Jenny Long, Sydney
Following two weeks of rolling 24-hour stoppages, cleaners from 100 public schools and TAFE colleges across inner-city Sydney mounted community information pickets at their schools before rallying at the office of NSW education minister Andrew Refshauge on August 12.
The cleaners, who are represented by the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (LHMU), are campaigning against job cuts affecting up to 6000 school cleaners across NSW. The campaign is being supported by the NSW Teachers Federation.
At the August 12 rally outside Refshauge's electoral office in Marrickville, Sherif Hakka, who has worked as a cleaner at inner-city TAFE colleges for nearly 10 years, said he was disappointed in Premier Bob Carr's Labor government.
"I love the job", said Hakka. "I work at the school because I think the students and the teachers are worth it. It's a job that I've put my heart into. The changes to the contracts from next year will either mean I do not have a job or I'll have my hours cut back so badly that I'll lose almost all of my wages."
NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson said the government's attacks on school cleaners were occurring at a time when the LHMU was campaigning for corporations such as Woolworths to meet minimum wages and conditions standards for its cleaning contractors.
Robertson said the government's failure to insist that school contractors retained existing workers, or even apply the award, was evidence that NSW industrial relations minister John Della Bosca had embraced "the race to the bottom".
In an August 13 article on the Workers Online website, Chris Christodoulou, deputy assistant secretary of the NSW Labor Council, wrote: "In what many cleaners believe is an act of betrayal, the state government will not guarantee any of them their jobs when the state cleaning contracts come up for renewal next year.
"When Bob Carr was Labor's Opposition leader he promised to reverse the Greiner Liberal government's decision to privatise school cleaning. When he won his first election in 1995 he failed to deliver on the promise.
"What he did do however, was to guarantee the existing cleaners their jobs and entitlements but only on the basis that cleaning companies did not need to automatically back fill vacant positions as they came up. The privatisation of the government cleaning service lead to a dramatic cut back in cleaning hours in schools. The cleaners and their union reluctantly agreed to these changes in exchange for job security.
"After having endured the pain of cost cutting over many years the cleaners are now being hung out to dry."
Christodoulou noted that the cleaners, most of whom are women migrants over 45 years of age, and who take home only $13 per hour, are hurting badly because of the way successive state governments have introduced savage cuts to their cleaning hours in the name of cost cutting.
What is now clear is that the Carr government wants to cut even more cleaning hours out of public schools. The easiest way to do this is to give the cleaning contracts to new cleaning companies. These companies will not be required to employ the existing cleaners. This is because the government wants to further reduce the cleaning services provided in each school in order to save money.
New cleaning companies will only be required to do basic cleans in a government plan to allow school principals to choose from two levels of cleaning standards — a basic standard would involve parents chipping in to clean windows, classrooms and playgrounds.
On August 13, the LHMU released the results of its poll of 400 parents across the state, in which 88% of parents said it was unreasonable to ask them to help clean their children's schools.
"While the minister and his bureaucrats think this is a good idea, the poll of 400 parents across the state shows that only 3% of parents would definitely volunteer and 77% would definitely not or probably not volunteer", said the LHMU's Annie Owens. "Imagine it. A parent rushes home from work, has dinner, drops the kids off at footy training and then goes in to wash the windows in the kid's classroom!"
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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