FEATURE
TC: Facilicom also does a lot of work with the Living Wage Foundation, as it is a recognised service provider with the Foundation. Would you say that this is linked to the work that the EHRC is doing?
PS: I do think the two things sit side by side and are actually inextricably linked. I think one of the things that the industry as a whole suffers from is the fact that the wage rates that we pay our cleaning colleagues are consequential to the amount that our clients will pay us for the cleaning service.
So if we work with a client that can see the social benefit, the productivity benefit, and the all-round benefit to all concerned of paying the living wage, which invariably means that the sufficient focus is being placed on the cleaner themselves, it follows that those clients also are more than happy to discuss with us about making sure that the cleaning team is treated as part of the team and as part of the building’s workforce. It just creates a much healthier environment, so I do think the two things are very closely linked, and the work that we’ve done with the Living Wage Foundation just naturally lead for me in particular to want to do some work with the EHRC as well.
TC: Have you found that the work of the EHRC and the Cleaning Taskforce has encouraged companies that may not necessarily have been adopting best practices beforehand to act and rethink the way they treat their staff?
PS: I wouldn’t like to second guess what cleaning companies that weren’t following those good practices felt about the report but I do think that from our point of view, we welcomed the commission’s findings, and it was a bit of a ‘wake-up call’ to the industry, to recognise that we are actually looking after the wellbeing of millions of low- paid workers who are potentially not only low-paid but also mistreated.
So I think it was great that it was starting to be openly debated within the cleaning industry, and that we started to see organisations like the BCC, BICSc and the BFG at least having a debate and having conversations regarding this. And I think that since the EHRC published the report and the
32 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning December 2015
I’d like to think that if the EHRC were to do another report like they did a
year and a half ago, that they wouldn’t be comfortable in using the world ‘invisible’ anymore.
outcomes of the cleaning taskforce, a number of organisations have, I hope, looked at their practices and determined that they are best practice or that they’re less than best practice and have seen an opportunity to improve their own practices.
I’d like to think that if the EHRC were to do another report like they did a year and a half ago, that they wouldn’t be comfortable in using the world ‘invisible’ anymore. I’d like to think that we created some visibility and made people a little bit more aware of cleaners. I have a huge amount of respect for anybody that would go around and clean up other people’s mess. I don’t know many people that would say they’re happy to do that. It’s a very tough job, they invariably have to work out of hours so it’s either cold starts on a winter morning or late evenings home in the dark, it’s a very tough job and they deserve our respect.
TC: Since the Invisible Workforce report was first published last year, have you seen any improvement in practices and behaviours throughout the industry?
PS: Since the report was published, the work that the taskforce has done has been very much behind the scenes. Ultimately it’s one thing us understanding exactly what our cleaners need and how we need to respect them but in 95% of instances they work on our clients’ premises and not in our own, so we’re in discussion with a number of our clients now to see how we can roll that programme out.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, it does take time for these things to start to happen, and it’s still very early
days since the report’s findings were published, but I do think that there’s certainly a significant improvement in the awareness of people of this campaign and of the preparedness of them to look inwardly and scrutinise their own way of operating.
TC: Obviously the work that the EHRC and the Taskforce is doing is still ongoing, can people and organisations still get involved with the work that they’re doing?
PS: The EHRC are constantly looking for organisations to participate in anything that can influence an improvement in the things that the commission is set up for, which is equality and human rights. When I first started in conversation with them, they openly said that they were met with a degree of reluctance from cleaning organisations to engage with them and discuss these things, and I think as the commission started to work more openly on the report itself, there was an increased level of interest from outside of the original core community. And I think that that has continued and it is something that at networking meetings, trade shows, trade fairs this is a topic of conversation that many people are discussing. I do think that if the commission was to go out into the marketplace again, I think that they would find a completely different response now. I think people are very keen to openly debate it, to discuss it and give their input and ideas, and that is another measure of its success.
www.facilicom.co.uk
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