The workers who keep Aotearoa running, and the fight to make their work pay.
Walk through any office, hospital, school, or airport, and you are walking through the workplace of cleaners. They often work through the night, starting after other workers have gone home and finishing up before dawn. Their work keeps the rest of us safe and healthy and able to do our own jobs. It is skilled, physical, essential work. Far too often it is invisible, and it is nearly always underpaid.
Why cleaning pay stays low
The core problem is the way the industry is built. Most cleaning is contracted out. A building owner or a business hires a cleaning company, and that contract goes up for grabs every few years. Companies win the work by being the cheapest, and the easiest place to cut is wages, a “race to the bottom”. When a contract changes hands, workers can find themselves with a new employer overnight, through no choice of their own. It is a system designed to keep wages low and workers divided.
Strength in numbers, but only so far
Cleaners build power by sticking together, and some of our members are covered by a multi-employer collective agreement that includes many different commercial cleaning companies. That means those members are not bargaining alone with a single employer or site by site. The multi-employer collective agreement has delivered meaningful gains for cleaners for over 30 years.
There is a limit to what it can do, though. It only covers the companies that have signed up, and in an industry where everyone competes on price, employers resist any pay rise that might make them dearer than the company down the road. Winning real, lasting wage lifts one agreement at a time is hard when the rest of the industry keeps undercutting.
This is why we need Fair Pay Agreements
There is a better way, and we had it within reach. Fair Pay Agreements would set minimum pay and conditions across a whole industry or occupational group, covering every worker and every employer in it. The terms would be worked out between unions and employers, with workers at the table, and then they would apply to everyone.
For a fragmented, low-paid industry like cleaning, that would change everything. No company could win a contract by paying less than the floor set down in the Fair Pay Agreement. The collective agreement remains an important and additional set of rights. No cleaner would be left behind because their employer lost the cleaning contract to an undercutting business. It would lift the whole sector together and stop employers competing by paying the least.
The Government scrapped Fair Pay Agreements in one of its first acts in office, leaving workers in industries like cleaning without the one tool that could lift their wages and conditions and stop the race to the bottom. Winning them back means changing the Government in November. For cleaners, it is one of the clearest reasons there is to enrol and vote.
Bargaining for a Living Wage
In the meantime, the fight goes on where it always has, in our workplaces. A huge focus is the Living Wage, because too many cleaners, including the people who keep our airports running, are still not paid a wage they can live on. The Living Wage rose to $29.90 an hour this year, and E tū members are campaigning and bargaining to win it.
Talafaiva Lotolua cleans at Auckland Airport, and rising costs have hit her hard just getting to work.
“We need the Living Wage so we can afford to put petrol in our cars to go to work, feed our families, and pay our bills. The airport must be a Living Wage Employer. We look after the wellbeing of the New Zealand community.”