ABSTRACT
Story 1: It’s dark, cold and its 10.30 at night. A staff member working late on a university campus in a comfortable middle class suburb in an industrially developed country switches off the computer, leaves the place unlocked for the friendly cleaner who speaks no English, and heads for home. Out in the car park, he passes her children asleep under coats in the minibus that ferries these cleaners around the sites for their night work. A month later, a different set of cleaners appear; another contractor employing recent migrants had undercut again with an even lower price by using less cleaners or setting more work to be done for the same money. The university that contracts out their cleaning takes health, safety and well-being seriously; they run a crèche for use by staff and students, give pensions and subsidize health checks, and have a health nurse that they will send to help permanent staff set their video display unit screens at the right height.
