Dirty toilets and dirtier welfare rorts: What I found at the bottom of the cistern and at the bottom of the system
If there's one thing dirtier than the rorts in the mutual obligations system, it's a public toilet after a day of heavy use. And Tess should know, because she has experience with both at the same time
Years ago, having been forced out of unsafe housing, I found myself at the mercy of Centrelink, at my most vulnerable, for support in getting back on my feet. Fresh into the system and still without a safe and consistent roof over my head, I had to agree to a “reduced” job search plan of only 10 jobs per fortnight (rather than 20), and was linked up with a Job Service Provider (JSP) to "help" me meet my mutual obligations.
This was after making one of Centrelink’s own social workers cry, which you'd think might merit some sort of reprieve from a "do this or get nothing" approach, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and the purpose of Centrelink is to punish people who try to access help. But between the welfare system and the most vulnerable in our society, there stands an impenetrable Ypres-like mud field of Job Services Providers and mutual obligations, and that's where I really got into the shit.
As a small mercy, I'd been registered with a Disability Employment Services (DES) Provider, thanks to a recent hospitalisation that required ongoing treatment. If you have any skin in the game, you'll know that's a mercy in name only, because disability employment services function the same as the regular ones, just with a higher caseload of ignored medical certificates and doctor's letters.
During my first mandatory appointment, I was identified as having barriers to employment, and told these would be entered into my record to help my mutual obligation requirements reflect my capacities. In theory, that means that someone who is, for example, unable to lift 25kg or stand for long periods is not forced to apply for jobs with those requirements. In reality, however, if there literally are no job listings that match your capacities, you have to apply for jobs outside those capacities, or else you're not meeting your mutual obligations and your payments get suspended. That doesn't sound like specialised support, does it? More like forcing people into work no matter their circumstances and punishing them if they don't comply or succeed? Again: the purpose of a system is what it does.
Within 36 hours of that first appointment, I received a call from my very excited JSP worker, requesting that I come in again as they'd secured me an interview. We'd gone over my skills and relevant work experience during my intake, so I had some hope that the role would be similar to the night shift servo work I'd been doing for the last several years. That hope was short-lived.
When I arrived at the interview and met my soon-to-be new boss, I found out it was a cleaning position at a nearby major shopping centre. It was night shift, at least, but the rationale seemed to be: "You mopped the floor and cleaned the toilet nightly at a servo, so you can mop several dozen floors in a night and clean several hundred toilets". Still, being young and incorrectly of a mind that my body could recover from most things I put it through, I agreed. I didn't even need to be coerced with the threat of payment suspension if I didn't accept the job they'd deemed me capable of; because, like the vast majority in my position, I genuinely wanted to work. Centrelink was only going to leave me with $20 after rent and bills when my first welfare payment finally came, and this was a full-time opportunity, allegedly with penalty rates. I confirmed I had safety cap boots and a hi-vis vest, signed my life away on the dotted line, and prepared for my first shift.
Night came and I followed the SMS instructions to arrive at a specific entrance and provide my employment details to the security guard, who let me in and directed me to the cleaning base of operations. Approaching in my hi-vis and work boots, I was waved inside without so much as a grunt, then pointed towards a service elevator bank, and told to hit the bottom. And I was about to. A similarly dressed man rode down with me. I thought he was a new coworker, but soon discovered he was the person I was replacing, and was there to ask for his pay. Not final pay, just pay. He'd never received any. When he brought this up, the man who'd interviewed me pretended not to understand his English, until he finally left in disgust. I was too stunned and nervous to say anything, and I still regret not standing up for him in that moment. These were the first few red flags of many; but, with that out of the way, I was introduced to my trainer, loaded up with a cleaning cart, and sent off to learn the ropes.
I learned a lot in my weeks at that job. I learned that, on average, at least one person a day has an accident that warrants abandoning their underwear in a shopping centre bathroom. I learned that we had to buy our own cleaning supplies out of pocket with no reimbursements. I learned how to harvest bumpers from the smokers’ areas, just outside the entryways and fire escapes, as a source of affordable tobacco. I learned that we were independent contractors of a major cleaning subcontractor, and our touted penalty rates were approximately a dollar twenty an hour for being on night shift – far below the standards of the industries I came from.
I learned how to love a cup of Blend 43 before the start of a shift and how to light a cigarette by shorting the battery on a floor buffing machine. I learned the secret passageways and service corridors of the shopping centre. And I learned that there are no clean surfaces in any of the bathrooms. Seriously, none – not even in the parents’ rooms or disabled toilets.
