ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Christian Bouzols, ECJ’s French correspondent, reports on the Rhônes-Alpes region cleaning sector, which accounts for around one-tenth of the total.

With a turnover of about €1.3 billion in 2015 and 53,500 employees, the cleaning companies of the Rhônes-Alpes region in southern France account for about a tenth of the economic weight of the French cleaning sector (€13 million turnover and 485,000 workers).

The 2,200 cleaning companies of the region (13,800 for the whole of France) are distributed among a small number of large groups of 100 or more employees (five per cent of companies and 51 per cent of employment), a much larger number of SMEs (27 per cent of companies and 38 per cent of employment) and a great number of micro enterprises of between one and nine workers (68 per cent of businesses, accounting for 11 per cent of the workforce).

Cleaning jobs are undergoing rapid changes, due in particular to the growing use of robotic solutions. But the sector continues to suffer from a rather poor image. To face this situation, the cleaning sector is turning to tasks related to sustainable development, to diversifying its activities and to creating new services aiming to make best use of the presence of cleaners within the premises of
client companies.

These services could be the management of mail, the moving of materials, logistical tasks, the internal displacement of equipment, stock management, the preparation of meeting rooms, the care of green spaces, the technical maintenance of premises, etc. Thanks to policies of this kind turnovers have been increasing by two to three per cent a year and employment by two per cent.

Among its attempts to diversify, the cleaning sector is giving much importance to the management of waste. In doing so it is availing itself of a new regulation which came into effect in July 2016, requiring all services companies that produce more than 1,100 litres of waste a week to sort them.

The French cleaning federation (Fédération des entreprises de la propreté - FEP) has produced a tool called Smart Tri (Smart Sorting) enabling its members to inform their clients of their regulatory obligations in terms of waste management, to produce an audit of the waste production/management activities of client companies, and to prepare estimates for the performance of the relevant services.

“As far as we’re concerned this is clearly a business tool that allows us to give more value to our trade in the eyes of clients and to grow our turnover,” says Vincent Fisher, president of FEP for the Rhône-Alpes region.

Efforts by the cleaning trade to modernise itself at the human level and to rank among the most appealing activities have still not managed to change some negative views that cling to the trades that are linked to the cleaning sector. “I really love my branch of business! It’s an area where the human factor still plays a fundamental role, but which doesn’t project the image that it deserves!” muses Vincent Fischer. It’s a sector where profit margins are small but where minimum wages exceed the official minimum wage (SMIC) by 2.7 per cent and where a premium is paid at the end of the year.