Cleaners Are Human Too
Highly profitable companies barely pay cleaning staff a living wage - and of course no one is to blame. There's a cycle route along the old canals from Hackney to Canary Wharf.
There's a cycle route along the old canals from Hackney to Canary Wharf. It's a journey that takes you though several hundred years of London's history: the old stonework of the canal locks, the Victorian brick warehouses, the postwar housing estates, the derelict factories and then, finally, the gleaming, sparkling high-rise blocks of Canary Wharf. You pass from one world - rubbish-clogged locks, graffiti, smashed glass, overgrown buddleia - to another where all is immaculate, every surface polished, swept and cleaned.
Just before 9pm, the small army of people responsible for this cleanliness arrive in Canary Wharf. They come by bus, but they are making a similar journey from Hackney and other desperately poor boroughs, and they provide a cheap, plentiful supply of labour. From its inception, Canary Wharf has been emblematic of Britain's growing inequality: is there anywhere else in the country where huge wealth and poverty sit quite so closely together?
Canary Wharf has been organised in such a way as to screen out the poverty that surrounds it. By 9pm there are few office workers about, so the majority probably never even think about the people who clean their offices. The cleaners turning up for the night shift at Credit Suisse First Boston even use a different entrance. The two worlds sit side by side - just like in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy - and few find a subtle knife to cut a window between them.
That's what makes an event in the House of Commons tomorrow so intriguing. The East London Community Organisation (Telco) is pulling together the cleaners, the cleaning contractors and the banks that draw up the contracts, and challenging them to sign up to a code of practice that would give the cleaners a living wage, sick pay and a pension.
One of those planning to attend is Samuel, a trained pastor, who has been working as a cleaner at Canary Wharf for nearly four years. He does a night shift (9pm to 6am) five days a week, but although paid more than the minimum wage - getting about £5.50 an hour - the weekly take-home pay of around £180 isn't enough to support his four children. So he has another, better-paid cleaning job of three hours a day for the council, and his wife also has a cleaning job. A working week of 57-and-half hours meant he had to give up his computer course - he was simply too tired to concentrate. "They look at you like you're a nobody. It's disgusting. Everything is between the client and the contractor, and the real players of the game are sidelined," he says.
Samuel's predicament is not unusual. The image of booming London and the south-east conceals the staggering levels of poverty in inner London, where more than half of all children (53%) are being born into poverty, the highest proportion of any region in the UK, well ahead of the north-east on 37%. A sizeable proportion of the parents of these London children are in work - a job has not proved the solution to their poverty; rather it is the cause of it.
Samuel asks some tough questions. "If we all stayed away from cleaning, who would clean the offices? How would they cope with an unhygienic environment? If I cannot respond to the needs of my child because I earn small wages, will not my inability to fulfil my parental responsibility result in my child yielding to any available temptation to make money? I believe there is someone out there who is capable of taking decisions over our predicament. Will that someone rise up and take a stand for this just course?"
Samuel wants to know who is responsible, but this is the crux of it - no one takes responsibility. The banks say it's not their job to dictate to their contractors what they should pay their staff; the cleaning contractors say that it's the client who specifies the contract. If they increase wages, they will simply lose the contract.
Martyn Vesey, director-general of the Cleaning and Support Services Association, points out that his members (who employ more than 800,000 cleaners across the country) are in an extremely competitive market where profit margins are often below 5% gross and 80% of the invoice value is direct labour costs. He declares himself a convert to Telco's campaign: higher wages would reduce the chronically high staff turnover rate, but it's got to be the client who picks up the increased cost.
But that's not easy for the client, argues a City analyst interested in the campaign. How does a bank justify the extra £500,000 in better pay for cleaners to its shareholders? The corporate social responsibility (CSR) of which most banks now boast doesn't usually have such a high price tag, says the analyst. What the banks want is "low-lying fruit" - relatively cheap CSR with maximum impact. A donation to a well-known charity might qualify; better pay for 100 cleaners does not. The analyst adds that perhaps what's needed is government regulation to ensure a level playing field - a regional minimum wage that reflects the much higher living costs in London.
The government, however, is just as quick to pass the buck as everyone else. It's up to the market, it's nothing to do with us, intoned Tony Blair last week on another issue - jobs going offshore to India. Everyone ends up blaming the "market" as if it was some deus ex machina rather than the sum total of millions of our interactions.
So to go back to Samuel's question - who's going to take a stand? Well, one of his colleagues was in no doubt that it was a waste of any union's time even to try recruiting. A supply teacher who supplements his income with cleaning explained: "Eighty per cent of people employed here don't speak English properly. If I say I'm not going to do something, others will rush to do it. They're sycophants, they lick boots because they have to survive."
Market capitalism fragments responsibility into such tiny quantities that each individual - the banker, the contractor, the government minister - can plausibly explain away the impossibility of their taking action. (That's precisely the beauty of contracting out.) The net result of all those reasonable explanations is shocking: half the children you see on the streets of London are living in poverty. Nor can we salve our consciences that their parents' hard work will ease their futures; studies of social mobility published today by the Institute for Public Policy Research argue that the greater the degree of inequality in a country, the smaller the chances of improving your lot, and that mobility has significantly declined in recent decades.
