Unionising the low paid in London: the Justice for Cleaners campaign: a case study Professor Jane Holgate Professor of Work and Employment Relations Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change, University of Leeds Business School, University of Leeds, LS2 9HT [email protected] Written in February 2009 as a research contribution for the book Mobilizing against Inequality: Unions, Immigrant Workers, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Lee Adler, Maite Tapia and Lowell Turner (eds.), Ithaca: ILR Press, 2014. 1 Unionising the low paid in London: the Justice for Cleaners campaign: a case study Data presented here has been collected over a number of years since 2001 from interviews with organisers and members in the East London Communities Organisation (Telco) and their parent organisation, London Citizens, and from attendance at assemblies, meetings, demonstrations and training sessions. Interviews have also been held with trade union officials and organisers in London. Many of the interviews have been anonymised in order to encourage participants to speak openly and without restraint. Summary This case study looks at organising low paid cleaners in London – the vast majority of whom are migrant workers. It begins with a historical overview of union organising of cleaners in London and then moves on to look more specifically at a few linked campaigns. The first is the organising of migrant cleaners led by London Citizens, a broad-based community coalition affiliated to the Industrial Areas Foundation. This group began the London Living Wage campaign and then this was taken up by Unite the union, the UK’s largest private sector union, which has been organising cleaners across the city of London since 2004. The campaign has resulted in other groups of workers from other unions taking up the campaign – with a great deal of success. The case study also looks at the extent to which the migrant workers organised have been integrated into their respective unions. Organising cleaners in London – a brief look back During the early 1970s feminists from the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK became involved in a campaign to organise cleaners in the city of London. Following a number of meetings with night cleaners the ‘Cleaners Action Group’ was formed. With more determination than strategy, a small group of feminists set off into London’s financial district armed with leaflets, urging their sisters to get unionised to improve their terms and conditions. Shelia Rowbotham, now academic, but then active in the campaign, described the women cleaners they were attempting to organise: Some were from the unskilled working class which had known poverty for generations and others were Irish, Afro- Caribbean, Asian, Greek or Spanish immigrants. Though a few were in their twenties and a few over 60, most were in their thirties and forties with husbands who were low-wages workers, ill or disabled. The women looked older than their age, for they hardly slept at all, snatching a few hours after the children went to school. The accumulative exhaustion was etched on their faces. They had no time for the meetings and demonstrations which for we young activists in Women’s Liberation had become a way of life. (Rowbotham 2006: 179) The subcontracting of cleaning labour meant workers were hired by agencies, whose managers were told to move workers to other sites when attempts were made to unionise the women. Considered ‘unorganisable’, 2 this group of workers were largely ignored by trades unions and where they did manage to join a union the women cleaners struggled to negotiate union structures – ‘the byzantine rules of the T&G were double Dutch to us’ (Rowbotham 2006: 118). Despite several years of hard work and determination, the campaign faltered due to sheer exhaustion and lack of support from the trade unions. It is interesting to contrast the campaign of the early 1970s to that at the start of the new millennium. In the 1970s, many of cleaners were migrant workers, often working several jobs struggling to make ends meet. They worked in corporate headquarters employed by subcontractors, were moved around as their agencies saw fit and were considered by trade unions as marginal workers, too difficult to organise and not really worth the effort. Wind forward thirty years and Shelia Rowbotham’s description of cleaning workers in the city has changed little. Today, however, cleaners are more likely to originate from different countries – Africa, South America and Eastern Europe – but their terms and conditions and employment status remain much the same (see Aguiar and Herod 2006 for examples from around the world). As then, cleaning is precarious work, subcontracting is still the norm (Savage 2006) and until recently these workers have not had the protection of trade union membership, as the UK’s general unions focus remained within the male dominated manufacturing and transport sectors. More than thirty years later, another attempt to organise cleaners in the City of London began when The East London Communities Organisation (Telco) – a broad based community organisation – initiated the London Living Wage Campaign. In December 2001, campaigners occupied a branch of the HSBC bank in Oxford Street, London to protest at the low pay and poor conditions of cleaners at Canary Wharf. Between December 2001 and February 2004, Telco kept up the campaign with public protests (including marches, demonstrations, public assemblies), as well as lobbying of politicians and employers (see Holgate 2009; Holgate and Wills 2007; Wills 2004: for more details). As a result, in February 2004 Barclays Bank agreed to new terms and conditions for cleaners employed at the company’s HQ at Canary Wharf, raising pay from the minimum wage (then £4.50) to £6 per hour, as well as granting fifteen days sick pay and eight extra holidays per year. Although a relatively small victory1 following 2 years of intense campaigning, the impact was much wider as the London Living Wage campaign became high profile, with support from the Mayor of London and other bodies and had even begun to attract the attention of trade unions. As a result, in early 2004 the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU, now Unite), allocated two full- time organisers to work on the campaign to unionise cleaners at Canary Wharf. Working closely with 1 Although a small victory in terms of the labour market for cleaners in London, the increased pay and conditions for those individual workers affected should not be underestimated. 3 colleagues from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the US, who were seconded to the TGWU for 2 years, an intense campaign was launched to map and organise the cleaning sector in the City of London. Prior to this, the cleaners campaign had been organised by Telco (part of the broader community coalition London Citizens), although from around 2003 there had been contact with the TGWU who had begun co-operating with the campaign; ‘over a number of months [we] had attempted to persuade the T&G that it was fertile ground for organising’ (Interview with Telco, organiser). However, the two organisations were culturally very different: Telco was bottom up, community based, member led and loosely structured; the TGWU was more hierarchical, top down and had rigid structures. Not surprisingly, both organisations found it difficult to understand each other’s different ways of working, which led to confusion and mistrust on occasions, which is why the campaign as been off and on at different times in both organisations, when they found it difficult to work together. As one staffer from the TGWU remarked: I think trade unions are, as you know, conservative and centrist and general unions - and the T&G particularly - which is kind of left of centre, doesn’t like getting out and working in partnership with groups it doesn’t understand or control. (TGWU full-time officer, Interview 2007) The issue of which organisation was ‘in control’ was problematic and confusing for those taking part in the campaign. Press releases were sent out from both organisations claiming victory for a particular action or win creating antagonism on both sides. A Telco organiser described how the problem manifested itself at one bank that was being jointly organised – but where the workers had originated from the community based living wage campaign: There were attempts in the negotiation period [at Deutsche Bank] between us and the TGWU, because we have 60 workers organised, wanting to campaign and wanting to join the trade union. But they didn’t want to join a trade union where they’d just get slung in the back with the Canary Wharf group. They wanted their own organisation and their own campaign and wanted to work with us still. (Telco organiser, interview 2007) The union had developed a strategy for the cleaners campaign which involved building up membership until there were enough workers to vote for/or be granted union recognition and in the meantime, wanted members recruited to be placed into a union branch. But often this mean that workers felt that they were not really involved in the campaign and that they did not understand why it was taking so long to progress the campaign and that they did not understand the process of gaining union recognition: So actually I suppose when [the relationship] got more difficult was when the T&G were campaigning very hard for recognition and there was a lull in the relationship then because our members had only ever really consented to a Living Wage campaign and although by and large they could see recognition as important and that unions are important, no question about that, but campaigning outside buildings that pay a living wage, because they did offer recognition was 4 not..