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Private Eye article highlights the damaging effects of outsourcing on staff working at the University of Birmingham and its subsidiary company Edgbaston Park Hotel

We are concerned about the way in which senior managers at both the University of Birmingham and at its subsidiary company, Edgbaston Park Hotel are treating staff. Their refusal to meaningfully negotiate with the unions and the constant erosion of pay, working conditions, and equality on campus are having a devastating and very real impact upon everyone: staff, students, the wider community, and higher education as a sector. They are ultimately also damaging the reputation of the workplace we all strive to improve.

The effects of outsourcing have been captured well in Private Eye’s latest issue, published on the 21st of August 2019. The University of Birmingham is, unsurprisingly, yet again in the spotlight. The absurdity of low pay at the bottom of the pay scale, the unnecessary outsourcing of hospitality and accommodation to Edgbaston Park Hotel (a wholly-owned subsidiary company of the University), the embarrassing inequality, the conspicuous wealth at the top, the creation of the two-tier workforce on campus, and future strikes are presented very neatly in a short but concise article on page 38.

To read more about the working conditions at the Edgbaston Park Hotel and our efforts to end outsourcing on campus, please visit this page: https://uobunison.org.uk/category/edgbaston-park-hotel

When ‘The Hotel’ celebrates successes and publishes tweets like the one below, we wonder: Are ‘they’ the University of Birmingham, or the Edgbaston Park Hotel? They always say that they are separate entities, hence the decision to pay workers £8.21/hour (instead of the minimum of £9/hour that all UoB employees get) and the refusal to recognise trade unions for new staff.

We also recall two other articles about UoB published in the Private Eye.

In November 2018, an article covered Birmingham UCU’s boycotting of the Dubai campus.

In 2012, the University of Birmingham’s VC (again, David Eastwood) closed the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity. Read below to see what happened at a swanky dinner he attended..

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