Samuel's challenge is not going to go away. We will always need cleaners; they are not jobs that can ever go offshore. So when are we going to pay living wages to people who perform a crucial job? Without them, the brokers couldn't make their billions on the global financial markets; they'd be choking on their own rubbish.
Samuel is a pseudonym
Just before 9pm, the small army of people responsible for this cleanliness arrive in Canary Wharf. They come by bus, but they are making a similar journey from Hackney and other desperately poor boroughs, and they provide a cheap, plentiful supply of labour. From its inception, Canary Wharf has been emblematic of Britain's growing inequality: is there anywhere else in the country where huge wealth and poverty sit quite so closely together?
Canary Wharf has been organised in such a way as to screen out the poverty that surrounds it. By 9pm there are few office workers about, so the majority probably never even think about the people who clean their offices. The cleaners turning up for the night shift at Credit Suisse First Boston even use a different entrance. The two worlds sit side by side - just like in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy - and few find a subtle knife to cut a window between them.
That's what makes an event in the House of Commons tomorrow so intriguing. The East London Community Organisation (Telco) is pulling together the cleaners, the cleaning contractors and the banks that draw up the contracts, and challenging them to sign up to a code of practice that would give the cleaners a living wage, sick pay and a pension.
One of those planning to attend is Samuel, a trained pastor, who has been working as a cleaner at Canary Wharf for nearly four years. He does a night shift (9pm to 6am) five days a week, but although paid more than the minimum wage - getting about £5.50 an hour - the weekly take-home pay of around £180 isn't enough to support his four children. So he has another, better-paid cleaning job of three hours a day for the council, and his wife also has a cleaning job. A working week of 57-and-half hours meant he had to give up his computer course - he was simply too tired to concentrate. "They look at you like you're a nobody. It's disgusting. Everything is between the client and the contractor, and the real players of the game are sidelined," he says.
Samuel's predicament is not unusual. The image of booming London and the south-east conceals the staggering levels of poverty in inner London, where more than half of all children (53%) are being born into poverty, the highest proportion of any region in the UK, well ahead of the north-east on 37%. A sizeable proportion of the parents of these London children are in work - a job has not proved the solution to their poverty; rather it is the cause of it.
Samuel asks some tough questions. "If we all stayed away from cleaning, who would clean the offices? How would they cope with an unhygienic environment? If I cannot respond to the needs of my child because I earn small wages, will not my inability to fulfil my parental responsibility result in my child yielding to any available temptation to make money? I believe there is someone out there who is capable of taking decisions over our predicament. Will that someone rise up and take a stand for this just course?"
Samuel wants to know who is responsible, but this is the crux of it - no one takes responsibility. The banks say it's not their job to dictate to their contractors what they should pay their staff; the cleaning contractors say that it's the client who specifies the contract. If they increase wages, they will simply lose the contract.
Martyn Vesey, director-general of the Cleaning and Support Services Association, points out that his members (who employ more than 800,000 cleaners across the country) are in an extremely competitive market where profit margins are often below 5% gross and 80% of the invoice value is direct labour costs. He declares himself a convert to Telco's campaign: higher wages would reduce the chronically high staff turnover rate, but it's got to be the client who picks up the increased cost.
But that's not easy for the client, argues a City analyst interested in the campaign. How does a bank justify the extra £500,000 in better pay for cleaners to its shareholders? The corporate social responsibility (CSR) of which most banks now boast doesn't usually have such a high price tag, says the analyst. What the banks want is "low-lying fruit" - relatively cheap CSR with maximum impact. A donation to a well-known charity might qualify; better pay for 100 cleaners does not. The analyst adds that perhaps what's needed is government regulation to ensure a level playing field - a regional minimum wage that reflects the much higher living costs in London.
The government, however, is just as quick to pass the buck as everyone else. It's up to the market, it's nothing to do with us, intoned Tony Blair last week on another issue - jobs going offshore to India. Everyone ends up blaming the "market" as if it was some deus ex machina rather than the sum total of millions of our interactions.
So to go back to Samuel's question - who's going to take a stand? Well, one of his colleagues was in no doubt that it was a waste of any union's time even to try recruiting. A supply teacher who supplements his income with cleaning explained: "Eighty per cent of people employed here don't speak English properly. If I say I'm not going to do something, others will rush to do it. They're sycophants, they lick boots because they have to survive."
Market capitalism fragments responsibility into such tiny quantities that each individual - the banker, the contractor, the government minister - can plausibly explain away the impossibility of their taking action. (That's precisely the beauty of contracting out.) The net result of all those reasonable explanations is shocking: half the children you see on the streets of London are living in poverty. Nor can we salve our consciences that their parents' hard work will ease their futures; studies of social mobility published today by the Institute for Public Policy Research argue that the greater the degree of inequality in a country, the smaller the chances of improving your lot, and that mobility has significantly declined in recent decades.
Samuel's challenge is not going to go away. We will always need cleaners; they are not jobs that can ever go offshore. So when are we going to pay living wages to people who perform a crucial job? Without them, the brokers couldn't make their billions on the global financial markets; they'd be choking on their own rubbish.
Samuel is a pseudonym
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