After 20 years on campus, Clements Coffee on the Queen's University Belfast has announced they are shutting down all operations on May 15th, with workers being directed to the Department of the Economy’s Redundancy Payments Service. In essence, instructing workers to go to the taxpayer for money owed to them by a private employer. On top of this, workers with zero hour contracts, the vast majority of staff, have been informed that they are “casual, as-required” and therefore not considered employees.
This attempt to categorise staff, many of whom have been working regular shift patterns for years as baristas, chefs, and kitchen assistants, is an attempt by the company to deflect from their responsibilities to engage in genuine collective consultation over these proposed redundancies.
Staff are angry at how they have been treated and ignored after years of service and Unite the Union has organised and pushed for the company to come to the table to rethink how they are handling this situation, but hopes are low that such basic decency will be shown.
There is another option. Queens University, as both the landlord but also as the institution that relies on the cafe service both to feed and caffinate students and staff, and to cater hundreds of events each year, could step in...
As a bare minimum a requirement could be made to that all current contracts be honoured by a new operator. Even better QUB could take the catering staff in-house. That would mean permanent, stable, and secure union jobs for the workers and food and drinks service whose primary function is to serve the academic community rather than to line the profits of some external boss.
Last Wednesday, about 100 Clements workers, QUB students and staff, other on-campus trade unions such as NIPSA all gathered outside the Lanyon Gates to demand action from Queens to end this disgraceful situation. The ball is in their court, but workers will only continue to grow the pressure.