Paying cleaners a living wage is important

Posted on January 24, 2022 in Cleaning

As Britain begins to recovery from the pandemic, Peter Gray – Managing Director of cleaning and maintenance company Protech Property Solutions Ltd – emphasises that returning to ‘normal’ would be a disaster for cleaners who have long suffered low pay and exploitation in the sector.

The events of the past year have made crystal clear how much we, as a country, rely on key workers like cleaners. So, as the vaccines roll out and society looks to reopen, we must ensure the “new normal” doesn’t leave them behind. Fellow employers: the responsibility is in our hands. Low paid cleaners can’t afford to wait for the government to make the changes they need. It’s down to us. We must ensure all cleaners are paid a real Living Wage.

As recent research by Focus on Labour Exploitation has sadly highlighted, our industry is one of the worst when it comes to the abuse and exploitation of the people who work in it. 61% of the workers they surveyed reported that they had experienced issues with pay. These included: not being paid for all hours worked (31%); not being paid at all (15%); and being paid less than the minimum wage (6%).

It is shameful that cleaners are routinely treated so poorly. It always has been. But the pandemic has underlined that, while it is a profoundly undervalued profession, cleaning is critical to our social infrastructure and public health. If cleaners don’t clean, people get sick.

There’s no two ways about it: paying cleaners a living wage is the right thing to do. Cleaners make our hospitals, schools, supermarkets and offices safe for everybody else to use. It cannot be right that nearly two-thirds don’t earn enough to cover the cost of living. As new research by the Living Wage Foundation has shown, key workers paid below the Living Wage have missed out on an average of £900 since the pandemic began. That sum could have paid for a month of someone’s rent (based on the UK’s average of £725 per month), nearly four months of their food (averaging £56 per week), or ten months of bills for gas and electricity (£22.70 per week). Things need to change.

With the vaccine programme going forward at pace, much of the country is understandably anxious to return to normal. But for low paid workers, going back to normal would be a poor way for us to say ‘thank you’. Surely we can do better than this?

This year, as a part of our ongoing efforts to recognise the often unseen work that key workers like cleaners do day-in-day-out, we are talking with our teams on how we can improve not just their individual salary but working conditions as a whole.

After the second world war, they say there was a moment in which the welfare state became possible. This year there’s another one of those moments. This is the year to aspire higher, to have the biggest dreams about what could be done. Now is the time to eradicate low pay from our country – to lift millions of workers and their families out of poverty. Now is the time to start paying a real Living Wage.

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