Letter sent to NPL by Latin American Workers Association

Forward Union · #1 6th October 2008, 11:14

Dear Director

We wish to express our deep concern and indeed disgust at last week’s sacking of 5 Latin American cleaners working at National Physical Laboratory for Amey Business Services, for the 'crime' of being migrant workers engaged in legitimate trade union activity, following the stress and uncertainty of a near 3 month suspension for alerting NPL staff to a number of abuses being committed by Amey management.

These abuses related to: health and safety; failure to consult over contractual changes; failure to fulfil pledges to replace staff (there are now 10 of the original 36 left), and thereby attempt to get rid of the London Living Wage (approved by the Mayor) which the original cleaning workforce had previously earned and pay them instead the minimum wage. Indeed of the skeleton staff remaining almost half are temporary staff earning the minimum wage.

We believe that NPL has a responsibility as a socially responsible governmental body to ensure that the businesses it outsources work to adhere to minimum standards when it comes to ethics and basic human and employment rights. These are demands a number of statutory bodies, such as local councils, are nowadays placing on cleaning companies, due to overwhelming evidence of abuses in this industry, as evidenced by the recent report on Commission on Vulnerable Workers and the measures the government is now taking as a result of this report.

It is not enough, therefore, for NPL to simply tell concerned members of the public, community organisations and trade unionists that the complaints should be directed at Amey.

This situation has already caused considerable concern in the Latin American community in London and the recent protest at the Institute of Directors/Nanofinance seminar has been covered by various community media. Indeed the community had barely recovered from the traumatic and totally avoidable immigration raid at NPL premises last year, which itself damaged community relations. We were however please that NPL staff attending Nanofinance took a few minutes to express to us personally their concenr at the cleaners's ituation, especially given that one of the reasons leading up to the sackings was that a cleaner was did not enter a lab which had the 'red' sign prohibiting entry, which raises serious health and safety issues.

We would therefore urge you to intervene as a matter of urgency in the face of Amey’s out-of-control site management and instruct them to reinstate the sacked workers. We believe that this should have been done much earlier in order to avoid the extreme situation at which we have arrived.

Meanwhile we will continue to highlight as visibly as possible what has happened at NPL and campaign until a just solution is arrived at.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Latin American Workers Association
Management Committee

Cc:
Vulnerable Workers Project

Latin American Workers' Association
c/o Unite-T&G, 218 Green Lanes, London N4 2BR

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