design, these corporations minimise their costs and maximise profits that come

from their lucrative contracts (paid for with students tuition fees and public money). Currently UCL

employs around 800 outsourced workers, mainly in cleaning, security, and catering.

Outsourced workers come from overwhelmingly Black, Brown and immigrant communities. They face

low wages, overwork, and a lack of employment rights that whiter, directly-employed staff at

universities enjoy. This is a clear example of a two-tier workforce, organised along racial lines.

Outsourcing has been widely acknowledged as a detrimental and unequal system, and in recent

years many other universities have decided to end the practice, so why does UCL continue to resist

Come to this event to hear from workers, activists and academics who will discuss the social, racial

and economic dimensions of outsourcing in higher education and beyond. We will host a discussion

on its effects on workers, students and academics, while talking about existing and potential strategies to put an end to outsourcing at UCL and beyond.

About the Participants:

The IWGB has been campaigning to in-house Security, Catering and Cleaning workers at UCL since

2019. Currently, the IWGB is fighting against a fire-and-rehire process that has cut significant hours

and worsened working conditions for UCL Security Guards. In recent years, the workers of the IWGB

have won battles against outsourcing at the University of London, LSHTM and Goldsmiths.

Black Lives Matter UK has been on the front lines of fighting against racial injustice since 2016. One

of their current initiatives is to push for a reassessment of the legal definition of structural racism to

include the racial inequalities endemic to the UK’s economic system, of which outsourcing is a central

example.

India Labour Solidarity was created in 2022 to forge links between workers in the UK and India.

Highlighting that exploitation from outsourcing is not unique to the Global North, workers in India have

long fought battles against outsourcing practices that further entrench caste discrimination and

gendered exploitation.