Explainer

Comment

Economics

4 May 2023

5 min read

Cleaning up cleaning: the problem with split shift work

Unhealthy and unnecessary working practices impact unseen cleaners. It doesn’t have to be like that argues Ryan Gilfeather.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

A cleaner sweeps between large white interior walls of a concourse.

Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash.

In offices across the country cleaners are often kept out of sight whilst the other workers do their jobs. Cleaners are instead brought in for two short shifts, the first starting as early as 1, 2 or 3 am, and a second beginning around 8pm. Most of us overlook this pattern of work, taking for granted that it is necessary.

However, dig a little deeper, and its insidious nature emerges. We begin to see how it is mostly unnecessary and harms the flourishing of cleaners in their health, family, and dignity. It treats small financial gains as worth more than human lives.

For many industries, cleaning does not need to happen in the early mornings and late nights. Consider the downsides of daytime cleaning. The cleaner would need to manoeuvre around colleagues at their desks and in meeting rooms, but they would still clean to a high standard in a similar timeframe. Their job does not need to be done during unsociable hours. There is a minor cost to the company in the office. The office worker might need to briefly step away from their desk for a moment as it is cleaned, they may be momentarily distracted by the sound of a hoover, and a meeting room may be out of action for a very short time. The only costs would be a tiny loss in efficiency and profits to the companies who hire these cleaners. Since the negative consequences of daytime cleaning, instead of split shifts at unsociable hours, are so marginal, the current working patterns are clearly unnecessary.

No choice, compelled to say yes

Importantly, these cleaners often do not have any other choice. I meet many of these cleaners in my work at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work. None of them choose to work split shifts at unsociable hours. For many, employment with better conditions is simply not available. About 27 per cent are migrants and often they lack English-speaking skills, preventing them from getting other kinds of jobs. 59 per cent have attained an education below the equivalent of C or 4 at GCSE, so it is hard for them to find other work. 17 per cent are ethnic minorities, who face greater barriers accessing other kinds of work. They have to work, they often have no better choices than cleaning, and in this industry they cannot say no to these working patterns. In this way, they are compelled to say yes to these kinds of split shifts.

Split shifts deadly consequences

This working pattern damages health. A recent medical study demonstrates that working night shifts, a similar pattern to split shifts, more than doubles the odds of developing breast cancer Another study shows that shift-work disturbs worker’s circadian rhythms. This in turn leads to problems with cancer, heart health, mental health, and more. Split shifts have deadly consequences for cleaner’s health.

Eroding family time

Split shifts also steal cleaner’s time from their families. When cleaners earn below the real living wage, their family relationships suffer; 48 per cent say that their wage level has negatively affected their relationship with their children. For many, poverty wages force cleaners to take on two or more jobs. As Angus Ritchie, an Anglican priest, academic, and campaigner for marginalised communities puts it, poverty wages force workers to:

‘to choose between spending enough time with their children and having enough money to provide for them.’

These cleaners, who are often on poverty wages too, may only be able to briefly see their children between the end of school and the beginning of the nightshift, but will miss out on caring for them in the morning and enjoying extended periods of quality time. Therefore, when employers unnecessarily force these working hours upon cleaners, it also harms their relationships with their families.

Denying dignity

These patterns of work also render cleaners invisible. In an Equality and Human Rights Commission report from 2014, cleaners spoke about how they were made to feel ‘invisible’ and like the ‘lowest of the low.’ It is hardly surprising that they have this experience when the patterns of work we force upon them are designed to literally stop office workers from seeing them. Cleaners do crucial work which enables the broader enterprise of offices all around the country to function, yet they remain hidden away, their existence and contribution unseen and unacknowledged. Needless to say, these unnecessary split shifts take away their dignity.

Why value humanity

Campaigning to oppose this practice are Christians. Here’s why. The Bible and its tradition teaches that all human beings share the same inextinguishable value. As part of the story of creation says,

“God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them.”

Over the centuries Christians have interpreted this passage as affirming the same fundamental value of every person as one made in the image of God. Every person in some way dimly mirrors God’s inestimable goodness and love, and is, therefore, of greater value than all the riches of the world. To treat someone as less valuable than us or material goods is to deny the reality of how God created the world.

Split shifts at unsociable hours, however, represents the opposite belief. As argued above, these patterns of working are largely unnecessary, and only lead to small financial gains for the companies who hire the cleaners through tiny increases in efficiency. However, these small riches are treated as worth more than the flourishing of lives which are of inestimable value because they are made in the image of God. Fractional gains in money are placed above their ongoing health, their family relationships, and their dignity through recognition. These meagre financial rewards are more treasured than the flourishing of lives made in the image of God.

