Disappointing news to start with – we were also hoping to arrange a hustings, and wrote to UCU suggesting this – frustratingly, though, we were told that their Regional officials wouldn’t allow this. The idea was to allow all sides to put their case at a special All-Staff Meeting…ho hum, maybe next time!

On a more positive note, thanks to everyone who has helped out so far with the campaign – it has been great to have so much support, and fantastic to see all the fliers we handed out at the branch meeting finding their way around Stewart and Senate House.

Thanks as well for helping on the stall on Monday – it was the first time we’ve ever had an official presence inside Senate House, and we got a really positive response, even from the people from Finance who got inadvertently flyered every time they went to make a cup of tea. Apologies…

We’ve also been trying to get round all the departments and chat to people, in the process finding bits of the building that we never even knew existed. If we’ve not been round and you think it would be good for people in your section to meet the candidates drop Danny (danny.millum@sas.ac.uk) or Catherine (catherine.morrissey@london.ac.uk) a line…

There will be more stalls / flyering next week, and please do spread the word and help support our candidates!

DON’T FORGET VOTING BEGINS MONDAY 7 MARCH!

We’ve just finished our Saturday branch meeting – as you can see from the pictures, the IWGB office was pretty full today!

We had about 25 people at yesterday’s meeting as well, so we just wanted to thank everyone for participating – the union is only as strong as its members, and the more active people we have, the more we can achieve!

Si trabajas como limpiador/a, ayúdanos en nuestra labor de visibilizar las condiciones de trabajo en el área de la limpieza completando esta encuesta.

Por favor, reenvía este correo a tus colegas.

Proyecto de la University of East London y CLAUK.
Todas las respuestas se mantendrán anónimas.
Para más información visite www.clauk.org.uk

Please come to the branch meeting this Friday, 19 February at 12.30 in room 246 (or at 1pm on Saturday at the union office if you can’t make it).

As well as the pay campaign and the University outsourced contracts, we will be discussing the elections for negotiating reps for the ICE forum.

We really need help from members to try and get the IWGB slate elected – Danny Millum, Catherine Morrissey and Damien Short will be standing in the Levels 7-10 category, and Chris Josiffe and Rebecca Dooley are our Levels 1-6 category candidates.

Check out our election website (https://iceforum2016.wordpress.com/) and please get in touch with Danny (danny.millum@sas.ac.uk) if you can help with anything or need more info!

BREAKING NEWS! The crowdfunding site for Liliana Almanza, a Colombian cleaner at the University of London who was harrassed, insulted, denied trade union rights, and forced to continue to do work which caused her physical pain despite having a disability, has now gone live! Please chuck in a few quid to help this case progress to tribunal and help Liliana to achieve justice!

https://www.crowdjustice.co.uk/case/liliana/

Following a meeting last week with union reps from SOAS, UCL, LSHTM, Birkbeck and IoE, an open meeting of all Bloomsbury union members has been called for Tuesday 23 February.

The invitation in full is below – please let us know if you can make it!

Dear Bloomsbury trade union member

Some of us have been discussing this year’s pay claim and we feel it would be good if as many people as possible were able to take an active role in discussing and campaigning for a decent pay rise from an early stage. We’d like to think about ways we could put pressure on our university managements, alongside all the things we do to feed into our unions’ claims on a national level. This isn’t about local bargaining but about convincing our institutions that it’s in their interests to argue on a national level for a higher pay settlement – because their workers need it, are demanding it, and are willing to fight for it. To this end we’d like to invite you to an open meeting on;

Tuesday 23^rd February from 1 to 2 in the SSRU Seminar Room, 18 Woburn Square.

The meeting will give a chance for people to discuss what they’d like to see from a claim, and how they think we could fight for it. We want everyone to have a chance to participate, so it’d be great if you could extend the invitation to your members/anyone else you think might be interested.

We’ll also have an update from Sandy Nicoll (UNISON Higher Education Service Group Executive member) on the progress of the national HE pay negotiations.

As well as discussing pay the meeting will also hear from some of the other campaigns active in Bloomsbury right now – outsourced workers at SOAS fighting to be brought in house, students at UCL on rent strike against high housing costs, and staff at UCL for their demand for increased London weighting to match other institutions.

Hope to see you there. Any questions email danny.millum@sas.ac.uk or catherine.morrrissey@london.ac.uk.

The IWGB submitted Freedom of Information request to the University for full details of the Vice-Chancellor’s salary for the past 20 years and the results were interesting to say the least.

We discovered that the post of Vice-Chancellor has been a part-time position since the early 1990s and certainly pays more than your average part-time job!

The current Vice-Chancellor, Sir Adrian Smith, received a salary of a whopping £172k in 2015. The salary for the post has been over £100k since 2002. Nice work if you can get it eh?

For the full list of salaries from 1995-2015, please click here.

Check out this article on employment in the Financial Times which features University of London Branch Chair Maritza Castillo Calle.