When George Osborne announced the introduction of the national living wage, my colleagues and I, who clean the Merseyside offices of HM Revenue and Customs, were pleased. We’re not naive – we knew we wouldn’t be in line for huge pay rises. But we did think it meant the government was taking low pay a bit more seriously – and when you’re on as little money as we are, any increase is welcome. We definitely didn’t bank on the firm we work for cutting our hours to pay for it.
We work for a multinational company called ISS, but the building where we work says HMRC on the door, the signs in the corridors all say HMRC and it’s stamped on the letters and envelopes on the desks we tidy. It’s hard to imagine you’re not working for HMRC.
So it is really hard to swallow when HMRC says it has no responsibility to make sure we’re treated fairly, especially when we spend our working lives emptying its bins and cleaning its toilets. What makes it worse is that this is the government department responsible for making sure employers pay the minimum wage.
And we are talking about very low wages. I’ve been a cleaner in these offices for almost 10 years and earned so little from my 30 hours a week that I had to claim tax credits – a benefit paid out by HMRC – because ISS doesn’t pay me enough for cleaning HMRC’s offices.
I’ve now lost two hours a week, which means I can no longer claim tax credits and will have to pay for visits to the dentist and prescriptions. So while the cut in hours might seem like nothing to the sort of people who make these decisions in ISS’s head office – or to well-paid government ministers who can wash their hands of it – it means an awful lot to me. You start to question whether it is worth going to work at all, and I hate to think like that because I have always worked and always want to.
This isn’t the first time ISS has cut our hours, or the number of staff. In one of the offices in Bootle there are 19 floors and there used to be two cleaners to each floor. Now there aren’t even enough cleaners to take a floor each. This is only going to get worse. We can’t work any harder than we already do, but that’s what is expected of us. When any of us is on holiday, the rest are now expected to cover their work for no extra money.
So this is why I was on strike on Monday and Tuesday. Most of us have never done anything like this before, but what else can we do? ISS won’t listen and HMRC doesn’t want to know.
We’re back at work now, but it won’t end there. We will carry on taking other types of industrial action to show how important our work is and how overstretched we are. We are determined to bring more people with us next time.
We’re not asking for much. The Living Wage Foundation’s recommended salary of £8.25 an hour is hardly going to hurt a company like ISS that makes millions of pounds in profit every year, but it would be a good start for people like me. I work hard, I see my colleagues working hard, and we deserve to be treated with more respect.
This week they have bussed in people from Manchester to help with the cleaning – we’ve heard some of the managers are even helping out as well. How much extra is that costing them, when they could be sitting down with us and our union representatives to agree a fair deal?
Although we’re angry with ISS, most people I speak to just think this is what a lot of these big companies do – that’s how they make their money. It’s HMRC we’re really furious with. At the very least, we hope we have caused some embarrassment to the department that is supposed to keep these firms in check. But we don’t want them to just be embarrassed – we want them to act.