The working patterns are bad for cleaners. Not just because they damage health, but more fundamentally, because they deny the reality of God’s desire for creation. Enforcing split-shifts in pursuit of financial gain values small amounts of money above the flourishing of human beings, the infinitely valuable image of God, in their health, family, and dignity.

Christians are beginning to oppose this practice. For example, in 2017, three Christian organisations (Centre for Theology and Community, Church Mission Society, and the church, St Andrew by the Wardrobe) launched Clean for Good. This ethical cleaning company treats cleaners fairly; they pay the Real Living Wage and give holiday leave, sick pay, training and guaranteed working hours. Crucially, they also don’t force cleaners into working anti-social hours. They offer cleaners working conditions and hours which enable them to flourish in their health, family, and dignity, because they truly believe that these workers are infinitely valuable, being made in the image of God.

Article

Comment

Community

Freedom

Politics

5 May 2025

4 min read

From councils to conclaves, there's a vital common ingredient

Church and state alike need pluralism.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A gate to a churchyard displays a sign saying polling station.

A polling station through a churchyard.

Southwark Diocese

Rumours that Donald Trump may suspend the US constitution in order to seek a third term as president and yet darker threats that his regime may even harbour autocratic ambitions have reminded the West that we should not take democracy for granted.

Parliamentary democracy, we have widely assumed, is A Good Thing. It’s so good that we not only want to share it but impose it on other populations. The Iraq war on which the UK and US embarked in 2003 was fought, we were told, for freedom and democracy, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

By democracy, we tend to mean political accountability, through which parties of government exercise power through the will of the people they serve, expressed in regular plebiscites which ensure that no one can cling unchallenged to power. The recent English council elections are a small example of what we mean by that.

The Trump phenomenon, though, begins to point towards the prospect of a popular will that is in favour of a form of government that doesn’t correspond to our usual liberal assumptions. There are voices, among them that of the writer Margaret Atwood, which anticipate a suspension of US democracy as a consequence of the President’s insanity.

Most of us in the UK might argue that democracy need to be more than a system in which majorities have their way. We want our governments to be under the law too. And then we have to decide not only what law, but whose law. For those of religious faith, that question will partly and significantly be answered by God’s law, on which arguably western civilisation is built.

This is where pluralism comes in, without which democracy can’t operate effectively. A state is a collection of political and civic communities, in which individuals have rights and duties, which are protected in law.

This model is based on Roman legislature, intensely centralised and systemically suspicious of private societies, which is why early Christians were persecuted under it. The collapse of that empire left a legalistic vacuum, into which stepped nation-state kingdoms and the early medieval Church.

Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

It was this latter organ of state that inherited the basic principles of Roman law, centralised, universal and sovereign, under the Pope. And it is that organ that will meet in conclave to elect a new Pope. To describe that election as democratic is more than a stretch, in that the demos, as in common people, are uninvolved and arguably unrepresented.

So the Church is not a democracy, any more than God is accountable to his creation. Rather the other way around – some denominations speak of God’s “elect”, those he chooses for salvation. In Christian thought, God is a servant king, but nonetheless an absolute and, some who oppose the divine might say, tyrannical authority.

How are we to respond to an undemocratic deity? One answer to that might be found in that pluralistic characteristic of democracy. We’re not good, frankly, as recognising pluralism in our faith systems. At best, we operate in a kind of absolute duopoly – you believe, or you don’t. A pluralistic model would be one in which we learn of the divine will through the entirety of creation, all manifestations of belief and unbelief, rather than simply our own.

Pluralism is healthy, in secular politics as well as in religious observance. It has been observed that the old UK political duopoly of Labour and Conservative has been broken in these local elections by Reform UK and resurgent Liberal Democrats and Greens. It’s the polar opposite of the gathering autocracy in the US and gives a voice to a range of worldviews.

This is not an argument for theocracy, but it is to claim that the Christian tradition rests on the principle that no political order can claim the authority of God other than the Body of Christ. And the Body of Christ incorporates all members of the human race. Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

The choice here is between a kind of secular citizenship, a form of multi-culturism which strikes an accord between varied communities on universally enlightened principles. Or we can respond to the energy on which that secular utopia might be founded, in building communities of the willing towards global justice and peace. That is a diversity mission for the Church.

So, it’s less about democracy than pluralism. And that pluralism has to become a recognisable characteristic of the body of the faithful, which it all too often historically hasn’t been. One can only hope and pray that it might be a mission that is also at the heart of the deliberations that lead to a puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel in the coming days.

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