Low-paid contract cleaners are working harder for less as employers cut wages in a bid to remain competitive while pressure to cut corners has led to poor standards of hygiene in some of Victoria’s public places. mojo reports on the dirty face of contract cleaning.
By EMMA KELLY
VICTORIAN casual shopping centre cleaner David* describes his work as “a struggle”. On top of a heavy workload, his pay was recently cut by 21 per cent.
David, who migrated from Sri Lanka four years ago, said a change of cleaning contractors at his shopping centre resulted in his Saturday casual pay rate dropping by $7 per hour.
“When it was the other company I got $33 dollars. Now the company has changed I get $26 an hour,” he said.
David said he worked eight-hour shifts. The change in contractors has resulted in his pay dropping by about $56 per shift.
Aside from pay, the cleaner said the demands of the workload and a shortage of equipment were also major issues in the industry.
“It can be a struggle to finish work,” he said. “The workload is too big. There’s not enough equipment to clean the items which makes it hard for us...There’s not enough chemicals and they’re not maintaining the machines properly.”
David is one of many cleaners in Australia whose pay and working conditions have been adversely affected by the use of contracts in the cleaning industry. All perfectly legal – but a threat to the ability of workers to survive financially and to standards in hygiene in the places they clean.
Disputes
Recent media reports have drawn attention to disputes between cleaning contractors and their cleaners in regard to pay and working conditions.
Spotless, an international services contractor, received recent media attention following the Walk for Cleaners on March 28. Spotless-employed shopping centre cleaners, represented by the United Voice union, walked 15 kilometres from Chadstone Shopping Centre to the Melbourne CBD to draw attention to the distances they are required to walk during shifts.
This followed a series of strikes by Spotless-employed shopping centre cleaners in demand of better pay and working conditions in early March this year and mid-December, 2011.
In a statement, Spotless said that it “continues to abide by the umpire’s rules”.
The company, which follows the Cleaning Services Award 2010 – the legal document outlining minimum wage, penalties and conditions in the cleaning industry – said it expected there would be a wage increase this year as part of an annual review of the award.
“Spotless relies on having qualified and adequately remunerated employees and will immediately pass on future award increases to all cleaners including those working in shopping centres,” the statement said.
Crisis
The dispute only scratches the surface of a much wider crisis in the industry, which critics say has been caused by the predominant use of contracts.
They have argued that many Australian cleaning contractors are lowering or avoiding minimum pay and working conditions in a race-to-the-bottom to secure cleaning contracts, resulting in substandard pay and working conditions for cleaners.
Low Pay, Compressed Schedules and High Work Intensity: A Study of Contract Cleaners in Australia, by RMIT University’s Iain Campbell and Manu Peeters, described the contract system as involving a manager or owner of a site releasing a tender outlining the cleaning services needed. Contract cleaning companies then competed to win the tender.
“The competition is fierce and the successful bidder will usually be the one offering the lowest price,” the report found.
Monash University's Professor Anthony Forsyth said most cleaners – the majority employed by contractors – were subject to minimum award employment conditions. The Cleaning Services Award 2010 base rate is $16.57 per hour.
“Mining, transport and so on get above award pay and conditions through negotiating or having their union negotiate enterprise agreements on their behalf,” he said.
“That doesn’t happen a lot in the cleaning industry so a lot of these workers are stuck, for want of a better term, on minimum award conditions and have little bargaining power.”
Prof Forsyth, director of the Workplace and Corporate Law Research Group, said the issue with wages was whether they enabled cleaning employees to lead a decent life.
“I guess I wouldn’t like to try and support a family on those kinds of wages. That’s what a lot of these people probably have to do,” he said.
“We do have processes in place under Australian law...that are meant to ensure that minimum award wages and conditions are reviewed at regular intervals. There’s actually a process going on in Fair Work Australia for that at the moment and there’s an annual wage review.
“We probably do provide fairly good minimum employment wages and conditions compared to some other industrialised countries.”
He said migrant workers, including those from a non-English-speaking background, may be more easily exploited by employers or contractors.
“That makes it more likely that there’s going to be lower limited awareness, not just of award entitlements but employment rights generally,” he said.
“I think if there are concerns or areas where people might not have the same level of ability to represent themselves in the workplace or inclination to join unions, then the cleaning industry is one where that is certainly higher than in a lot of other industries.”
Subcontracting
A cleaning industry representative, who did not wish to be named, said competition between contractors was “an extreme problem in the industry”, resulting in “a culture of subcontracting” and the exploitation of cleaners.
