Cleaners, call-centre workers, outsourced care workers, security guards: they are among the essential workers who have kept our societies going since Covid-19 hit.
Now is the time for action to bring their working lives up to a decent standard.
Understaffing of nursing homes and failing hygiene in schools have become a too common predicament. Public procurement accounts for large market shares in sectors such as cleaning, security and call-centres. It is no coincidence that these very sectors, which are amongst the lowest paid and most precarious, are also amongst the lowest in terms of collective bargaining coverage.
More than half of public tenders in the European Union only look at the price tag to select which company gets the contract. In these cases, service quality, working conditions or environmental impact are simply not considered. As a result, our public procurement rules incentivise companies to undercut each other on working conditions. Companies that are ready to cut costs at the expense of decent work win public contracts. These cuts are made on workers’ pay and conditions, putting them far below living wages as well as safe staffing levels or sufficient health and safety equipment. This is simply not the type of competition we should be rewarding.
The simple reality is that to provide quality services, essential workers need good working conditions. It is ultimately the public who pay the price of poor service delivery.
Low-pay and precariousness of essential workers is a direct result of barriers to them bargaining collectively. When workers have a say they use it to defend their interests as well as those of the communities they live in and serve.
Our proposal to make public contracts conditional on collective bargaining is in fact a win-win-win. We know that collective bargaining is the most effective way of lifting workers’ pay and conditions in the long run. Research suggests that extending collective bargaining would put an additional €25 billion per year in the pockets of working people. By spending this money locally in their communities, this could be crucial to revitalising the real economy at this crucial time.
Public procurement amounts to €2 trillion per year in the EU, representing 14 per cent of the GDP. We cannot bypass the opportunity to use public money to ensure decent work and decent quality of services. We must set a floor of minimum decency for essential workers by ensuring that public contracts only go to companies that have collective bargaining agreements with their workers.
