IWGB Guest Speaker for the AGM & for an evening event on 13th February 2019

Jordi Lopez-Botey (caseworker and campaigner for IWGB London) will be our Guest Speaker at the AGM (Wed 13th Feb 1-3pm in LR1 Arts, with free lunch from 12.30pm outside the room). You are entitled to 2 hours of paid time off to attend – please do come!

As Jordi will be on campus the entire day, we will also be holding an event at 5pm in 219 Law Building on Wed 13th Feb, to learn from his experience, think about how unions on other campuses work jointly with students and other groups, what we can do bring back the outsourced staff in the Edgbaston Park Hotel in-house (so that they are all employed directly by the University of Birmingham), and how to campaign for Living Wage Accreditation (among other things). We note that management in the Hotel are refusing to recognise unions for the new staff in the Hotel – clearly a classic tactic to separate us and to reduce our collective power. All staff and students are welcome to the 5pm event – please invite anyone you know.

IWGB is a small but very active trade union in London. Some of their campaigns have been covered in the media – i.e. recently, Deliveroo and Uber IWGB members went on strike, and took the companies to court. In the Higher Education Sector, IWGB have supported workers on particularly precarious contracts (outsourced and on low pay). At the moment, they are boycotting the University of London’s Senate House until all staff are brought back in-house. https://iwgb.org.uk/en/boycottsenatehouse This campaign that is publicly supported, among others, by Labour’s very own John McDonnell.