Gail Rego’s Jacobin interview with two European cleaners — Hayat Elhore at the European Parliament in Brussels, Lisa Stenson at an Irish hospital — is really about what procurement rules do to a job. Since the late 1970s, cleaners once employed directly by municipalities and public authorities have worked for private contractors competing on price. EU public bodies now spend over €2 trillion a year, about 15 percent of GDP, buying goods and services from private firms, and the rules governing those awards have produced a race to the bottom.

The consequences show up as arithmetic:

  • Three hours that once covered twenty offices now covers two floors — roughly fifty offices
  • Work is measured in square metres, not in what is actually inside each room
  • Backs, wrists, and knees give out, which is why a central demand at the October 2024 protest by thousands of cleaners outside the European Parliament was the right not to work until sixty-five
  • Contracts churn, hours are reorganized after six months, and undeclared subcontracting spreads

Stenson supplies the missing half of the argument, which is that this is skilled work. Her hospital sent all cleaning staff on a four-week health-related course carrying a Level 5 certificate, with an assignment, a skills demonstration, and a written exam. She cleans incubators, blood pressure monitors, ECG machines, and resuscitators daily, and works to a 90 percent audit threshold. Her line is the thesis of the piece: “the only time people notice what a cleaner does is when she doesn’t do it.”

Elhore’s route through it was collective. She became a union rep because women with migrant backgrounds often couldn’t make themselves heard in French, and used the role to win daytime schedules for mothers and to defend workers facing disciplinary warnings. Stenson’s Irish union, SIPTU, negotiates through sectoral Joint Labour Committees covering cleaning, catering, and security — which is a working answer to price-driven contracting: set terms for a whole sector instead of fighting site by site.

Both note that the appreciation was real during COVID and has since disappeared, even as the training and audit requirements went up. The comparison to the United States is uncomfortable and worth making: the same devaluation of “low-skilled” work, the same dependence on workers whose labor is only visible in its absence.