The Cleaners Who Started Their Own Union

From a Campus Dispute to a National Presence

The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain — the IWGB — was not a breakaway faction from an existing union. It emerged in 2012 from a dispute among outsourced Latin American cleaners employed by contractors working on behalf of the University of London. Those workers had been members of Unite, one of Britain's largest unions, but felt their concerns were not being adequately represented. A core group organised separately, won recognition for their own branch, and then formalised that branch as a standalone institution. The IWGB registered as an independent trade union with the Certification Officer, the statutory body that maintains the official list of UK trade unions.

The founding circumstance — workers engaged by a contractor, cleaning a building owned by an institution that had formally nothing to do with their employment contract — anticipated almost everything that would follow. Outsourcing, fragmented supply chains, and the legal fiction that an end-client bears no responsibility for the conditions of the people serving it: these were not new problems in 2012, but the older unions had settled into structures that matched the twentieth-century industrial pattern, where workers were direct employees of large, stable enterprises. When the enterprise is a university and the workers belong to a contractor that itself changes whenever a new tender is won, that settlement leaves a gap.

Campaigns and the Question of Who Is the Employer

The IWGB's subsequent campaign history has been shaped by the legal question of who bears the obligations of employment when work is mediated through multiple contracting layers or through a digital platform. After its founding campaign at the University of London — which secured improved pay and terms for cleaners and other outsourced staff — the union expanded into new sectors where the same structural ambiguity appeared in sharper form.

Among the most consequential was its work with courier and delivery riders, particularly those using cycle or motorcycle. These workers were typically engaged as self-employed independent contractors, which meant they were outside the scope of statutory employment protections for minimum wage, holiday pay, and working time. The IWGB took this argument to employment tribunals, pressing for recognition that its members held worker status — the intermediate legal category in UK employment law that sits between employee and independent contractor, and that carries a more limited but meaningful set of statutory rights. The broader category of worker status, and the conditions under which it is conferred, became central to several of the most significant UK employment judgments of the 2010s.

The union also challenged the refusal of platform companies to engage in collective bargaining. In 2017, the IWGB applied for statutory trade union recognition from a cycle courier company — a step that, if granted, would legally require the company to bargain with the union. That application, and the legal disputes it generated, became a test case for whether collective bargaining rights could reach into the gig economy at all.

A Different Kind of Institution

What distinguishes the IWGB from older general unions is not only its membership but its architecture. It was built sector by sector, campaign by campaign, by workers who were not previously unionised and who came to collective action without the inherited workplace culture that supports it in industries with longer union histories. Its branches have covered foster-care workers, security guards, cleaners, and yoga instructors alongside the delivery workers who generated its national profile.

This approach carries a real constraint: without the financial reserves of larger federations, and without the dues base that long-established membership provides, the IWGB has depended on legal action and public pressure as organising tools in a way that a more resource-rich union might not. The Certification Officer's register records it as a small independent union by most conventional measures. But the measure that matters to its membership is different: whether the institution can do, in practice, what the Employment Rights Act 1996 and the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 say a recognised union can do. On that question, the IWGB has an answer that neither the statute nor the older movement fully anticipated.