During the lockdown, there was a cohort of workers who toiled through the night in what was described as a ‘fairly thankless job that is taken for granted day to day.’ Those workers were cleaners, who decontaminated buses and trains so that commuters could remain safe. We didn’t clap for them on our doorsteps, nor did they even receive the inadequate praise we gave to supermarket shelf stackers or lorry drivers.
It is telling that these workers were the subject of Professor Phil Banfield’s disdain earlier this week. The Head of the British Medical Association’s council appeared outraged that junior doctors – whose takeaway salaries average around £37,000 (not including a pension) – could in theory earn less than he pays his cleaner.
We’ve come to expect this kind of snobbery from certain sections of British society, which have a growing hostility towards the working classes and a mountain of self-righteousness. Of course, it shouldn’t surprise us that a militant union struggles to grasp the contribution cleaners make to our economy; we’d need a nationalised cleaning service for that. Only then, perhaps, would the likes of Banfield complain that the wages of our cleaners and housekeepers have fallen in real terms. According to the most recent ONS data, those working as cleaning and housekeeping managers and supervisors are earning on average £20,000 a year. Cleaners and domestics are earning less, at around £17,400 a year.
But we don’t have a British Cleaning Association, and their pay hasn’t been politicised. We don’t have a bidding war between politicians over who can shower frontline housekeepers with more praise. Their salaries are determined by supply and demand in the labour market – just as it should be in the NHS.
Cleaning is a big business. The annual revenue from the sector in the UK amounted to around £55 billion in 2018 – though this fell significantly during the pandemic. The industry directly employs 970,000 people, but if we include all cleaning-related jobs the figure jumps to nearly 1.5 million. They make up 5 per cent of the UK workforce, making the sector one of the largest in the country.
Lockdowns created a bizarre dividing line between ‘key’ workers and everyone else. But in a complex, modern economy all kinds of jobs are ‘key’. Hospitals need doctors, but they also need beds. They need companies that manufacture things like adjustable side rails, and those companies need designers and HR staff and finance directors. There are few worthless jobs, to paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s just that we can fail to acknowledge their value.
Of course, the work of health professionals is incredibly important. But that does not automatically mean that they should have higher pay. Whenever the BMA compares the remuneration of doctors to baristas or barmen, it is worth pointing out that doctors do not stay on their starting pay for long. Medical graduates begin to out-earn most other graduates fairly soon after leaving university, and they sustain that lead in the long-term. Employer pension contributions in the public sector are roughly three times those in the private.
If we had a functioning labour market within the NHS, rather than a centrally-planned socialist one, groups wouldn’t be pitted against one another in this way. We wouldn’t have systems of rewarding and motivating staff that are outdated, inflexible and frequently unfair. We would have greater pay variation by geography or specialty. We could plug shortages with the offer of higher wages. We would also have better outcomes for patients – many of whom cannot afford cleaners, and many of whom will be cleaners.
But given an NHS labour market would also loosen the BMA’s iron grip, it is fated to become yet another healthcare reform consigned to the scrapheap. We do value doctors, and we recognise their contribution to society. But perhaps doctors’ unions should display some respect for the people who pick up after them as well.
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