Despite his repeated claims that the ‘right to protest, debate, and challenging ideas is fundamental to our role as a university’, the President and Provost Michael Spence appears to have no interest in extending the freedom of speech to UCL’s over 200 outsourced security workers.
Malvika Murkumbi Investigations Editor
While the Provost has begrudgingly agreed to ‘disagree well’ with directly employed UCL staff who expressed solidarity with pro-Palestine student protesters on campus, outsourced security workers have been the target of intimidation by UCL management and its subcontractor Bidvest Noonan for doing the same, even when they are off-duty.
Outsourced workers have long suffered mistreatment from management at UCL. In an interview with The Cheese Grater, the Independent Workers’ Union (IWGB) universities branch organiser Charles Aprile explained that security staff are often forced to ‘fight and protest every single issue just to have a dialogue with management’ for issues that could have been an email in most workplaces. At London’s Global University, however, they ‘have to kick up a lot of fuss to get very simple things sorted.’
A Brief History of Outsourcing at UCL
Outsourcing is the practice of hiring staff, typically in cleaning, catering, portering, and security, through external subcontractors. It is widely regarded by labour rights activists as exploitative by creating a workplace in which workers are not treated as equals.
Currently, outsourced support staff at UCL are scattered across multiple outsourcing agencies: Sodexo for cleaning, Bidvest Noonan for security, and CH&CO for catering. Because they are not directly employed by the University, outsourced staff have long suffered mistreatment and intimidation from management at UCL and their respective agencies (CG passim).
Despite UCL’s commitment to offering equal pay and benefits in 2019, The Cheese Grater understands that outsourced staff often find themselves having to fight their bosses on basic issues such as withheld pay. As recently as July, a number of security officers reportedly lost hundreds of holiday hours as a result of gross miscalculations by Bidvest Noonan.
Outsourcing also does wonders for union-busting purposes. UCL and Bidvest Noonan have continually refused to recognise the IWGB – the trade union that represents about three-quarters of UCL’s security staff – on the grounds that it already recognises Unison for the purposes of collective bargaining. This is unlikely to change soon after the High Court rejected the IWGB’s bid to be recognised by the federal University of London in 2021.
This continual mistreatment has left a large number of outsourced workers feeling like they exist at the bottom of a two-tier system, where they are denied rights that their directly employed colleagues are granted. UCL and Bidvest’s latest attempts at suppressing their right to free speech are a testament to this suspicion.
Unfriendly Reminder
Over the summer, Bidvest management has taken active steps to prohibit its staff from expressing any form of solidarity with the student movement. In an email addressed to all UCL security staff seen by The Cheese Grater, Bidvest’s Account Director Dominic Woodley said, ‘It has come to my attention that some members of the security staff are interested in joining the protesters at the encampment for Friday prayers. I would like to remind you that this would be wholly inappropriate and could be seen as supporting/participating in the protest.’ He included a not-so-friendly reminder that security staff ‘must remain neutral’ (in all caps, bold, and underlined) and keep ‘personal views and opinion’ to themselves. Notably, he added, ‘This includes officers who are on break or off duty.’
In the same email, Woodley was also kind enough to include a bulleted list of eight ‘other acts that are deemed inappropriate’, including ‘being over friendly’ to student protesters, ‘making comments to or about the protest or members of the protest’, ‘talking to press’ (whoops), and even ‘commenting and giving opinions on the protest on social media’.
Aprile tells us that ‘Security guards have found that even by greeting people, shaking hands, smiling at people, they’ve been told off by management for doing those kinds of things, or been threatened with disciplinary action, been sent written reminders, all-staff reminders about not speaking to the students.’ He was also keen to point out the glaring double standard in treatment: ‘[Directly employed staff] are able to go out when they’re able to go out when they’re off duty, speak to people, participate in the encampment, go to the teach-outs, but the people in security have been told explicitly that they cannot do that.’
Union Buster
In addition to explicitly restricting their freedom of speech, Bidvest management has simultaneously adopted a series of intimidation tactics to further undermine solidarity in its outsourced workforce. Among them is the practice of hiring lower-paid temporary staff (‘agency workers’) to deal with protesters.
The practice of hiring agency workers is almost twice as exploitative because they are often paid significantly less than permanent staff, enjoy little to no benefits and, owing to their precarious immigration status, are much less willing to speak out or organise collectively. One security staff member, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us that ‘Luckily for us [subcontracted workers], we are unionised… we can protest against stuff. But unfortunately for [agency workers], they can’t. A lot of them are very sad… They really hate doing it and hate even being there, but they have no choice.’
One worrying benefit to commercialisation is that you suddenly become an expert in union busting. When security staff went on strike in October 2022, the University hired agency workers to replace striking staff, a move jointly condemned by the UCU and the IWGB as ‘an intimidatory strike-breaking tactic’ and ‘a violation of UCL’s commitment to parity on account of these workers receiving lower rates of pay.’
It is also worth noting that the High Court had recently ruled the previous government’s decision to allow agency workers to cover strikes to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Unfortunately, that has not stopped London’s Global University, which avoided a legal challenge by refusing to recognise the IWGB for the purposes of collective bargaining.
The Root of All Evils
UCL has thus far distanced itself from labour disputes with outsourced staff by claiming that it did not employ them directly. Be that as it may, the Provost can hardly outsource his moral obligation to treat these support staff as human beings worthy of equal dignity and respect. If Spence is serious about the University’s commitment to the freedom of speech, then he has a responsibility to ensure that this right is extended to its outsourced support staff – without whom the University will cease to function – by intervening when its subcontractors take repressive measures against its workforce.
Ultimately, Bidvest’s continued mistreatment of its staff and UCL’s wilful ignorance is testament to the fact that outsourcing is a fundamentally exploitative labour practice. As Aprile aptly summarised, ‘The response to this has shown this two-tier system that is created when you have a private company operating in a public institution.’ He added, ‘There’s that two-tier system in terms of people’s freedom of speech and expression, which manifests itself with the continued existence of outsourcing.’
Remember Who the Real Enemy Is
Towards the end of our interview, the anonymous security staffer was keen to stress the value of student-staff solidarity, telling us that ‘Without student support, we wouldn’t have got [pay] parity here at UCL. And without student support, we will not get [employed] in-house’. The staffer was particularly disheartened to see that many student protesters have been led to believe that security staff are hostile against them. ‘It’s just because our hands are so tied, we can’t directly help them or protest for them ourselves’, but notes that both trade unions representing security workers, the IWGB and Unison, support the student protests.
Make no mistake that Bidvest and UCL are playing divide and conquer to disrupt student-staff solidarity by pitching students against an exploited workforce. The least we can do is to remember who the real enemy is.
A spokesperson for UCL responded with the following comment:
‘Our security staff are highly valued and respected members of our diverse community, fulfilling essential roles on which we all depend.
‘This includes helping us to meet our legal duty and commitment to promote freedom of speech within the law, while ensuring the safety and security of our community and enabling our education and research activity to continue. Our security staff need to be seen to be impartial in order to carry out this vital role.
‘The pay and key conditions of our outsourced security staff are the same as those of their directly employed colleagues.’
This article appeared in CG 88