The Guardian

Managers, to your mops

I read with great interest your article about how poorly cleaners are being treated by a company called Churchill Group, which manages Facebook’s London offices (“Union activist who led protests against Facebook fears for job”, News, last week). Cleaners say that they were told to clean a washroom with five lavatory cubicles and a shower in one minute and 30 seconds. A spokesperson for Churchill Group responded that “each task has been timed and undertaken by our own management to ensure they are realistic and achievable”.

But it is one thing to time a specific job and another thing altogether to time these same tasks across a working day. Telling someone to clean a washroom in one minute 30 seconds might just be achievable if this were the only task they had to do, but this does not mean that one could clean 10 such washrooms in 15 minutes, any more than if someone could run a mile in four minutes they could run 10 miles in 40 minutes. No wonder the cleaners are exhausted.

I have a suggestion. Instead of timing cleaners while they work, why don’t managers work alongside the cleaners for a day – leading by example, as it were – and help them complete the tasks that they have to do for that day? Start and finish at the same time the cleaners do. Is it still possible to clean 12 floors in the time that was previously allocated to five? If so, Churchill can stick to its present policy; if not, it should revise its schedules.

Dr Kenneth Smith

London E2

Comment & Analysis

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2021-09-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://guardian.pressreader.com/article/282342567977125

Guardian/Observer