City cleaners start to win a living wage

More than 3,000 cleaners, many of them working for the City's financial giants, have won better pay and conditions over the past year, as a result of the Living Wage campaign highlighted by The Observer

Firms including Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have agreed to ensure their cleaners are paid at least the £7.20 an hour London Living Wage, after being targeted by a coalition of trades unions, church leaders and local activists.

'People now know who the cleaners are; the campaign's helped to bring them out of the shadows,' says a spokesman for Unite, the union that has helped to organise a series of noisy protests, including a sit-in at Goldman Sachs.

Many City firms contract out cleaning and other services to companies such as ISS, Mitie and OCS. Their initial response to the protests was often to deny responsibility for what the staff employed by the contractors were paid, but the Living Wage Campaign has persuaded many to stipulate a minimum wage when they tender for services.

Contract cleaning firms themselves have often welcomed the public pressure exerted on City institutions. 'The cleaning contractors are in a piggy-in-the- middle position, because they can only pay what the client is prepared to allow for,' says Andrew Large, director-general of the Cleaning and Support Services Association (CSSA), which represents many of the companies involved.

He says higher pay, together with the other conditions demanded by campaigners, including paid holiday, sick leave and pension rights, help cleaning firms attract and retain better staff: 'When you pay a bit more, you get people who are interested in a career, rather than just a job. You get people who are more committed.' Barclays, an early target of the campaign, agreed to offer its Canary Wharf staff the living wage in 2004 and found that turnover and absenteeism among cleaners fell sharply.

According to the CSSA's survey, the proportion of the national cleaning workforce on the living wage has risen from 4 to 9 per cent over the past 12 months. 'The challenge for us was always to change the market,' says Neil Jameson of community organisation London Citizens, one of the prime movers in the campaign.

However, thousands of cleaners still remain out of the reach of the Living Wage Campaign, and the Unite spokesperson says there will be more protests in the new year. 'We're in this for the long haul. We have to get to all the employers who are still not treating their cleaners with the respect we think they deserve.'

One contractor that has still not agreed to pay the living wage is MacLellan, which employs Emmanuel Osinsanya, a 60-year-old who has cleaned the outside of the iconic Lloyd's insurance building for 16 years. Osinsanya told The Observer this year that he has had to take a second job as a security guard overnight so that he can send money home to his children in Nigeria. 'It's very hard. It's telling on me, but I can't help it,' he said. 'Not all of us can be pen-pushers.'

The City was only the latest front in a long-running campaign, which was launched at a mass meeting in Walthamstow town hall in 2000. Inspired by the success of similar action in US cities, the churches and community groups involved began by focusing on the cleaners in hospitals. They have since won living-wage agreements for the support staff in several of London's universities, including the LSE, where students supported the campaign, and for workers at the 2012 Olympics.

The next front, Jameson says, will be the hospitality industry, including hotels, whose cleaners are often not unionised, and on payment by piece-rates, instead of an hourly wage. London Citizens is also training its fire on cultural institutions, including Tate Modern. After a mass carol-singing protest on 14 December, when around 400 people gathered around the giant crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall - a work of art created by Doris Salcedo - the management agreed to pay cleaners the living wage.