“Until the advent of John Howard's WorkChoices, subcontracting was never really thought much of in the cleaning industry because it was presumed that the main contractor would lose control and it would add to not detract from his costs,” he said.
The industry representative said individual workplace agreements were introduced too late to prevent subcontracting.
He said most contractors subcontracted at least part of their work to relieve the burden of worker’s compensation, payroll tax, superannuation and long service leave.
“What they did was create an illegal system where subcontractors were taking up work of previously employed people and the contractors paying them at rates far below those they would have received under the [Cleaning Services Award 2010],” he said.
“If this was done simply to avoid payroll tax then it may have been legal but it went far beyond that.”
He said subcontractors may also subcontract their work, leading to cases where cleaners were paid as little as $7 an hour in cash.
The industry representative said some cleaning contractors lowered their prices to 10 dollars or more below the price required by the Cleaning Services Award 2010.
“Inevitably, the reality of lowering the price is that workers don’t get paid what they’re entitled to. Cleaners are paid an average of $15-$20 per hour,” he said.
Trade unions were putting pressure on larger cleaning contractors to pay the award standards, the representative said.
“The majority of companies out there don’t,” he said. “The small businesses are the real problem for the most-part.”
He said smaller businesses tended to work at night, reducing their chances of being caught out by payroll officers.
The cleaning representative said time constraints made it difficult for cleaning contractors to keep up with changes to the Fair Work Act 2009, the Cleaning Services Award 2010 and the National Employment Standards.
“They don’t know where to look to get the information. They’re busy working all the time so don’t have time to look at these sorts of things.”
The Fair Work Ombudsman’s National Cleaning Services Campaign was launched in September, 2010 as an opportunity to educate the Australian cleaning industry about these changes to legislation. 366 cleaning firms were audited, with 315 audits finalised by the release of a final report in June 2011.
The report found a non-compliance level of 37.1 per cent: 117 employers who contravened legislation.
“Generally inspectors found the knowledge of [Victorian] small business employers to be significantly less than their larger employer counterparts,” the report found.
“The audit also found a number of Victorian businesses engaged in sub-contracting.”
From the 315 finalised audits, “inspectors have recovered a total of $242,451 of 621 employees”, with Victoria accounting for 26 per cent of the money recovered, the report found.
One national cleaning contractor said it was difficult to keep up with changes to legislation.
“The rules seem to change often. We belong to [the Australian Cleaning Contractor’s Alliance to] ensure we are kept up to date with any updates or changes to legislation,” the company said. “As a business, we pride ourselves on doing the right thing.”
The commercial cleaning contractor said competition was fierce in the cleaning industry.
“We would rather walk away than not comply.
“Our company has been around for many years and its reputation and goodwill are too important to the owners to buy business at lower than cost rates.”
The company said some larger companies and small sole traders secured contracts by bidding below cost, meaning the bid was lower than the cost of providing the cleaning services.
“Some of the tenders we are unsuccessful on are fine-costed and we still don't win based on cost. It should be illegal.”
According to The Retail Cleaning Crisis: It’s everyone’s problem, a report by trade union United Voice, cleaning contractors who bid below cost hope to cut corners to secure a profit.
The report also found that sites releasing tenders, such as shopping centres, can be “unrealistic when they consider the capacity of contractors to meet their stringent cleaning specifications”.
“This downward trend in the industry has negative implications for all stakeholders, with the trap of cost-based competition leading to massive employee turnover, a lack of training, an unstable and transient workforce, security risks, Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) problems and lower standards of cleaning,” the report found.
These health and safety risks were highlighted in a recent hygiene audit of Melbourne shopping centres.
Poor hygiene
Melbourne Shopping Centre Hygiene Audit 2012, conducted by Bio-Clean director Peter Guerin on behalf of United Voice, found unacceptable hygiene levels in seven of Melbourne’s major shopping centres.
The report found toilet door latches, food court table surfaces and high chair surfaces to be three of the most unhygienic areas in the shopping centres examined.
“Of the more than 70 individual swab tests conducted in the shopping centres, all but one found levels of bacteria that were far in excess of acceptable hygiene levels,” the report found.
“High workloads of cleaners could be a significant factor contributing to poor hygiene standards in these shopping centres. In turn, these workload issues are increasing the risk of shoppers contracting infectious diseases.
“While for most shoppers, that could mean at least severe discomfort and pain, for those with vulnerable immune systems like babies, children and the elderly, these diseases could even kill.”
*not his real name