“There is a reason the old cleaners seem to have a limp in their step”: Wobbly Cleaners Reflect on Work and Organizing at a Canadian University

In early 2014 two IWW members commenced the early groundwork necessary for a union campaign of cleaners at an Atlantic Canadian university. The campaign was cut short before it could even really begin when both IWW organizers were laid off as part of a massive reduction of cleaning staff for the summer. This cost saving layoff was unprecedented, the result of the current state of austerity at university campuses across Canada.

We initially interviewed Khan and Yves (Ed: we’ve changed their names to protect their identities), the IWW organizers involved in the campaign in April 2014, about a month before they were laid off. After their layoffs, we held off on publishing the interview as it was initially unclear if the campaign was over or not. After reviewing it recently, we’ve decided to publish it now as a retrospective piece. We think that the analysis here could be useful to education worker-organizers in future campaigns.

With some distance form the campaign, we followed up with Khan and Yves, asking an additional question reflecting on the value of the campaign in hindsight.


ClassRoom: Can you start by telling us a bit about your work and your working conditions?

Khan: Yves and I work for a subcontractor, cleaning at a medium-sized university in Atlantic Canada. The university contracted out the cleaning to this company a number of years ago. The wages are only a little above minimum wage, with non-supervisors making $10.75 per hour. We are not unionized.

Yves: People don’t realize how hard this work is. I didn’t fully appreciate the job until I started. Despite being young and physically fit, I find the job incredibly taxing on my body. There is a reason the old cleaners seem to have a limp in their step (but they still manage to outpace me), the job destroys your body after repeated lifting and scrubbing. The worst is when those on campus obviously don’t respect the work it takes to keep the campus clean: garbage strewn on the floor, or goddamn full cups of coffee thrown in the trash which inevitably will leak out while I’m carrying it down the hall and have to be mopped up. Once, I made it carrying an extremely leaky bag the whole length of a cafeteria before realizing the long spill I had left on the floor.

CR: Cleaners aren’t exactly the first people that come to mind when someone mentions education workers. Can you explain the logic of organizing along industrial lines instead of by trade?

K: Seeing the university as one workplace that requires all the workers and students to function is important. The cleaners are one essential piece of the functioning university. If we refuse to work, garbage is not cleaned up and the washrooms will stink up entire buildings to the point that no one will want to enter. If the food service workers refuse to work, people go hungry and decaffeinated. The list goes on. The withdrawal of students and professors from the equation are often the two most highlighted strategies of disrupting or shutting down the university. And it is true that these are the key components (learning and teaching) of the university. But the other pieces are still important and those in the other groups need to ensure we are included in a collective organizing process, so as to avoid the pitfalls of exclusion.

Fighting alone often means that gains in one place can mean losses in another: increased salaries can lead to raised tuition, a zero sum game. If the whole campus is organized to act together, to take collective and coordinated direct action, namely various forms of strike action, then a greater potential can be realized by effectively shutting down the whole campus. Additionally, when organized together, we can fight efforts of the university and province to play a zero sum game with us.

Y: The work of cleaners is essential to education work. People talk about “good learning environments.” We’re the ones who actually take care of the physical environment of a school. I’d also add that organizing together industrially is required in order to get past this the zero sum game and into more political demands like securing the required funding for free education and the allocation of resources from the province to the university. We need to fight not only our bosses, but the austerity regime as a whole which comes from the state.

CR: How significant is it that you and the people you see at work everyday have different employers?

K: It is a fact. Cleaning was sub-contracted out a number of years ago. The division is something that has to be contended with. Ideally cleaning services are re-included as a division within the university. The present condition means that when we are fighting for better conditions, we are dealing with our company during the life of their contract with the University. We recently missed the opportunity to apply pressure on the University Administration about the subcontract issue when the company was awarded a new contract in a successful bid.

Regardless of the fact it is a separate company we are operating with – Sodexo food service workers are in a similar condition – versus most other workers and students on campus who are employed by or enrolled in the university, action we take on the job affects the university as a whole. It is important to recognize the practical effect of our actions and not get wrapped up in the university webs of dissociation from us. We are still university workers.

Also, at the end of the day, the university is still responsible. They pay the cleaning company that employs us and there are terms and conditions that must be met on both sides. If we can strategically interfere with the meeting of these conditions to our own benefit, it can give us some leverage. That would be something to research. The sub-contract adds another official layer to contend with; that is all.

CR: Are there potential problems in organizing workers with potentially different interests into the same organization? (Students, professors, staff, etc)?

Y: Like in the working class as a whole, campus workers have dividing sectional interests that need to be bridged. At the university where we work, the contract professors made an unsuccessful bid to form their own union, and when it failed, reluctantly joined the full time professors’ faculty union. The contract faulty were afraid that their voices would be drowned out if they were lumped in with the full time faculty.

