Hotel cleaning immigrants exploited in London

Hotel cleaners in some of London’s top hotels are paid less than half the minimum wage to service rooms that cost up to £400 a night.

An investigation by The Times has revealed a pattern of ruthless exploitation in which immigrants desperate for work are paid a pittance for their labour at some of the capital’s luxury establishments.

A number of workers have told The Times that gangmasters are fiddling employees’ timesheets so that they earn only £100 for a 40-hour week.

Agencies providing labour to hotels claim to be paying an hourly rate, but instead pay staff by the number of rooms they clean. They effectively guarantee a low rate by setting target numbers impossibly high.

Increasingly, agencies are also insisting that employees are self-employed to avoid paying the minimum wage. Barbara Malyska, 24, a Polish worker, joined an agency that employed her in an East London hotel. Her contract stated that she would be paid £5.73 per hour (the national minimum wage) but she was told that she would be paid per room cleaned. “They cheat all the people like that,” she said.

In a report published today, Oxfam says there are clear indications that gangmasters have moved into the hospitality, care and construction industries. Those workers affected include Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks and Latvians, from the so-called A8 European Union countries whose citizens have freedom to work in Britain. Many, though, lack the language skills to find better work. English is not required for hotel agency cleaning work.

Romanians are particularly vulnerable. As newer members of the EU they face employment restrictions, lacking the rights of A8 countries. They can work only as self-employed, and gangmasters can more easily avoid paying them the minimum wage.

A cleaning supervisor employed at a hotel with executive suites and rooms overlooking the Thames said that over the past year most new positions were filled by self-employed Romanians. “Half of the forty chambermaids are Romanian — a year ago, there were only three or four.”

In some instances Romanian workers are paid as little as £1 per hour.

Cleaners say they are given work that they know they cannot complete in the alloted time but they say that it is better than having no job.

A Polish supervisor who works in a chain hotel near Heathrow said some workers cleaned only ten rooms in seven hours. Each room cleaned earns them approximately £1.70 and they earn only £17 gross for a day’s work.

Oxfam said these practices are becoming commonplace. It wants an extension of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority’s remit to cover these sectors. The GLA was set up to protect workers in agriculture, food processing and shellfish gathering after the Morecambe Bay tragedy where 23 Chinese cockle pickers died in 2004.

Kate Wareing, Oxfam’s director of UK poverty, said: “We would argue that there should be one employment rights body to make sure rights are enforced across all sectors where agency staff are being employed. There are specific problems in the care, construction and hospitality industries.”

Such a call is resisted by the hotel industry, which wants to avoid additional regulation. Bob Cotton, the chief executive of the British Hospitality Association, said: “There are sufficient laws already. People shouldn’t be paid below the minimum wage, be it through a third party or whether you are employed directly. You have to be paid the minimum wage per hour, not shift pay or how many rooms you have cleaned. What difference would a GLA approach make?”

Mr Cotton rejected claims that such practices were commonplace. “We’ve had two incidents in 18 months . . . and as soon as this was brought to light they changed their practice straight away.” He added: “The self-employment issue is a different technical matter. If technically someone is self-employed and they wish to pay themselves £2 an hour — you might argue that that is their choice.”

Kevin Curran, chairman of the Unite union’s London hotel workers branch, said problem cases were on the increase because hotel cleaning was almost entirely outsourced.- Times