‘We need to assert our power - or we’ll get trampled on’: the cleaner sacked for eating a tuna sandwich

At the moment when Gabriela Rodriguez discovered she had been sacked for eating a tuna sandwich, she was carrying the bins out. Removing rubbish bags from the office in Finsbury Circus – an elegant, towering ring of neoclassical buildings that sits at the heart of London’s financial district – formed a key part of Rodriguez’s daily duties. So did wiping surfaces, scrubbing dishes in the kitchen, restocking basic supplies and all the other quietly essential activities that enable a busy workplace to function. “I’m proud of my job: it’s honest, and important, and I take it very seriously,” she says. Which is why, when the call from her manager flashed up unexpectedly on her mobile last November, nothing about it seemed to make any sense.

“He ordered me to come back inside and hand over my security pass immediately,” she says. Rodriguez was at a loss, until the words “theft of property” were mentioned – an act of gross misconduct, and a criminal offence under English law. “That’s when it began to dawn on me,” she says, shaking her head. “This was about a leftover piece of bread. And I was going to be dismissed for it.”

Rodriguez didn’t know it yet but that call was the beginning of a journey that would rearrange her life completely: plunging her family into financial uncertainty, but also casting her as a hero for low-paid workers across the country who are being forced out of their jobs for the tiniest, most trivial of misdemeanours. This is a tale that often starts as absurdist comedy – with a piece of popcorn, a discarded apple or a sweet from a communal jar – but ends in a vast tapestry of labour abuses currently unfolding in the shadows of our economy, revealing something profound about whose lives we collectively choose to value, and whose are considered disposable.

“There are so many stories like mine that most people never get to hear,” Rodriguez says. “And in most cases, the people involved are staying silent because of their vulnerability, and their fear.” That omertà, however, could finally be about to break. Because Rodriguez – who earlier this year led a protest rally at Finsbury Circus which involved the tongue-in-cheek delivery of 100 cans of tuna and 300 sandwiches to the foyer of the prestigious law firm from which she’d been barred – has decided not to remain silent. Alongside a small army of cleaners, caterers, security guards and other outsourced workers toiling in the underbelly of Britain, this 39-year-old single mother is fighting back.

* * *

Rodriguez was born in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil, where ribbons of rivers cut through the streets before snaking south into the Pacific. “The town is beautiful, and gave me so many happy memories,” she says in rapid-fire Spanish, cracking one of her wide, infectious smiles. But after finishing school she decided to go in search of better economic prospects and flew more than 5,000 miles to join her mother in Madrid. There, Rodriguez studied business administration and worked her way up to a position as an administrator in the human resources department of a large corporation. In time, she applied for Spanish citizenship, took out a mortgage on a property and met the man who would become the father of her child. By the late 2000s, it felt as if the building blocks of a secure life in Europe were falling into place. Then the financial crisis hit.

“All of a sudden, everything collapsed,” she says. “My company went under, like so many others. I was the breadwinner for my family – including my very young daughter – and I knew I had to explore other options. I’m never afraid of starting from scratch. So I left everyone behind and moved to the UK.”

In London, Rodriguez joined the tens of thousands of Latin American migrants who have made their home in the capital in recent decades, a high proportion of whom work in the contract cleaning and facilities management sector. The work was hard, and her employment structures fiendishly complicated, involving multiple outsourcing companies, third-party recruitment agencies and byzantine lines of management and responsibility. On a typical day, she would leave her flat in Streatham, south London, at 6am and service at least three different sites across the city, often not returning home until midnight; pay was always at or very close to the minimum wage. But in the course of her labours, Rodriguez found herself playing a vital role at the core of some of the country’s most famous institutions, from flagship fashion outlets to the House of Commons, where she worked for four years. She and her colleagues sometimes felt like Britain’s skeleton: an unseen but indispensable support structure without which nothing else could stand upright.

In late 2021, Rodriguez began a new set of jobs with Total Clean: one of London’s more established outsourced cleaning companies, which was founded in the 1980s and today boasts of its charitable partnerships and reputation as an “attractive, long-term employer”. Among its many clients was the law firm Devonshires – ranked as “top tier” by Legal 500, the industry research group – and Rodriguez became one of the regular cleaners in its City headquarters.

She found the other staff at Devonshires friendly and respectful, and there were occasional perks, including regular meetings and conferences in the building for which huge platters of food would be ordered in; there was always plenty left behind at the end of the day. “The women who worked on the reception of the floor where all the big meetings were held would clear the rooms afterwards, and take the best leftovers for themselves,” Rodriguez says. “The rest would be placed down in the staff canteen, and people from other floors would come by and grab whatever they wanted before it was all thrown away.”

One fateful afternoon last autumn, as she finished up her shift, Rodriguez came across a platter in the kitchen and took a single tuna and cucumber sandwich wedge – the value of which is estimated at £1.50. “There was nothing unusual about that action,” she explains. “I was a member of staff and people did it all the time; there was nothing to indicate that this would be thought of as unreasonable.” Total Clean have since claimed that these particular sandwiches were not leftovers – though Rodriguez believed that they were.

