"Customer Care"?

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

Word reaches Tubeworker HQ that cleaners working for ISS, the company to which LU outsources cleaning work on Jubilee, Northern, and Piccadilly Line stations, are getting increased "customer care" training.

The idea seems an innocent one: cleaners are working in Tube stations around the travelling public, easily identifiable in hi-vis uniform, and often get approached by passengers with enquiries. Why not equip them with some training to respond to these enquiries, rather than forcing them to constantly direct passengers to a member of LU staff, who might be busy dealing with someone else?

But the implications of giving cleaners "customer care" training are much more sinister; they're bad for cleaners, bad for LU staff, and bad for passengers. By training cleaners to deal with customer enquiries, ISS (and their LU paymasters) are expecting cleaners to do aspects of LU station staff work without any of the benefits - pay, travel pass, pension, etc. - that LU employees enjoy. If LU want station cleaners to provide "customer care", there's a simple way to achieve it: employ them directly as part of the stations workforce. Put them in LU uniforms, give them LU rates of pay, access to the TfL pension, and a staff travel pass.

Cleaners - outsourced workers employed by a subcontractor on a precarious basis - doing aspects of station staff work gives a vision of the nightmare future LU bosses and their Tory backers in City Hall have for our stations: de-staffing, de-skilling, outsourcing, and casualisation.

The issue of whether a separate cleaning grade should even exist at all (rather than cleaning work being distributed across stations grades, as it was until the 1980s) has been debated on Tubeworker's blog before (click here). Whatever one's view on that debate, it's clear that RMT (the only Tube union which organises cleaners) must step up its campaigning for cleaning work to be taken back in house, to stop cowboy contractors like ISS exploiting cleaners and potentially allowing LU to get extra station staff on the cheap.

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