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.

Column

Ageing

Character

Comment

Politics

3 July 2024

5 min read

What the Joe Biden story tells us about growing older

Rather than mimicking the young, the elderly witness to a life well lived.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Joe Biden holds a fist to his chest as he stands and speaks.

Biden at the CNN presidential debate.

President Biden has had a few bad days at the office recently. Time and again, he seems to freeze in public, stumbles over his words, as his voice falters and his sentences tail off. At his first public debate with Donald Trump, he looked just like a man in his eighties, struggling to remember facts, his mind not as alert as it once was. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what many people in their eighties are. And Trump is no spring chicken either. Questions around age dominate the American Presidential election like never before. This is a story of not of two elderly gents in a bar arguing over their fading memories of the past, but between candidates wanting to be the most powerful man, in charge of the most forbidding military and economic powers on the planet.

Old age creeps up on us slowly. To tell when it starts is hard to say. Yet we all know how it ends. Old age is a kind of preparation for death, a slowing down of faculties, a loss of control, a gradual diminishing of powers, preparing us for a new kind of life beyond this one. As a result, in our achievement-oriented age that doesn't believe in a life beyond death, we are tempted to ignore the elderly, shutting them away in residential homes, out of sight and out of mind.

Yet they were valued for what they were – signs of where we are all heading, their stories as object lessons for the young in how to live well (or badly).

Old age, however, is not a slide into passivity. Even as powers diminish, elderly people still have significant agency – keeping the mind active through reading, walking to the shop to buy bread, keeping in touch with relatives, even getting out of a chair as the end draws near can take as much resolve and determination as the more complex tasks of our youth, and are every bit as heroic and human as the more impressive achievements of our sprightlier years.

Former cultures respected the elderly for the experience gained, as members of the community to be looked up to, respected and valued. Teenagers were not considered as the moral arbiters of the future but as immature human beings who still have a lot to learn. The old were given pride of place as those who had gained the wisdom of years. Not that that wisdom was always apparent - the elderly can become cantankerous, repetitive and self-focused as powers diminish. Yet they were valued for what they were – signs of where we are all heading, their stories as object lessons for the young in how to live well (or badly).

The one time when we do place elderly people front and centre, is when they are able to do the things that young people can. Adverts regularly depict old people jumping out of planes, playing rugby, strumming electric guitars - doing the things that young people typically do. Old people who can pretend that they are young are praised to the hilt. Elderly people who lose their memory, their train of thought, stumble and repeat themselves are looked on with pity, not respect. When they do both it confuses us – which is why everyone is worried about Joe.

Part of the wisdom of old age is to recognise when it has come upon us, and what its distinct calling is. In a strange echo of our culture's attitude to the elderly, Joe Biden seems desperate to tell himself and others that he's perfectly capable of doing the job of President, a job that would come much more naturally to someone 20 years younger than him. Surely the wiser and more sensible course would have been to recognise the signs of time, and halfway through his presidency, to have announced that he was not standing again, triggering a leadership race among the Democratic Party so that a new candidate could be ready for the Presidential election without all the doubts about age and capacity in mind.

So, caught between ignoring old age and yearning for lost youth, how then, are we to value the ageing process? After all, one day, it will come on all of us who manage to avoid a premature death.

The main task as the years pass and the shadows lengthen, is to be there for the young,

If we remain active throughout our lives, that activity changes over time. As someone well into my sixties, approaching old age (or perhaps already in it – it is hard to tell?) I recognise my body creaks and does not adapt as it once did. I can't do all that I could in my 30s or 40s. Over time, callings change, and recognising that is part of the wisdom of life. The Christian ethicist Oliver O'Donovan suggests that the calling of old age is to "stand by the side of youth." Elderly people have the task "to show to the young how their generation, the only earlier generation to which the young have direct access, has conceived its tasks and tackled them. If the young are to form their world effectively, they will need models to inherit and to build on."

The prime task of old age is not to withdraw into some retirement village, playing golf every day, going on endless holidays, living the life we wanted to live in our 40s but couldn't because we had to work. It is not to enjoy retirement as a kind of secular heaven, a reward for a lifetime of hard work, with pleasures abounding. There may be time for some of that, but the main task as the years pass and the shadows lengthen, is to be there for the young, not to tell them what to do but to be a witness of a life well lived - or sometimes an object lesson of a life lived badly – often both at the same time. It is to be a sign of how another generation managed to navigate the complications and complexities of life and how for those who have a faith, as a witness to how God has proved faithful over time, space and the shifting sands of culture. And that involves focus from both sides. The younger need to value, respect and prize the elderly for what they offer as a model of life lived and complexity negotiated, and the old need to recognise their changing role as it creeps upon them with the passing of years.

The calling of the elderly is just as important as that of the young or even the middle-aged. Yet it is different. We need to value our older people, not because they can do the things younger people can, but because they are object lessons in how to navigate life, and how to prepare for the next one.

Getting it muddled up helps no one.