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Living in a blame culture |
Latest news from the UK cleaning sector courtesy of ECJ's correspondent.
Retailer WH Smith has decided to involve its staff in direct cleaning tasks which has national implications and raises all kinds of diverse questions. Are the staff there to serve the customers or clean the store?
The headline tells us that staff will ‘sweep’ the store, which is one of the few jobs accepted as part of cleaning by the general public. Dust however rises and the whole concept causes some concern and not just from the Cleaning and Support Services Association (CSSA). Will costs really be reduced? Will the appearance of the store improve?
If the experiment fails to produce a clean or better yet a cleaner store, we can expect negative headlines and blame.
For we live in a blame culture. The newspapers and the TV tell people to react with ‘fury’ and ‘anger’ with a smidgen of ‘fear’. Those who may or may not have not been doing a very good job are hounded out of office whilst those just as responsible remain.
What does this have to do with the cleaning industry? We have amongst our staff many of the poverty stricken and the dispossessed as well as being a receptacle for our fair share illegal immigrants.
We need to do more for our staff than we do, take more interest in the community from which they come. We generally now pay good wages commensurate with the job but many have yet to adopt the approach of the caring employer. This is not easy when the labour turnover is still hideously high but it can be done.
Raise profile
We have to raise the profile of our industry and we are well placed to do it. The media (cleaning media excepted) likes to use cleaning as an 'Aunt Sally'. The British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc), CSSA and the British Cleaning Council (BCC) and other reputable organisations are asked to take part and make comments on a pseudo investigative programme. These programmes are designed to be controversial, to shock, to entertain. They are there to fill schedules, to bolster profits, salaries and expense accounts.
To those who are asked to take part in an ‘exposé’, we offer Mr Punch’s advice to those about to marry – don’t.
Remember there are thousands of good hardworking employees, some working for your company who do not deserve to be smeared with innuendo. The cleaning industry needs good publicity. Very occasionally it gets it but not often because it is about hard graft which many of the public have forgotten how to do.
This is the time of the annual Toilet Lament over the lack of facilities, the condition of those that there are and the government inertia. Apart from wondering as always why the government is always supposed to do everything it is also the fact that there is mooted a change of an Act of Parliament in this area. It was put on the Statute book in 1936 only 73 years ago. Is it now time for a new Act which is practical and takes into account today’s living conditions - even if the toilets have not changed since 1936 life has. |
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