The contract professors know what we all know – the campus has a limited operating budget and the groups of workers with the strongest leverage will win themselves the biggest piece of the pie. This typically means full time professors get theirs first, then other teaching and support staff, with cleaners and food service workers being somewhere at the bottom.

[Ed: According to Yves, this is why, in the current (real or imagined) fiscal crisis of the university, the cleaners saw unprecedented seasonal layoffs.].

K: Building the industrial union means engaging in a process of identifying separate interests that have developed and finding ways to bridge them. The bigger picture is taking on the university governance structure itself. We have to establish enough common ground to be able to fight together. It will be built through struggle. But any struggle can’t be expected to lead to positive resolutions without an organizing structure that is built to keep us fighting alongside each other. There must be a confluence between the two.

Y: Here’s a concrete example of what we’re talking about: During the recent full time professor’s strike at our university, the food service workers on campus received reduced hours. Khan, myself and some radicals in the professors union made a point of drawing the union’s attention to this. The union responded by creating a fund for the affected workers. This was only a small example of solidarity that works to bridge the very real divides among campus workers.

CR: What specific challenges do you think you are going to face in your campaign?

K: Turnover and language barriers are major challenges with organizing janitors.

A lot of people only keep the jobs for a short period of time until they find something better. In my own case, I will be a law student next fall and do not intend to keep the cleaning job. I will be switching to the student hat.

The challenge with organizing people who are only around for relatively short amount of time is fairly obvious: perceived lack of incentive for investing time into organizing and an inability to effectively organize because they are not around for long. Even if such temporary workers do begin to organize, then leave, which will happen in an organizing campaign, there needs to be recruitment of replacements as well as transferring knowledge between old and new organizers. But new people then have to build trust, so this is challenging.

The language barriers are an issue because the company hires a lot of people who are new migrants (not certain about whether they are TFWs) / refugees to Canada, and some of these people seem to stick around for a while (years). There are a number who I think are refugees from Nepal, for example. While such workers may be agitated, it may be hard to communicate issues back and forth without some translation assistance. Additionally, there may be some tentativeness in actually organizing because these particular workers (low levels of English proficiency and previous skills from countries of origin not recognized) have very few options for employment. While international students may have some options for employment on campus, their prospects off campus are restricted by law, so they are also vulnerable.

Additionally, people are so spread out throughout campus, so finding all the cleaners is not easy.

CR: Cleaners have been the subject of several high profile union organizing campaigns in recent memory – like the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors and the IWW’s London cleaners’ campaign in 2012. Is there something particular about cleaners that makes this the case?

K: Our work is some of the most degraded in society. We pick up after people. We are paid in accordance with our social value. We are talked down to like children by management. Anyone with a semblance of dignity will resent that. So, the impetus for organizing is there, but the deterrents are currently overwhelming, as I’ve referred to with our relatively non-existent protection and turnover. The challenges can be overcome, but it will take dedicated organizing and support from other workers and students in our industry.

Y: There’s been a lot of interest in the conditions of low waged workers lately. It might mean that there’s potential to win better wages and conditions and that’s great. At work you can feel really isolated, typically working on particular tasks by yourself. There’s a certain empowerment that comes with an organizing campaign, a self-respect that comes with organizing and challenges the notions of our work being lesser. Seeing fast food workers striking in Manhattan is really cool and makes lots of workers, myself included, a little bit more optimistic. But, at the end of the day, our organizations need to be substantive and self-reliant. We need to move beyond merely appealing to the public and to leveraging victories based on our real economic and political power.

CR: Was the work that you put into this campaign worth it? Do you regret anything? Did you learn anything that you will take to new organizing efforts?

K: The main thing is that we had ideas, we talked about the lay of the land but we never had a chance to put our plan into action. If we would have started the process much sooner we might have gotten more ahead. But it was a very difficult organizing project that we were trying to take up.

These kinds of jobs don’t last for long and high turnover endemic. If we had a plan for how to continue the campaign even if we were laid off or fired we might have really been able to make something of it.

Y: From a personal standpoint it was worth it. As someone interested in workplace organizing I was able to hone and develop skills and think about the nature of union organizing in education work. It was disappointing that we were laid off right at a point that we were looking to set up one-on-one meetings with our coworkers. Our main contacts were laid off too. The company cut the head off a potential organizing drive without even realizing it. We felt like the campaign had real potential and it was shitty that it ended without having anything to do with us – it was the economy.

I learned that it is really, like really, easy to get people agitated about low wage work. But turning the conversation towards imagining how things can be better can take a lot of effort and requires coming back to conversations again and again. Ultimately, the union is built through conversations with our coworkers and its something we will all have to work on forever.