Back to the future

A three hour shift that starts at 5.00am is not for the faint-hearted, but the cleaning team that takes care of the offices, marble staircases and tiled corridors of Islington’s rather elegant Town Hall seem quite content.

Since the expiry of a 10 year contract with private company Kier Building Maintenance in October 2010, the 130 cleaners of borough’s 70 municipal buildings are once again directly employed by the local authority. The transfer back to an in-house service has seen the cleaners’ pay rise significantly to the London Living Wage level of £8.30 an hour, with improved conditions and no job losses. According to Council Leader Catherine West, the new arrangement costs less and, in addition to higher pay, offers the employees job security, access to the council pension scheme and the feeling of being “part of a team”.

It seems that the predictable consequences of the large-scale contracting out of council and other public services introduced by the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s, and left unchanged by the New Labour governments that followed, are finally being recognised in some quarters. Other council services in Islington are being reviewed, and further afield, hospital cleaners in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are now all directly employed, in an attempt to halt the disastrous spread of hospital infections. More pictures here.

TESCO: Every little helps

At an assembly marking the 10th anniversary of the Living Wage Campaign last week, Citizens UK launched a campaign to persuade supermarket chain Tesco to pay its workers a Living Wage. The company’s “every little helps” slogan, designed to promote its low prices, applies equally well to the wages of its employees, as was made clear in personal testimony on the impact of the Living Wage on their own lives by individual members.

The community organisation also announced the updated Living Wage rate for London (£8.30 an hour), and for the rest of the UK (£7.20). The National Minimum Wage is £5.93. More pictures here.

London’s Other Workers: multimedia

This multimedia presentation of the London's Other Workers project combines still photos and a recorded interview with Alberto Durango, who has worked as a cleaner since he came to London in 1995 to escape paramilitaries in his native Colombia. In this 3 minute piece he talks about the problems faced by the cleaners who work through the night in the office buildings of London’s financial district.

Putting together still photographs and words, whether written or spoken, can be very powerful. For the written word, the books John Berger made with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr are a model for many. A Seventh Man, which explores the experiences of southern European migrant workers in north-western Europe, is probably the best known.

What makes them stand out is the way in which the images and text do not refer directly to each other, but run in parallel, expressing complementary aspects of their subjects’ experiences. Berger and Mohr did not use photographs to ‘illustrate’ the text, but allowed them to tell their own related, but different, story.

Something similar can be done with photographs and the spoken word. Technology has moved on since the days of tape-slide, but the produce of digital cameras and sound recorders can be put together to much the same effect. Tape-slide required cumbersome equipment, and its audiences were necessarily small. The modern digitised version makes possible cheap, instant and unlimited distribution via websites, blogs and all the other channels the internet has to offer.