Posts Tagged ‘living wage’

Over 400 people have signed a petition to pay cleaners at UCL the London Living Wage (LLW) of £7.60 an hour.

Currently, contracted cleaners at UCL only receive the minimum hourly wage of £5.80, which organisers of the campaign argue “is simply not enough to survive in London.”

Five University of London colleges now pay the LLW to their cleaners; LSE, SOAS, Birkbeck, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary. KCL has finally held talks with London Citizens, a living wage charity, after 14 months of requests;  a sign that they may be considering paying the LLW to all staff. UCL, however, says it has “no plans to join the London Living Wage campaign,” and has argued that it already pays its own staff above the living wage, but not the cleaners, as they are employed by a contracted company.

The petition, currently with 440 signatories, is aimed at UCL’s president and provost, Malcolm Grant – one of the best paid university leaders in the UK. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, Grant was paid was paid £404,742, including pension and benefits, for the 2008-09 academic year. Mazdak Alizadeh, ULU’s vice president, commented: “It can’t be justified to pay so much at the top when people who work for you are struggling to feed their families.”

Many cleaners at University of London colleges are migrants; the Hands Off My Workmate campaign, which promotes migrant workers’ rights, have published a letter in the Guardian which reiterates the fact that “Britain has benefitted in every way from migrants.”

One of the signatories of the letter is Greg Brown, organiser of the UCL Living Wage Campaign: “Cleaners would have to work over 77 years to earn Michael Grant’s salary – 6 days a week on normal wages. UCL obviously have no enthusiasm to confront this issue, which is a significant concern to a large number of students and staff.”

A statement from Goldsmiths College said: “Goldsmiths pays its staff well above the London Living Wage – our minimum rate of pay for those we directly employ is currently £8.84 per hour. We are committed to ensuring that London Living Wage is also paid to staff employed by contractors, and will be ensuring that as contracts are renewed, this is included in the specification.”

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.

Campaigners for a ‘Living Wage’ at SOAS have hailed a decision by the School’s governing board to raise its cleaners’ wages as a victory – but have criticised a decision to continue outsourcing the service. Read the rest of this entry »