I don't know if you've ever counted up the bathrooms in your local centre and figured out how much time per toilet per shift is possible in a night of cleaning, but including floors and sinks and surfaces, the answer is well under a minute where I worked. Can you clean your toilet at home in under 60 seconds? Speed and efficiency were the rules of the day, and that meant wiping down to remove visible stains only – no actual sanitisation. In theory, we were supposed to be using a spray that did both, but as it was not supplied, I was doing the best I could with spray and wipe for most things and WD-40 for anything metal (another handy life hack I learned). This also meant one reusable wipe for every single surface in the place, and one mop for every single floor and some of the surfaces too. Every countertop, every grubby flush button, every seat and lid got the same wipe, and so did the parents’ changing tables and handrails in the disabled bathrooms. You could change wipes per floor but any more often than that and you'd run out in under a week. I was trained to use the mop on the couches in the fancy upper-level women's bathrooms and anything else that was too big a job for the wipes. "Clean enough" was good enough. There was no time for anything else, and absolutely no sanitisation.
If you are wondering if management was aware of all this, they absolutely were. Management consisted of: the guy who'd interviewed me and mocked an international student out of the room, at least one person paying our invoices, and one person in charge of the two of them, and however many other supervisors at shopping centres they had the contract for. And that contract was worth an eye-watering amount – something they drove home to us nightly in the "Clean enough is good enough! Faster! Better!" meetings.
There were about ten of us – the majority on some kind of visa and probably being exploited worse than me. Our combined incomes tapped out at under $400k/year. That left at least the same amount being paid annually to the cleaning contractor, for the (at minimum) three people involved at a higher level than us. Surely enough to pay us better than minimum wage plus a buck twenty, right? Surely enough to pay suppliers for refills of the chemicals we had useless MSDS folders for, or at least reimburse us for supplying our own? Surely enough to hire even one extra person and double the cleaning time available for each individual toilet? Objectively yes. But for whoever was securing those contracts and raking in six figures per shopping centre in pure unpaid wages and unprovided services: no, because that would mean less money for them.
An organised workforce could stand up to this. Confident workers, with full knowledge of their rights and appropriate standards for their efforts, could immediately flag what was wrong with the job and demand better conditions or walk away. And that's precisely why they exclusively hired Centrelink recipients and visa holders. The former have absolutely no choice: even if it's a morally sleazy and physically disgusting job, or turns out to be beyond your actual capabilities as a person with disabilities, turning down a chance to double your income is a breach of mutual obligations and results in absolutely no income at all.
And here's where it gets really gross: JSPs and employers both get money from the government for placing someone in paid work. They get a bonus if the person stays on for a certain amount of time, and they get even more if it's someone, like me, who’s been flagged as having barriers to employment. It's literally a captive workforce with a near-infinite pool of candidates as people fall prey to the system, because of one single moment of bad luck in their lives. If you've never been on Centrelink, I can't emphasise enough how much a JSP will not help you find work. They're happy to sit there with you on their books, collecting money while you jump through hoops, issuing breach notices for appointments they themselves set and then miss, and fraudulently hitting KPIs to continue collecting those sweet taxpayer welfare dollars.
You don’t need to take my word for it – their own staff have blown the whistle on the processes. In my case, I was already brought into the JSP office to interview for a job, within a few short days of going on their books. When you’re subject to this kind of rapid churn, whether or not you’ve been in the system yourself and learned all these dirty tricks firsthand, you can just feel that something even dodgier than their baseline operation is being done to you.
And sure enough, when my retention bonus had been paid to both the JSP and my employer, the negative reviews started pouring in. Centre management allegedly weren't happy with the level of cleanliness I was achieving on the job, despite getting faster and better at it with time and physical conditioning. Night after night I was then met with official notices that my efforts weren’t up to scratch, until, with as much dignity as I'd ever found evidence of in any of those bathrooms, I was let go. As with the bloke they'd never paid before me, it was time to make room for someone more profitable.
