ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Cleaning staff across five Belgian hospitals are protesting against a government decision to exclude them from a COVID-19 bonus scheme.

The federal government of Belgium recently announced that it would be granting hospital staff an "incentive bonus" of €985 for working throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

However, the bonuses are only being paid to permanent employees while cleaning staff members tend to be outsourced and employed by external companies. As a result, some 1,000 outsourced cleaners were excluded from the bonus scheme, according to unions.

Around 40 cleaners recently gathered in the cellars of Ghent University Hospital with masks over their faces to symbolise their sense of invisibility. And outsourced staff members across several hospitals have been putting up banners in medical institutions bearing the slogan "Are we invisible?"

Trade unions ACV and ABVV initially believed the outsourced cleaners had simply been forgotten. But following several letters to MPs and ministers and after a parliamentary question was raised on the subject there has still been no sign of a resolution.

The unions have now urged the federal minister of public health Frank Vandenbroucke to grant the "forgotten" bonuses and have warned that this is the first phase of a series of planned actions, adding that: "if the cleaners are still not listened to, others will follow."