500 signatures reached
To: NSW Government
End the failed privatisation of NSW Government cleaning services
The current contract cleaning model in New South Wales public schools and buildings is fundamentally it broken. Multi-national contractors make millions in profits while cleaners receive poverty wages, are injured at alarming rates and are often left without the time or resources to do their jobs properly.
Keeping schools safe and clean is a core responsibility of a world class public education system. Unfortunately, the NSW system of privatised contracts undermines both cleaning and employment standards by incentivising companies to engage a in race-to-the-bottom to be awarded contracts, and then systematically cut costs in order to make a profit.
Cleaners and their union, the United Workers Union, are calling on the NSW Government to create thousands of quality jobs all across NSW by ending the failed contracting model and employing cleaners directly.
Why is this important?
• Cleaners live in every corner of the state – cleaning over 2000 public schools, TAFE
campuses and thousands of other government buildings
• They are paid fractionally more than the minimum wage
• Cleaners' excessive workloads can equate to as little as 43 seconds to complete each of
the hundreds of tasks they are required to each shift
• School cleaners have one highest workers compensation premiums in the state! Keeping
our class rooms clean shouldn’t be a dangerous job!
• NSW tax-payers are expected to pay the contractors more than half-a-billion dollars in
2024. Every dollar from this that goes towards CEO bonuses, share buy-backs and
shareholders’ profits, is a dollar that isn’t going into a cleaners pocket.
• 2024 marks thirty years since the NSW Government outsourced the cleaning of schools and government buildings. Cleaners can’t continue to wait for safe and secure jobs.
All workers deserve a fair wage and to go home in one piece. The best way to ensure this is by bringing school cleaners back in house once again.