Just as easily as I’d been snapped up, I was spat back out into the system that didn’t want me depending on it, in worse physical shape than when I’d started, but back up to 20 applications per fortnight because I’d held full time work and thus been deemed capable. Those flags about my barriers to work remained, though, I did not find out until years later that a JSP automatically had me listed as suffering from a condition I’d long since cleared, among other incorrect information nobody had ever thought to re-verify or update. That explained why the process went on to repeat with several other employers – even for positions I’d found myself with no JSP assistance (i.e. all of them). Because from an employer’s point of view, why wouldn’t you do this to welfare recipients? It's literally free money in exchange for hiring and then firing someone – a process that can be repeated as often as you can keep the position open and bodies rotating through it.
You hear a lot in the media about the rorts in our welfare system, and people claiming benefits they have no entitlement to, so they can receive money without working. And this exists; but, as my story and the many others like it clearly demonstrate, the rorts are occurring entirely at the top. All it takes is one incorporated entity to form a good relationship with an MP and they can start collecting money as a registered JSP. Then, all a business needs is one good relationship with one of these JSPs to pull in tens of thousands a year in pure profit (gifted by the government) from hiring and firing desperate, vulnerable people. Multiply that by a few shopping centres and you're breaking six figures just off the backs of people who either desperately want to work, or despite their circumstances and abilities are forced to.
It doesn't just happen at your local shopping centre – there are businesses in every industry and at every level that do this. No person in this country is exempt from taxes, although a lot of corporations happily are; so, you and me and every worker, pensioner, and Centrelink recipient alike all pay for the people who have those connections, run these systems, and sit around collecting money in exchange for literally nothing. Not to actually help put people in long-term sustainable fulfilling work, not to provide clean and sanitary facilities to major shopping centres, and certainly not to ever scrub a toilet in their entire lives.
It wasn't always like this (we used to have the Commonwealth Employment Service, which did everything our current system doesn't), and it doesn't have to be like this. The Morrison government raised payment rates and abolished mutual obligations and means-testing during the Covid lockdowns. This wasn't a humanitarian or even purely economic play on their part. Tens of thousands of Australians were forced to interact with our welfare system for the first time and changes were instantly rubber-stamped to ensure these voters maintained their illusions that Centrelink payments are easy to get and adequate to live on.
But financially and legislatively, these changes were proven to be not only possible but beneficial for an absolutely massive proportion of the population compared to pre- and post-pandemic-measure baselines. The rate can be raised again, even higher given our repeated budget surpluses under Labor, and mutual obligations and the JSP system can be abolished – failing to do so delays our national development, and keeps employment non-competitive and rife with exploitation, because, with the unions watered down by Howard and payments so low, the threat of unemployment traps people in jobs like I've described and worse, lowering competition and suppressing wages across all sectors. It stifles our creative arts industries and dulls our cultural exports, with performers and creatives struggling to make ends meet with conventional employment alone during these concurrent cost-of-living and housing crises. Your favourite musicians are working day jobs rather than performing at your local, and new talent is going completely undeveloped and undiscovered.
This system traps us in a regressive last-century patriarchal national shame of domestic violence, with women unable to flee violent partners safely, resulting in a national death toll averaging one woman dead at the hands of a man known to her every single week. Public housing is torn down or sold off and never replaced, public services and accessibility are constantly scaled down and wound back with assurances private charities are picking up the slack, while a man who surfed through the election on tears over his upbringing by a poor single mum on the pension ignores expert report after industry recommendation, all of them saying the same thing: Raise the welfare rate like you campaigned for the whole time you were in opposition.
A rising tide lifts all boats, but our current government sees people overboard and won't even throw them a life preserver. Instead, thousands of us are funneled into private job providers like Sarina Russo, who earn a killing off of us despite doing nothing, and make political donations larger than I can earn in a year as a cleaner. The rot can't be excised, the system must be abolished. And every day that fails to happen hurts us all, as individuals and as a country. It hurts all of us except those interconnected moneyed elites – and, after reading this, do you really care what happens to them? If you do, don't worry, we can tear it all down and raise the rate and they'll be fine. They wouldn't have to collect unemployment payments even if we stripped them of their ill-gotten assets, because I know for a fact, there are plenty of jobs to be had scrubbing toilets, and they could stand to learn how to do it properly.
Tess is a disabled trans artist, Australian Writers’ Guild member, and anti-poverty activist who fights for intersectionality, because none of us are free until all of us are free. She lives on unceded Gadigal land, and thanks to pandemic assistance was able to become a Creative Australia awarded director, producer, and animator. You can support her work at ko-fi or Patreon and read more of her thoughts on Twitter.
If you’ve been exploited by any of the rots articulated here, please get in touch with us: media@auwu.org.au