As far as she was aware, no one saw what happened (Total Clean later alleged that two Devonshires employees witnessed her “take and conceal” the sandwich) and at the time nobody said anything to her about the incident. But over the following days she began to notice a change of atmosphere in the office. It wasn’t until a week later, two years to the day since she had started work for Total Clean, that she received the call from her manager telling her she was suspended.

It was swiftly followed by a formal hearing, at which Rodriguez apologised for any misunderstanding and offered to buy a box of replacement sandwiches out of her own wages to compensate for the missing one. The company rejected this, and sent her an official letter the next day declaring that her eating of the sandwich constituted “theft/misappropriation of client property” which had caused managers to “lose faith in your integrity”. She was dismissed with immediate effect, not only from Devonshires but also from her other job with Total Clean, at the clothing giant Stradivarius.

“I have considered whether, under the circumstances, a lesser sanction may be appropriate,” wrote the company’s head of operations, Graham Petersen, before concluding that it would not be. “You are not entitled to notice, or pay in lieu of notice.” As Rodriguez relays all this to me, she is shaking with muted fury. “I just hate unfairness,” she said after a long pause. “If I make a mistake, I will acknowledge and correct it. But this … this was just insulting. It’s as if they didn’t even think of me as human. Do I belong to a different species?”

In a statement to the Guardian, Devonshires said Rodriguez was employed by Total Clean and that her dismissal took place without the law firm’s knowledge. “From the outset, it has been our position that we would not object to Gabriela attending and working on our premises should Total Clean change its position,” said a spokesperson, who claimed that Devonshires had encouraged Total Clean to reinstate her. “We take allegations of discrimination made against us extremely seriously, but they are fundamentally flawed and are fully denied.” Total Clean declined to comment.

* * *

The question of who is afforded basic humanity within the workplace, and who is denied it, defines so many similar cases, according to Molly de Dios Fisher – an organiser at the United Voices of the World trade union, which now represents Rodriguez and is taking both Total Clean and Devonshires to an employment tribunal under a claim of unfair dismissal. In recent years, UVW – which focuses on low-paid, precarious and migrant workers in parts of the economy that traditional unions struggle to penetrate – has collected countless examples of workers being fired or threatened with the sack for the kind of infractions that most people would consider barely worthy of mention, never mind a disciplinary charge. “In many instances, it’s not clear that any contractual breach by the staff member has even taken place,” Fisher explains. “In others, there may have been a small and insignificant error made by the worker, but employers have discretion over how to respond. They could have a quiet word with the person involved, or even issue a formal warning. But instead, they move straight to dismissal.”

She runs me through some of the disputes the union has taken on, all of which induce a curious cocktail of astonishment and rage. There was the cleaner whose dismissal letter accused her of “rolling her eyes” at an office worker after the latter ignored a “wet floor” sign and walked straight across an area that had just been mopped. The one sacked for mistakenly moving a bottle of cleaning fluid to a different company site. The one dismissed for not fully filling a soap dispenser in the bathroom of a fancy hotel.

• ‘I felt so strong, and so seen,’ Gabriela Rodriguez says of the sandwich-packed protest she led outside the law firm from which she’d been barred. Photographs: courtesy of UVW/United Voices of the World

There are countless sackings on account of so-called “time theft” – usually involving workers clocking out a few minutes ahead of their allotted shift end, often because they believed they had been given informal permission to do so – and even more sackings due to “theft of property”, nearly always involving foodstuffs that appeared to have been made freely available to directly employed “professionals” in the same workplace. Rodriguez’s story ended up making headlines around the world, but Fisher said that the most surprising dimension of it was that it provoked such a media storm, despite its mundanity. “To us, this wasn’t really news,” she shrugged. “It’s happening everywhere, every day.”

In some of these cases, disciplinary proceedings have been issued against an outsourced cleaner following a complaint made by a directly employed member of staff; often, however, it’s not clear that anyone has complained at all. The only consistent factors, Fisher argues, are race and class. “There is a widespread perception that migrant workers are not equals in the workplace,” she says, “and an assumption, too, that – because of language barriers, a lack of confidence and the absence of union representation – they won’t resist if bosses take liberties with their rights.” That creates a toxic insecurity for workers who might have attracted a manager’s enmity because of discrimination (due to their ethnic background, gender or disability, for example), personal dislike, or because they have spoken out against poor or unlawful behaviour on the part of seniors.

In the days leading up to “Tunagate”, Rodriguez claims she contacted managers at Total Clean – which is owned by a Spanish family and employs several Hispanic supervisors – to ask about the London living wage and to highlight a shortfall in the payslips sent to her and several colleagues; she says that in response, one of them derided her as a defensora del pueblo, which literally translates as “defender of the people”. “They prefer workers who keep quiet and don’t make trouble,” she insists. In its initial response to the employment tribunal, Total Clean denied that the defensora del pueblo comment was made, but admitted that Rodriguez had submitted a complaint about missing wages. “The issue was investigated [and] adjustments were made where required,” the company declared. “As a large employer, errors unfortunately may occasionally occur and these are always promptly investigated and resolved.”

