Cleaners at UCL are striking back against bosses who treat them as disposable.

IWGB union members at the central London university were on the picket lines on Thursday morning, holding a noisy lunchtime rally with other trade unionists and student supporters.

The workers are outsourced to private company Sodexo which wants to make 143 cleaners redundant. Many of them are on short term contracts and fear that they won’t get redundancy pay if they lose their jobs.

The strikers, who are mostly migrant workers and are already on poverty wages, say they are discriminated against. They face early morning starts and gruelling workloads that they say will only get worse if the cuts go ahead.

Cleaner Pedro said, “They give you five minutes to clean one shower. We are always sick. And we know why, they give us more work than we are supposed to do. Now it’s going to be even more tough.”

In one student hall of residence, students pay up to £347.62 per week in rent but there aren’t enough cleaners to keep the place tidy. And last year there were over 200 reports of mould in UCL halls.

IWGB general secretary Henry Chango-Lopez told Socialist Worker that the strike aimed to bring the exploitation faced by cleaners into the open…