Cleaned out
16 April 2007Six years ago, the average wage for commercial cleaners was 25 percent above the minimum wage. Now that the minimum wage is $11.25, cleaners earn a mere five cents an hour above that, says Service and Food Workers’ Union (SFWU) organiser Mea’ole Keil.
Keil is one of the leaders of the SFWU’s “Clean Start” campaign battling the poor wages and conditions caused by building owners tendering out cleaning contracts to the lowest bidder. While commercial property owners are making record profits, cleaners’ wages in real terms are being forced lower and lower.
“It’s obvious now that people are hanging on to driftwood, they’re just swimming to stay alive, and they’re not getting ahead,” Keil says.
If cleaners’ wages had kept the same parity with minimum wage as they had in 2001, they would have reached $14.10 this year, he says.
Keil says that figure, $14.10, is a good one because it is close to two-thirds the average wage. The CTU and the OECD say two thirds of the average wage is a desirable level for the minimum wage. “If those cleaning companies were doing the right thing, the cleaners’ wages should be sitting right there.”
“If you put it up against the fact that the economy has been moving, and the property sector, especially the commercial building sector, has been in a boom time, then you see these sort of figures, well who’s hurting who on this one? That’s what those figures tell you.”
Yet cleaners haven’t immediately seen that their wages have gone backwards. They work in isolated small groups of less than ten, at night, with nobody to turn to besides their boss if something goes wrong.
“The difficulty is that people see increases being made to their wages every year, and you’re trying to tell them that these increases are not actually keeping them at the same spot, or bettering them, but they persist in believing that their employers will always do the right thing. When it’s pointed out to these people that they are doing the wrong thing, then the employers retaliate against the union that has pointed it out.”
The industry is notoriously hard to unionise: only 10-15 percent of cleaners are union members. That is not a very healthy bargaining position, with employers saying, “Who are you to dictate to the other 85 percent? Shut up, sit down, and sign,” Keil says.
Government social welfare initiatives such as income-related rent and family financial assistance such as Working for Families have lulled Pacific and Māori people - mostly women - that populate the industry into a false sense of security, Keil says. “All of that masked the reality of how little their wage packets are delivering. Working for Families and all of those that were supposed to be a supplement are actually now subsidising their lifestyle, being used to pay bills and pay for groceries.”
Keil credits the recent rises in petrol prices with opening people's eyes. “The cleaner on $10.95 or $11.30 an hour has to provide his or her own transport. Commercial cleaners work at night when there is no public transport. So they pay for their own car, they pay for their own petrol, licence, tyres, everything, where the boss gets his all paid for by the company.”
At a time of booming property markets, the trickle-down theory of wealth distribution seems to be missing cleaners, Keil says. When property owners tender out contracts for cleaners, the big cleaning companies compete to offer the lowest bids. “The bids come in and they say, ‘It was a fair and legal process, sorry people, we could only afford to pay you this much’. While the industry is in a boom!”
| Year | Minimum Wage | Cleaners' Standard Rate | Increase | Margin |
| 2000 | $7.55 | $9.50 | 24.5% | |
| 2001 | $7.70 | $9.65 | 15 cents | 25.3% |
| 2002 | $8.00 | $9.90 | 25 cents | 23.7% |
| 2003 | $8.50 | $10.15 | 25 cents | 19.4% |
| 2004 | $9.00 | $10.40 | 25 cents | 15.5% |
| 2005 | $9.50 | $10.60 | 20 cents | 15.7% |
| 2006 | $10.25 | $10.95 | 35 cents | 6.8% |
| 2007 | $11.25 | $11.30 | 35 cents | 0.04% |
The average hourly wage for Māori and Pacific peoples is $13.79, according to a Ministry of Social Development's 2006 report. The average for Pacific women is much lower. The cleaning industry is mostly staffed by Māori and Pacific peoples, especially women.