Posts Tagged ‘cleaners’

Students campaigning for the Living Wage to be paid in universities are stepping up their efforts to target party leaders, while Gordon Brown has revealed that he campaigned for “decent pay” for cleaners while at university.

The group London Citizens have been working with students and sabbatical officers at several University of London colleges to pressure the university to ensure all cleaners are paid a ‘London Living Wage’ of at least £7.60 per hour. They say this figure – £1.87 above the National Minimum Wage – is the minimum needed to live with dignity in an expensive city like London.

Several colleges including Queen Mary, LSE, Birkbeck and SOAS already pay the London Living Wage (LLW) to cleaners, and the University of London Union (ULU) recently signed a new contract to pay its cleaning staff the LLW.

But many colleges – including UCL, Kings and the Institute of Education do not pay the LLW to cleaners, which campaigners hope to change.

The Prime Minister answered students’ questions on the website The Student Room, and recalled his involvement in campaigns to oppose apartheid and increase cleaners’ pay.

“The thing I’m proudest of as a student journalist was the campaign I led to get the University to disinvest from apartheid South Africa. It was a tough fight, but we won it, and it meant a lot to me to be able to talk with Nelson Mandela years later.

“I also got involved in the campaign for the cleaners to get decent pay and became the second student to be elected Rector, chairing the governing body of Edinburgh University”.

Mazdak Alizadeh, vice-president of ULU, told the BBC last week that the LLW is “a bare minimum.”

“It’s a figure that represents the reality of living in London – rather than living and working in poverty,” he said.

Alizadeh and London Citizens will have an opportunity to press party leaders on the living wage at a national assembly on May 3rd; days before the election. The Labour party have made it already made it a central tenet of their manifesto.

Cameron will answer question on The Student Room website this week. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg revealed on the site that he “wasn’t into student politics” while at university, and instead had interests ranging from acting to transcendental meditation.

At least 40 students are occupying SOAS University in protest against the deportation of cleaning staff, which they claim is an attempt to exact revenge for recent trade union activity. Read the rest of this entry »

 The plight of cleaners struggling to make ends meet at University of London colleges looks set to continue, with Birkbeck College likely to decline to pay cleaners the wages they need to get by in the capital.

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