Cleaners battle to close wage gap

Cissy Alone, with her daughter Fehia, works evenings cleaning the Remuera Library and Britomart Railway Station. Picture / Brett Phibbs

At about the same time that Auckland City Council chief executive David Rankin heads for home, Cissy Alone starts a night's work cleaning council facilities.

She leaves her 3-month-old daughter, Fehia, with her namesake, Cissy's sister Fehia Petelo. She cleans the Remuera Library from 6pm to 8pm and then the Britomart Railway Station from 9.30pm until 1.30am.

After four years with City Cleaning Ltd, she earns $10.95 an hour at the library and $12.50 an hour at Britomart.

That's roughly a twentieth of the $206.37 hourly rate that Mr Rankin earns, if his salary is the same as his predecessor earned in 2004-05.

A transtasman union campaign launched in 10 cities from Auckland to Perth yesterday aims to reduce that gap by appealing to the people who ultimately pay the cleaners' wages: building owners and tenants, or in Cissy Alone's case, Auckland ratepayers.

A largely Pacific Island crowd at the Auckland rally were fired up by NZ Idol winner Rosita Vai and a Presbyterian Pacific Islands Church minister who was cultural adviser to the movie Sione's Wedding. The Rev Mua Strickson-Pua recalled his mother's night job cleaning the NZI building in Queen St in the 1970s.

"I still have family members who are cleaning, I have students I teach, and in our parish. That's the reason the church must get involved and support the unions," Mr Strickson-Pua said.

The minister's son, Feleti Strickson-Pua, a member of the hip-hop group Nesian Mystic, sings about social justice.

Auckland Airport night cleaner Sue Fuimaono Lafaele, still on $10.95 after seven years' service, told the rally that she and her husband, a welder, could not afford to buy a house on their current wages.

"They are looking down on us. The only thing they want is work being done," she said.

Api Ielemia, who cleans the PricewaterhouseCoopers office tower on the waterfront for $10.95 an hour, said she often had to help new workers get paid at all. She herself was not paid for three weeks when she started.

"I said, 'Put yourself in my shoes: How can you survive for three weeks without money, how can you feed your family?"'

Like many cleaners, she has a full-time day job at Tegel Chicken and works part time cleaning in the evenings.

Ms Alone's employer, City Cleaning founder Lance Pattullo, agreed with the unions that the $10.95 rate negotiated in the latest multi-employer collective agreement was too low.

"I think it's terrible too," he said. "But it is what it is and we have to play by those rules, otherwise we wouldn't be in business. If I could pay more, I certainly would."

Just yesterday he lost a contract based on the $10.95 union rate because a competitor undercut him by a third.

He said a majority of cleaners in New Zealand were now employed by three huge multinationals: Spotless (Australian), OCS (British) and ISS-Tempo (Danish).

"Those three companies control the industry whether we like it or not."


Hourly rates

$489.47 Top 44 CEOs
$206.37 Auckland City CEO David Rankin (library owner)
$91.35 Finance directors
$48.08+ Law partners
$21.29 Average wage
$10.95 Cissy Alone (librarycleaner)
$10.25 Legal minimum wage