Late last Saturday afternoon, and the queue is growing outside Tate Modern. They’re here for the exhibition of Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy. There’s no ducking the sponsor, EY (Ernst & Young): its name is emblazoned on ads, plastered across the gallery cafe and on every £22 ticket (dropping to a mere £20 if you’re unemployed). All is audio-guided, gift-shopped and regimented with a smile. Until a siren goes off.
Massed outside the gallery’s doors are around three dozen people. They are beating drums, blaring on vuvuzelas. A megaphone tells us that at the City firm bankrolling this exhibition, office cleaners face losing their jobs to save a bit of cash; that same business raked in tens of billions of pounds in revenue last year. Cleaners chant: “Ernst & Young, shame on you!”
One of Britain’s biggest museums has turned into something between an industrial dispute and a carnival. After obediently filing past framed pictures and curated erudition, European baby boomers happily rubberneck these largely Latin-American protesters. A boy behind me whispers to his mum, “What on earth is going on?” One security guard tries to clear the hall, before capitulating to the general impassiveness. Smiling down on the scene must be Pablo himself, lifelong communist and author of the aphorism, “Art is never chaste. Art is dangerous.” After a half-hour standoff, the cleaners are cajoled out, still megaphoning and handing out leaflets. Smartphone cameras are flashing every few seconds. What those pictures capture are the extraordinary beginnings of a vital battle.
Saturday’s protest was staged by the Independent Workers of Great Britain: a tiny, scrappy trade union I’ve been reporting on since 2011 as it has fought for the rights of cleaners and cycle couriers and Uber drivers. It has faced down smug university vice-chancellors and lavishly paid bosses of outsourcing companies – and, time after time, bulldozed them into defeat.
In a political culture that mists up over the white working class, the IWGB has been one of the few outfits to cotton on to the fact that in today’s London, a working-class person will as likely as not be a migrant woman, battling not just class snobbery and sexist behaviour but on occasion racist bile to boot. Along with others, such as the equally small and scrappy United Voices of the World, it has changed the face of industrial relations in our booming zero-hours jobs market. “The old complacent union logic says: ‘These migrant workers can’t organise, and if they do organise they can’t win’,” says Jamie Woodcock, an Oxford University researcher on precarious work. “And what these tiny unions have shown is, actually, they can do both.”
In keeping with IWGB tradition, this fight is directed against both the office where the cleaners actually work and their direct employer, the outsourcing company ISS, which they fear is seeking to make them redundant. The union’s custom is to make these “invisible”, low-paid workers visible. Only now, by flashmobbing art shows sponsored by EY, are Britain’s precarious workers taking on their biggest and most important targets yet. EY and ISS are both multibillion-dollar global companies that service other massive multinationals. They help shape the business world the rest of us have to live in.
Where university managers ineptly ape private-sector practices such as outsourcing, EY invents and markets them. On its website is a typical PowerPoint presentation that lists the benefits of outsourcing for its clients: no social security contributions, no employee protection laws and no protection against dismissal. Employers can shuck off all such tiresome responsibilities, leaving the rest of society to pick up the tab by topping up poverty pay, stumping up for welfare benefits and plugging the tax gap.
But then, EY can be a tad careless about its social obligations. These are the accountants who invented a £30m tax-avoidance scheme for big companies that the government defeated in court in 2016. As auditor for Google, it was hauled in front of MPs in 2013 to explain why the internet giant was paying so little tax in this country. It and the other big accountants were lashed in the resulting parliamentary report for displaying “no clarity” on where they “draw the line between acceptable tax planning and aggressive tax avoidance”.
Yet the Tate is apparently happy to help EY launder its reputation by plastering its name as a sponsor of good works across the country. Neither organisation would say how much this sponsorship deal is worth (or, indeed, answer any of my other questions), but the gallery’s sponsorship deal with BP came in at £350,000 for most years between 2007 and 2011. So, at reportedly less than 0.5% of the Tate’s annual income, the company that brought us the giant oil spill of Deepwater Horizon bought itself a lot of reputation for a very reasonable price.
EY claims its sponsorship of the Tate is part of its “commitment to building a better working world”. When I tell that to one of its cleaners, Isabella, she laughs sardonically. She helps clean its headquarters every evening. Wielding heavy vacuum cleaners has left her with a shoulder injury that makes it hard for her to sleep at night. The other thing that keeps her awake at night is the prospect of losing her job. That’s why we’re in her flat talking, even though she’s scared witless of reprisals from her employer.
In the past few weeks, ISS has warned staff against “unofficial strikes” (there have been none, nor does the IWGB plan any). I have seen an ISS letter listing five different criminal offences related to industrial action. These threats mean I am not giving Isabella’s real name. Rather than answer questions about this correspondence, ISS said: “It is our sincere desire that we will avoid the need for redundancy and that suitable alternative employment can be found within ISS for any affected individual.” This makes the entire redundancy process sound like an accident the company is having to weather rather than cuts it is opting to make.
Isabella’s two sparky daughters are in the flat’s one bedroom watching cartoons. Lose her job, and Isabella thinks they’ll have to move to a studio. But if her colleagues are let go instead, she will have to work far harder for the same money. EY’s only comment is that it supports the London Living Wage, “and this is part of our contractual agreement with ISS”. As it is, Isabella spends all her money on her daughters – she buys herself no clothes, no treats. She tells me about the office she cleans – “so fancy, with beautiful plants and paintings. Those people work in a magic circle.” As for herself, “I think I am at the bottom of society.”
Imagine what it must be like to wake up every day feeling like this. Imagine going to work in one of the richest companies in one of the wealthiest cities in the world and coming away without a single penny to spend on yourself at the end of the month. Imagine losing even that in order to save two of the world’s biggest businesses a bit more money.
Isabella joined a union only a month ago, and she is already attending meetings about how to fight the cuts. I remember her waving a placard in a museum where she had never previously spent a single afternoon. And I think that she and her colleagues may very well win their fight.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
