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Journal of Business Ethics
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics 3/2018

02-12-2016 | Original Paper

Does Contact Between Employees and Service Recipients Lead to Socially More Responsible Behaviours? The Case of Cleaning

Authors: Placide Abasabanye, Franck Bailly, François-Xavier Devetter

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 3/2018

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Abstract

Cleaning occupations, which in recent years have accounted for a not inconsiderable share of employment and job creation in France, are characterised by particularly bad working conditions and low pay. Is this situation inevitable? Are there not in fact mechanisms that might lead employers in the cleaning sector to adopt socially more responsible behaviours towards their employees? After all, the literature on corporate social responsibility suggests that the actions of consumers could be one of these mechanisms. The aim of our paper is to test the impact on job quality of contact between cleaning workers and service recipients. To this end, we analyse data from a survey carried out by the French Ministry of Labour and supplemented by interviews. Our results indicate that contact with service recipients does indeed have an influence.
previous article The Moderating Role of Context in Determining Unethical Managerial Behavior: A Case Survey
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Footnotes
1
Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques, The French national statistical office.
 
2
Thus we are positioning ourselves in what Weyzig (2009) calls the ‘economic register’ of CSR. "Moral arguments mainly concern the question whether business should contribute to social welfare, whereas political and economic arguments mainly concern the questions how, and under what conditions, business will contribute most to it at the aggregate level". (p. 417).
 
3
Some econometric studies do, after all, suggest that the employment of a domestic worker (even if he or she performs a wider range of tasks than just cleaning) rises with level of education and income, which are variables that can be regarded as positively linked to social background (cf., for example, Baxter et al. 2009, Devetter 2016b; Fakih and Marrouch 2012).
 
4
This is not a new observation. After all, it might reasonably be supposed that it was this invisibility that led certain economists, notably Adam Smith (1976), to take the view that a servant’s work (part of which involved cleaning), like other service activities in his opinion, was unproductive (cf. Delaunay and Gadrey 1987).
 
5
In a sub-contracting situation, the commissioning firm is not, after all, the direct employer of the workers doing the cleaning. The commissioning firm merely purchases a cleaning service, that is a space to be cleaned.
 
6
For indeed, the leeway for employers on counting working time is quite significant. The case was investigated thoroughly in the context of home cleaning but the question remains the same in other contexts. Not only some times can be counted or not (breaks, transport, interstitials time between several "sites", time consecrated to meetings or administrative tasks like signing schedules, recovering client keys, etc.) but also the way cleaning time is measured may substantially vary (real-time or fixed time per room, in hotels for example). Ultimately these elements combine to make the cleaners working time fairly porous (the ratio between actual working time and time devoted to work in the day is much lower than in other professions, see Devetter 2016a) and malleable.
 
7
For public-sector employees, this is length of service in the public services, while for employees in private companies and voluntary/charitable associations it is job tenure within the organisation. For workers employed by private individuals, it is seniority in the occupation.
 
8
For a more detailed presentation of the analyses of these interviews in households, see Devetter 2016b; for the interviews in the home help sector, see Bailly et al. 2013; the interviews in the office cleaning sector have not yet been published.
 
9
The results are not presented here but can be obtained from the authors.
 
10
The influence of size of firm on the behaviour of cleaning companies merits more detailed analysis (cf. also Nisim and Benjamin 2008).
 
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Metadata
Title
Does Contact Between Employees and Service Recipients Lead to Socially More Responsible Behaviours? The Case of Cleaning
Authors
Placide Abasabanye
Franck Bailly
François-Xavier Devetter
Publication date
02-12-2016
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 3/2018
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3390-5

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