a week out of about £200 a week take-home pay. My rent is £54.12 and there’s phone bills on top of that. I had three sisters and one died last year from AIDS. Another is now very sick and both their husbands have died. I have one niece at university and I pay her fees. If I don’t she might have to go out with men and get married quickly – and then I might be left alone. My niece appreciates what I’m doing and has sent me two phone messages saying thank you. I have four other nieces and a nephew who lives with my mother. I’m helping all of them. I want to set up a business back home and I want to build a house there and then I want to devote myself to helping women organise and train themselves.
Several times as she talked, Maev’s voice would trail away, and as she fiddled with a piece of paper she stared blankly at the keyboard and desk in front of her. The long silences spoke of her frustrations, of how she has sacrificed her life for her relatives back in Africa, and her anxieties for their welfare. Maev knows she’s overqualified for the job, but she takes pride in doing it properly, pointing out that she doesn’t have to wait to be told to clean things such as the dirty mop-heads: ‘I don’t like ISS because of the pay. It’s not my joy to be cleaning when I have skills in my head,’ she says, and adds that she was the one in her family who went the furthest in her studies, and that she had hoped to get to university. ‘But I know it’s my responsibility. I know the supervisors don’t consider it a big job. I don’t see them normally anyway, but you get feedback from other people on the ward.’
Maev refers to the humiliations of the job, and talks of the intense emotions on the ward at times, but she insists that she’s ‘been brought up not to make a fuss’. She’s hoping to get home sometime later in the year to visit her family, but she grimaces at the thought of the expectations of presents which will inevitably greet her on her arrival. Her hopes of change are pinned on the dream of going home with enough money to set up a business – a shop, and flats to rent perhaps – to support her family. That would require better pay, and for that she puts her energies into the union’s fight alongside the East London Community Organisation (TELCO) for a ‘living wage’. It took nine months to persuade the management of the hospital trust even to meet them, only for them to be told that the wages were set by the contractor. ISS have said they’re sympathetic to the campaign, but that market conditions (i.e. their contract with the hospital) don’t support a higher wage. Everyone dodges responsibility.
Joshua is in a similar plight to Maev. He’s been a cleaner at the hospital for sixteen years. He takes home about £212 a week, out of which he has to pay £50 child support, £60 rent, perhaps another £50 in bills, and he tries to send about £30 a month home to Jamaica for his mother and two children there. He’s not eligible for any benefit or tax credits, and some weeks his money runs out, so he has to go hungry until his wages are paid.
‘I catch up on one bill and then another, and end up a madman,’ he says unhappily. ‘I’m in arrears to the council, but there’s only £30 left for a week’s food and clothing.’ He doesn’t mind the work – he insists on showing me how clean the carpeted ward is – it’s the pay which makes him angry: just £4.79 an hour. He’s thought of signing up with an agency and taking a second job, but he’d have to travel, and ‘Sometimes I get tired, I’m just a human being.’ Walk into any organisation and there will be plenty of people like Maev and Joshua. They work long hours doing the tedious, repetitive work of cleaning in a burgeoning service economy. Only people with severely limited choices and little negotiating power in the labour market would ever take such jobs, and in London and the south-east that effectively requires a ready supply of immigrant labour. Without immigrants, much of the public sector services in the south-east would be on the point of implosion. They clean, they cook, they do the washing up, and because their work is classed as low-productivity, they earn wages barely sufficient to support one person – let alone the multiple dependants whom both Joshua and Maev support.
The conditions of work have seriously deteriorated as these types of services in the public sector have been contracted out to the private sector. The relationship between employee and employer has been blurred – many of the cleaners I spoke to rarely saw their ISS site manager, who visited the hospital maybe only once or twice a week. They worked alongside NHS staff, but now wore the logo of a company about which they knew nothing. One long-serving employee had once been, several years ago, to a presentation in the centre of London on ISS’s corporate vision for the future, and how it aimed at being the world’s biggest personal services company. ‘ISS is an absentee landlord,’ he commented, as incomprehensible and meaningless to him as a French-speaking St Petersburg landowner might once have been to a Russian peasant.
Even more importantly, contracting out has meant the loss of good overtime pay. Working overtime used to warrant as much as double pay, as did working on Sundays; it was how the low-paid managed to earn a ‘living wage’. But employees taken on under the new contracts have had their rights to overtime pay removed, and extra shifts are paid at the standard rate. Weekend work earns only a small premium; the time of these employees costs almost the same regardless of what point in the week or the day they are working. Long-time employees transferred from the NHS to the new contractors who have their pay and working conditions protected say that they are now less likely to get overtime: those shifts go to the more recent employees who aren’t entitled to the overtime pay.
It is this kind of development which has helped to loosen the link between low pay and long hours. The lowest levels of overtime working are in the lowest pay brackets, and the higher the hourly wage, the greater the proportion of people working overtime: only 39 per cent of employees earning under £5 an hour ever work overtime, compared to 61 per cent of those earning £10 or more.17 The introduction of the minimum wage has led to a slight decline in hours as employers cut down their use of labour to save money.18 Childcare is another constraint on low-paid long hours; its cost simply cancels out the advantage. Also likely is that poorer families opt for both parents to work different shifts and do the childcare between them in a relay, rather than one parent working long hours and the other caring; amongst Maev and Joshua’s colleagues, at least, that was the pattern. So the link between low pay and long hours is probably not as strong as it was when a whole family was often dependent on the one breadwinner. Where it is still strong is where overtime pay leverages a worker up into a higher income level, as happens in manufacturing and in skilled trades such as plumbing. It is also strong in some parts of the service sector – hotels and restaurants, for example – in London particularly in the ‘black economy’, where there are immigrants of uncertain status willing to take the work.
Pete and Sarah, Maev and Joshua may appear to have little in common at first glance, but they all have a powerful sense of being trapped. Pete would be the first to acknowledge that he has considerable advantages and negotiating power in the labour market, but Joshua and Maev have a clearer vision of what needs to change and how. Central to the dilemma of all of them is how their time is not their own. Sarah has gone ahead and made her choice, at the high price of abandoning her career. But for Pete, it isn’t clear how he can use his skills and talents to claim back his time. They are all caught up in the politics of time. What their lives reflect is how, over the last decade or so, time has become the battleground for a power conflict between employer and employee, arguably the battleground – and we didn’t notice.
The Big Squeeze
The traditional patterns of working time and individuals’ private lives which provided boundaries between work and rest have been erased. This ‘timelessness’ is one of the characteristics required of a flexible labour force. It takes on different characteristics in different jobs: shift systems which start early or finish late; on-call requirements; weekend working; an increase in night shifts. Work intrudes into a million bedrooms with pagers, Weepers, alarms to interrupt your rest – to check on financial markets, to make calls to another time zone. As in the television advertisement, you can phone up your bank at 2 a.m. and find someone on the line who is ‘perky’ and ready to answer your call; they could themselves be in another time zone, such as India. This timelessness is about the employee’s availability; instead of extra staffing, employers cut labour