“The people who clean the most expensive offices in London have to get up before sunrise, get a long bus into town and clean up after workers who earn more in a financial quarter — or even a month — than they do in a year. How does that feel?”

by robhastings

9 comments

  1. Undoubtedly the cleaners get up before almost all the staff come in, but I’m pretty sure those finance workers are also up before 8am.

  2. I was always taught to be polite and nice to cleaners/secretaries/admins ect.. I work in a fancy London office, but I’ll have a little chat with our regular cleaners and tidy the mugs off my desk before the end of the day.

    However.. it doesn’t look like the most strenuous or stressful job in the world. None of our cleaning staff look over-worked like the ones in the article.

    At the moment, I’m up an hour or so before sunrise, and yep, it also takes me a while to get into town.

  3. Yup and they form the greatest proportional funders to TfL’s budget as a class, relative to incomes. And more than say compared to those office workers. Meanwhile, they’re the most impacted by TfL poor service. They are the most impacted by the strikes. They get the short end of everything TfL.

  4. So what? This is a nothing piece. It’s saying people have different jobs, and others don’t appreciate them for it. It’s no different to say you don’t acknowledge your Deliveroo driver who has to deal with rain, your black cab / uber driver who deals with congestion and late hours, your local supermarket worker, or the tube driver. The vast majority of people don’t go out of their way to acknowledge the other people they interact with outside of their immediate colleagues and there is always a pay disparity across roles. You’re trying to conflate some moral point from a badly written article with no purpose.

  5. Why does this matter? Aside from being considerate to people making less money this is a non story.

    The cleaning companies they work for are making good money. They won’t pay their staff more because the unskilled labour market is what it is.

  6. It’s unclear how long she’s been living in the UK (at least two, but otherwise unspecified – I’d assume at least 4 years considering she is not in skilled work).

    I teach English to Ukrainians (generally refugees) on a pro bono basis, it generally takes around 6-8 months to go from their weak English, typically at A2 level, up to reasonably confident conversationalists who can spend an entire day speaking exclusively in English on a wide range of complex topics.

    The fact that Marianna actually lives in the UK, and still can’t confidently speak English – the world’s business lingua franca – in a normal conversation after so long would generally suggest she has poorly integrated.

    I worked in an office until 2021, and had a very positive relationship with our cleaners, they were treated like any other person when we ran into them, and if they were in the break-room, we’d always chat similarly to any other person – but then again, they could handle a conversation in English.

    But my company hired cleaners directly, its the cleaning agencies who seem utterly scummy.

  7. She works for an agency, right? So, why would the people she cleans for her consider her a colleague?

    As for the pay discrepancy, well, duh. Some jobs are worth more than others. Some people broker the kind of big-money deals that build skyscrapers, and some people hoover the floor. The difference is we’re all capable of hoovering, while only a few of us have the skills and expertise to broker complex trades. No one disparages the doctor for earning more than the hospital porter. Heck I’m not paid very much, but then I do a job a lot of people *could* do if they gave it a go. That’s Capitalism 101.

  8. I mean, the same can be said for the billionaire owners of those companies too.

    How does it feel to be slaving away as a software engineer at Meta with a constant threat of layoffs looming over you while your boss is out surfing in Hawaii.

  9. This just in: low skilled workers do not earn the same as high skilled workers.

    I was a professional cleaner for 4 years when I was a student. It’s physically tough but is not a hard job and at no point did I ever think I should’ve been earning similar to those who worked where I cleaned.

    I’m now a qualified architect and let me tell you, it makes cleaning seem like a walk in the park.

    In other words this belongs in r/slownewsday.

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