More than 300 Western Australian cleaning businesses are expected to be the targets of an Office of Workplace Services education and compliance campaign, aimed at ensuring workers are being paid correctly.
Individual business will be required to provide documents detailing time and wage records for all employees as part of a compliance and auditing process, which could result in legal proceedings if any breaches are identified.
OWS has identified the cleaning industry as vulnerable and in need of education and auditing due to its large reliance on casual and transient workers, and young and migrant employees.
The campaign also follows heavy union action nationwide, including the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union’s Cleanstart campaign, which is seeking to persuade cleaning contractors to sign onto union requirements for better pay and conditions.
Building Service Contractors Association of Australia WA executive director Ian Westoby said the association supported any effort to ensure cleaners weren’t underpaid.
Mr Westoby believes the OWS’s campaign is mainly focused on cleaning businesses in the eastern states, which he claims have a higher prevalence of impropriety among employers, including cash payments.
“WA is more isolated and a much smaller market. Everyone knows what everybody is doing, and if someone’s doing something wrong then you’d probably know about it,” Mr Westoby told WA Business News.
Mr Westoby said he hoped the OWS would pursue some of the smaller operators within the industry, following concerns raised from a Worksafe OH&S audit in early 2006 which pointed to difficulties in finding some smaller, publicity shy companies.
“We hope that, rather than just going to member lists of industry associations, they should go to the companies that don’t put themselves in the public arena,” he said.
LHMU secretary Dave Kelly said the contract cleaning industry was notorious for underpaying staff.
Mr Kelly said previous reports compiled by state government departments on the cleaning industry had pointed to high levels of non-compliance with existing awards.
“All they [the OWS] would have to do was look at the surveys already done by government departments to see that cleaning has a very poor record,” Mr Kelly said.
He said the cut-throat nature of the industry, with most of the work going out to tender to the lowest cost provider, has contributed to a drop in wages.
