NSW cleaners WON!

Date: 16 October 2009

Sydney cleaners celebrated a historic win in their three and a half year campaign for fair pay and working conditions on Anti-Poverty day with a big cake and sparklers at Town Hall.

The trigger point has just been reached in NSW for the new Clean Start Collective Agreement - the point when the Agreement becomes effective in Sydney's CBD.

Under the Agreement over the next four years office cleaners' full time pay will increase to $21.17 an hour and the part-time night shift workers rate will increase to $24.35 an hour.

Cleaner Mostofa Tareque spoke to a crowd of more than 50 cleaners about how proud he was to be a cleaner in Sydney.

"Today is a special day for cleaners. We have won our Clean Start agreement," he said to loud cheers from the crowd.

"For many cleaners like me, the pay increase will help us a lot. It will help pay the rent, buy food and for university."

LHMU NSW Branch Executive Vice President Rebecca Reilly says the Clean Start fair deal for cleaners campaign was launched in 2006 because cleaners were caught in the cross-fire of a vicious price-cutting war in the contract cleaning industry.

"This race to the bottom saw cleaners' workloads increase and working conditions decline while maintenance of buildings suffered as standards dropped," she said.

"This win means cleaners are fundamentally changing this industry - a proud achievement for this invisible workforce of mostly migrant, undervalued, underpaid cleaners working in isolation in empty buildings."

Mostofa said he was proud to be union. "We are the union and together we have won our seven fair solutions to the cleaning industry." This includes: fair hours, fair workloads, fair pay, fair job security, fair treatment, fair leave and fair rights.

Rebecca says the next step is to finalise the paperwork. "This could take some weeks but after three and a half long, hard years of Clean Start campaigning this is a down-hill run," she said.

For further information

Contact:	Louise Tarrant, National Secretary
Union:	LHMU
WWW:	http://www.lhmu.org.au/

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