Cleaners who work at John Lewis in Oxford Street protest noisily outside
Although the cleaners work in the John Lewis store on Oxford St, unlike all the other workers in the shop they are not ‘partners‘. Their work is essential in keeping the place running smoothly, but the company is happy to regard them as second-class workers, somehow not a part of the enterprise. They get none of the benefits of working for what is usually regarded as an enlightened company, an employee-owned UK partnership with the others who work in the building getting a share of the profits of their labours. Though the cleaners work at John Lewis, they are employed by a separate company, Integrated Management Cleaning, who pay them the minimum wage, are demanding more and more work in the same hours and allegedly treat them like dirt, or worse.
Currently the cleaners in the store are under threat of redundancy, having been told that half of them will be made redundant but that the remaining half will be expected to cover the whole of the work on the same number of hours and no extra pay. John Lewis may still proudly claim they are “Never knowingly undersold” but after the protest on 26 June certainly can’t claim “Never knowingly underpaid” about the workers that clean its store, some of them starting work at 6am and being required to be there up until 10pm.
Widespread realisation that it is impossible to live in London on the minimum wage led to the adoption by the GLA in 2005 of the ‘London Living Wage’, currently at £8.30 an hour compared to the statutory minumum of £6.08 which John Lewis’s cleaners currently get. One of Mayor Boris’s recent manifesto promises was to “continue to champion the London Living Wage, pushing private and public sector employers to pay at least this level to all of their workers in London”, hoping to more than double the number of employers paying it during this term of office. Around 20% of London workers are still paid below it, so there is plenty of room for improvement.
John McDonnell MP
It’s hard not to be behind the cleaners and other low-paid workers in London in their campaigns to fight for the London Living Wage, but the support of the traditional unions has sometimes seemed at best muted, perhaps because it might erode the pay differentials between their members. There were disputes in which the cleaners had the support of the other unions, but felt very much let down by the negotiations that took place between union officials and management, and some of them decided to form a London cleaner’s branch of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World.) Formally recognised in the UK as a trade union in 2006, the IWW is an industrial union which seeks to bring together all workers in an industry rather than representing separate trades and is a grass-roots organisation run by its members.
As well as supporting their claim for a living wage, I find the cleaners and their actions are also usually good to photograph, though I keep thinking I need ear protectors as they make sure their protests are noticed by using plastic horns which at the close range needed for taking pictures with a wide-angle are literally deafening. Some of the shouting is also pretty loud, and their protests are always animated and with plenty of waving of red IWW flags, as well as placards and banners. There is also a great deal of spontanaeity and energy on display. Like most of London’s low paid workers the cleaners come largely from first or second generation migrants to this country.
There was a little light rain falling throughout most of the protest, so as usual I worked with a cloth in my hand, holding it balled up to the filter of the lens between taking pictures. The rain was fortunate in a way, because I soon wiped the filter and removed the small blob of greasy muck that had spoilt some of my pictures earlier.
Most of my better pictures were taken with the 18-105mm, partly because there were quite a few other photographers working, and because I also needed to keep out of the way of the shoppers walking pas the protest I was working from a little farther away than I usually like to. But I was working with the DX 18-105mm lens on the D700 body, as the D300 had given up on me more or less completely earlier in the afternoon as I arrived at Buckingham Palace.
Looking through the D700 viewfinder with the DX lens attached you see an irregular shaped image with the DX format frame superimposed on it. I’ve not worked much like this before, and it opened my eyes to the possibility, reminding me very much of working with a rangefinder camera where the bright line frame lets you see outside what will appear in your picture. The DX frame is just a little small, but otherwise it was just like going back to a Leica again – except that the frame in the D700 was absolutely accurate, while Leicas are only moderately close under the best of conditions, and generally rather poor with some lenses.
With the D700, there is a big drawback. The files in DX mode are only 5Mp, which is OK for most press uses, but rather small if you want good large prints. But with a D800, the viewfinder would look more or less the same but the files would be 16Mp. Previously I’d ruled out the D800 because I didn’t want 32Mp files, but now I saw it differently. And just over a week later I was out working not with a D800, but a D800E. But more on that later.
More on the protest at Cleaners at John Lewis on My London Diary. As they left, the cleaners shouted “We’ll be back” and the campaign there will continue until they get decently treated and their contribution to the company is recognised.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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