Welcome on board

As M/S Silja Symphony berths at the quay of the Olympia Terminal in Helsinki on a March Thursday morning, 65 employees of cleaning company SOL Palvelut Oy in red-and-yellow overalls are waiting in the tube leading to the ferry.

They have five hours in which to clean the ship.

The boarding bridge is quickly connected and the cleaners vanish deep into the bowels of the 12-storey ferry. Rahman Masumur, 37, who is in charge of cleaning the cabins on Deck 5, marches into the labyrinthine cabin corridors and starts by checking a very specific group of cabins.

With 11 years of experience cleaning Silja Line ferries, Masumur can predict just by glancing at the work plan which cabins may be in a state of chaos. Nowadays, he works as a team leader in charge of ensuring that work gets done on a certain floor.

‘If there are several cabins in a row where all four beds have been slept in, this indicates a big group, a party crew,’ he says.

‘I’ve seen unbelievable things over the years. Just last week, for example, the floor in one of the cabins was soiled with faeces. I had to ask a co-worker to clean it up.’

Today, the cabins are in tolerable condition. One party does seem to have destroyed three cases of beer and thrown the empty cans onto the wall-to-wall carpet.

As the ferry arrived from Stockholm half-empty, Masumur’s team only consists of two workers, Mohammed Asho, 37, and Belayet Khan, 27. They are also from Bangladesh. Both have been cleaning Silja Line ferries for just over a year.

Asho starts by collecting rubbish. After the first two cabins, the refuse sack is already almost full. Next, Asho collects used sheets and towels and takes them on roller cages to the fifth floor lobby, from where workers called ‘clothes pegs’ take them out to the car deck.

All the laundry for washing must be collected by 12.30 pm. That’s when a lorry takes it to the West Harbour and further on to be washed in Estonia.

Today, Masumur has divided his team’s work such that Asho will clean 16 cabins while Khan will deal with 27.

The difference can be explained by cabin users: Khan is responsible for cabins used by lorry drivers, which are invariably tidier than the rest and generally have just one bed to make.

This has been taken into account when planning the work. The time reserved for each driver’s cabin is 12 minutes, whereas a regular cabin needs to be ready in a quarter of an hour.

In that time, a cleaner collects the rubbish, changes the sheets and towels, makes the beds, vacuums the floor, dusts, scrubs away any stains and fetches new disposable cups, tax-free price lists and drinks discount vouchers from storage.

‘The work is physically very hard,’ Masumur says.

Masumur is originally from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh with a population of 15 million. In Dhaka, he studied information technology at university while also working for his family business, which sells floor tiling to China and Malaysia. In 2005, he moved to Vaasa to finish his Master’s degree studies.

He has not been able to find work in his own field in Finland.

‘I used to apply for jobs for a while, but then I gave up.’

Now he is trying to provide for his family with three children on his €1,600 monthly pay. He works six days a week. The hourly pay for ship cleaners is 10.20 euros.

‘We are paid less than hotel housekeepers and I don’t understand why,’ Masumur says.

‘We have tried to ask the trade union and our bosses about it, but the answers are not clear. I’ve been told that cleaners’ wages are divided into three tiers and we are on the lowest one.’

A foreign worker who does not know the language can easily be left with contradictory or false information – and that’s no wonder. The Collective Agreement for the Facilities Services Sector was revised in 2011, when a new pay system was introduced. It has as many as ten job grades. The criteria for determining pay in each grade have been scored and, according to the collective agreement, wages are based on these, but jobs are scored within companies between each employer and employee. Ultimately, it is the employer that decides on scoring.

As a result, SOL ship cleaners are considered to fall within job grade 2, whereas hotel housekeepers are generally in grade 3. SOL chief shop steward Janne Forsman shares Masumur’s astonishment about the pay differential between housekeepers and ship cleaners, although the gap has become narrower and narrower over the years. Forsman finds the scoring system odd.

‘Different firms may have scored the same jobs quite differently. I think that cleaning cabins and hotel rooms involves very similar work, except that it may be more difficult to clean confined cabins, which are also dirtier in many cases.’

Some explanations for the pay differential can also be found in recent history, when all hotel housekeepers were still on hotel payrolls and their employment contracts were governed by the Collective Agreement for the Hotel and Restaurant Industry. When hotels started to outsource their cleaning services, the trade union demanded that hotel housekeepers remain under their old collective agreement in terms of their pay, rather than being transferred under the Collective Agreement for the Facilities Services Sector with its lower pay levels. In the end, the new pay system introduced this change as well, but even then housekeepers’ wages were not reduced. Over the years, the pay gap has become narrower and narrower.

All SOL ship cleaners are so-called service experts, i.e. cleaners doing basic cleaning work. Nowadays, Masumur works as a team leader in charge of ensuring that the cabins on a certain ship floor are cleaned. This work pays about one extra euro per hour. However, the increment is only payable for three hours in a five-hour shift.

