Outsourced cleaners at UCL are going on strike from 29 September to 1 October to resist mass redundancies.
We need your help to win!
UCL and subcontractor Sodexo have announced they will be cutting 195 Full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs within cleaning services at UCL. This means over 100 cleaners losing their jobs!
In residence cleaning teams, they are proposing 45 redundancies, cutting the number of cleaners in student halls in half. On the main campus, they are threatening to refuse en masse to renew temporary contracts of casualised cleaners, to avoid having to make any redundancy payments. Many cleaners have spent years being forced from temporary contract to temporary contract, being refused permanent, stable employment.
Those not losing their jobs will face even worse conditions than before. Understaffing and overwork are already serious issues for cleaners, who struggle to safely complete their tasks at current team sizes.
Most of those affected are women and Black, Latinx, and migrant workers, already discriminated against through UCL’s racist two-tier system of outsourcing. They have been campaigning to be in-housed since 2019, and are horrified to see the university throw their jobs away so callously during a cost of living crisis.
UCL staff and students can expect to see our working and living conditions get much dirtier. UCL and Sodexo’s proposals claim they will “reduce the frequency of core cleaning” by “removing unnecessary daily visits”. These proposals raise serious health and safety issues for a campus already struggling to be kept clean: in a recent Estates Services Satisfaction Survey, “only 22% of users were very satisfied with cleanliness.”
UCL claims they are making these changes for financial reasons. Yet their latest accounts show they are meeting financial targets, as they spend millions on bicentennial projects. UCL has no need to make such sweeping cuts to cleaners' livelihoods, whilst paying a premium to maintain Sodexo’s massive profit margins.
IWGB members working as cleaners at UCL have voted to ballot for strike action and to hold demonstrations to combat this senseless decision, but we need your help to make sure that outsourced staff retain their jobs.
Donate to the fighting fund now, and support cleaners striking to protect their jobs!