Regardless of his long career at SOL, Masumur’s hourly pay is the same as that of cleaners who are just starting out. With the new pay system, seniority increments were included in the pay determined by the job grade.

Nevertheless, SOL uses bonuses, which are not paid by all employers. On top of his basic pay, Masumur may receive a monthly bonus of 48 euros, but this requires the entire team’s cleaning performance to be absolutely impeccable. Any shortcomings may result in loss of a bonus for a period of half a month. In their own lingo, cleaners call a lost bonus a ‘fine’.

‘I haven’t had a fine for a long time,’ Masumur says.

Around noon, the cleaners take a fifteen minute break, the only one in their shift. In the lorry drivers’ mess room, there is some coffee and leftovers from drivers’ breakfasts: sweet buns, fruit and bread rolls without any fillings.

Some have brought their own packed lunch. Masumur settles for a cup of coffee.

‘I only have one warm meal a day, right after my shift.’

A buzz of conversation in many languages is drifting around the tables. The majority of ship cleaners are Bangladeshi and Nepalese, but there are about a dozen different nationalities in all.

‘When I started as a cleaner in 1998, Finns still accounted for about one half. Now, their proportion is about two per cent,’ says SOL service supervisor Jani Korhonen, who has just sat down at the same table as Masumur.

In the past, SOL used to bring ship cleaners in directly from abroad, but now they only do so in exceptional cases. According to Korhonen, SOL mostly recruits foreigners already residing in Finland. Some hold permanent residence permits, while others have residence permits for employed people or students. At present, there are also three asylum seekers cleaning ships.

‘I’ve been in charge of work permits for five years, and we’ve brought in a few workers during that time. They have always been relatives of existing employees,’ Korhonen explains.

As service supervisor, Korhonen is responsible for preparing daily work plans and assigning shifts together with his colleague Kladis Ahvenainen. Shifts are always assigned two weeks ahead, but there may still be some changes for the coming week on Mondays. Everything depends on passenger volumes on the ferries.

Masumur explains that cleaners are guaranteed 5 to 37 hours of work per week under their employment contracts. The latest shift rota is hanging on the wall of the corridor leading to the cleaners’ social facilities, showing that most cleaners work 25-hour weeks. Some work 30 weekly hours, but a few only have 10 or 15 hours.

‘Those are usually students, who mostly work at weekends,’ says Korhonen.

Ship cleaners are not offered so-called zero-hours contracts. The minimum is five weekly working hours, i.e. one shift.
At ten euros per hour, you obviously cannot earn all that much, even if you managed to get the maximum number of hours. As a result, many cleaners work a second job – either before or after their ship cleaning shift. 14-hour working days are not uncommon.

On Deck 5 of Silja Symphony, Belayet Khan continues toiling away. He has lived in Finland for eighteen months and ship cleaning is his first job here.
Khan is a trained IT engineer, who started his studies in Bangladesh and completed his Master’s degree in Estonia.
Khan cleans Silja Line ferries five days a week. He makes about 1,200 euros per month.

‘It’s fairly little in Finland,’ Khan says.

Luckily, his wife also has a job – cleaning an Ikea store in Espoo. His wife is studying for a Master of Science degree in Technology at Tampere University of Technology and plans to apply for work in her own field as soon as she graduates.

A job in IT is Khan’s dream, but even he himself is fully aware that it’s difficult to get one in Finland if you do not know the Finnish language.

‘If I can’t find a job here, I can go looking elsewhere, or go back to Bangladesh. After all, that’s where my whole family is.’

Or not quite the whole family: Khan’s younger brother has moved to Kuwait and found a job as a taxi driver. Guest workers coming from poor countries are expected to send money to relatives back home, but Khan does not have any money to spare.

‘Maybe someday.’

He ended up as a ship cleaner after hearing about the job through the grapevine. There are a lot of Bangladeshi people working on ships and news of vacancies travels fast. SOL also likes to recruit them, because they have a reputation for being hardworking people.

Khan describes a cleaner’s work as OK. The work crew is nice and their team spirit is good. The downsides include low pay and physical stress.

‘After the first couple of days, I was sore all over, but then my body got used to it.’

During a period of just over a year, he has walked hundreds of times through the tube into Silja’s white ferries, which Finns associate with a break from the daily grind, buffet tables groaning with food and colourful drinks in a night club.

Khan has only seen the remains of the parties. He has never actually travelled to Sweden on a Silja ferry. However, that time will come soon.

‘I have to renew my passport in May. The nearest Bangladesh Embassy is in Stockholm and I’m taking a ferry over there.’

SOL on ferries

Clients: shipping lines Tallink Silja (since 2003) and Viking Line.
Employees: about 230, with 130 assigned to Tallink Silja.
Employees of immigrant origin: 98%; there are three Finns assigned to Tallink Silja, for example.
Pay: €10.20/hour; €10.33/hour (as from 1 April).