For those who spend their working lives studying and fighting such cases, familiar patterns emerge again and again. UVW is currently representing another cleaner, Aoua Coulibaly, who was sacked in April by the outsourcing company Cleanology from her job at Etc.venues, a corporate events company that operates in several UK locations, including County Hall in London. In common with Rodriguez, Coulibaly alleges that her employer sometimes missed hours from her payslip, and that it did not follow due process when firing her; upon returning from annual leave, and after 18 months’ service, she was informed out of the blue that her job “was over” and ordered to vacate the premises.

“They did not give me a warning, or offer me a meeting or any possibility of talking,” the 49-year-old says. “They treated me like I was rubbish.” Cleanology later asserted that Coulibaly’s dismissal was due to poor cleaning standards and failure to follow the company’s absence reporting procedure. The former referred to her use of a corded vacuum cleaner rather than a cordless one when cleaning the stairs, and the latter to a single day during which Coulibaly was unexpectedly hospitalised and insists she was unable to call in.

“I’m now worried about my bills, I don’t know what I can do to pay my rent,” says Coulibaly, who escaped a forced marriage in her native Burkina Faso and went on to establish her own restaurant there. She says she came to the UK after facing social stigma in the community following her divorce. “I’m worried about where I can get food to put on the table.”

Cleanology’s co-founder and chief executive is Dominic Ponniah, a former Conservative party parliamentary candidate who recently wrote an article warning against the new Labour government’s plan to shield workers from unfair dismissal from their first day of work (protections currently kick in only after two years of employment, rendering any claim by Coulibaly ineligible). When I contact him he tells me that a mistake with Coulibaly’s pay occurred on only one occasion, and that her incorrect usage of the vacuum cleaner was a health and safety issue. “This is no trivial matter,” he says, “especially when an employee is asked repeatedly to follow very simple and reasonable instructions.”

• ‘They treated me like I was rubbish​,’ Aoua Coulibaly says of the outsourcing company who sacked her from a job cleaning for corporate event organisers. Photograph: Adrien Bitibaly/The Guardian

He claims that her sacking was entirely lawful and rejects any suggestion of discrimination, stating that his business is one of the most diverse in the industry and boasts a high level of employee satisfaction. Etc.venues did not respond to requests for comment.

Significantly, according to the workers involved, in both Coulibaly and Rodriguez’s cases, the contract cleaning company that directly employed each worker initially claimed that their dismissals were due to a “client request” – in other words, that bosses from the workplaces being cleaned by the women had demanded the outsourcing partner remove them. In both cases, those workplaces later denied making any such request.

Fisher believes that “client requests” for removals should be outlawed, arguing that they effectively offer a legal way of bypassing workers’ rights whenever a manager decides they want to get rid of someone. Nearly all outsourcing contracts contain a provision allowing companies to request the removal of an outsourced worker from their premises at any time, and under UK case law there is no obligation on the outsourcing firm to establish any wrongdoing on the part of the worker before complying (the only exception is if discrimination is involved, something that is notoriously difficult for workers to prove in court).

In theory, workers removed because of “client requests” should be offered alternative employment elsewhere within the outsourcing company, but it’s easy enough for managers to offer only replacement shifts they know the worker isn’t available for, forcing them to leave the firm. “When you work through all the complex legalese, what this basically amounts to is an official shortcut to screwing workers over,” Fisher explains. “Which is why it’s usually the first thing managers try to get away with, even when no actual ‘client request’ has been made.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg of ways in which outsourcing entrenches precarity in millions of workers’ lives. Far from being dramatic outliers, Rodriguez and Coulibaly’s experiences tap into a much deeper set of structures ostensibly designed to boost the health of Britain’s economy over recent decades, but which have corroded the historical link between work and financial security – normalising casualisation, low pay and, in some cases, patently unscrupulous employment practices.

“What we’re seeing is the constant lengthening of labour supply chains via contracted facilities firms, franchisers, recruitment agencies and umbrella companies,” observes Tim Sharp, who leads on employment rights at the TUC. “For workers, it creates massive confusion: who do you speak to if you’re being underpaid or denied your legal rights at work? Who is responsible for training you up, supporting your career development, making sure your working life is sustainable? And when things go wrong, who is really accountable?”

The ultimate problem, Sharp says, is that we are in the middle of a decades-long experiment in “ultra-flexible” labour markets that has failed on its own terms: it hasn’t led to economic growth, and it’s come at an immense human cost for workers and their families. “Many of those costs are hidden, because the workers who bear them are not that visible: they’re labouring out of sight in the early morning and late at night,” he says. “But just because many of us don’t see these problems, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to do something about it.”

* * *

Diego never pictured himself as a cleaner. Ask any of his friends and they’ll tell you his flat is a constant mess. “Honestly, I never even take my used cups back to the sink,” he says, laughing. Back in his Caribbean home country he held a position in a government office, but when he arrived in the UK in the mid-2010s he knew that his job prospects would initially be restricted to something less prestigious. He eventually found work cleaning the London offices of a major global media conglomerate, and although the pay was poor and the labour often back-breaking, for several years his working life proceeded without incident.

One day, however, the outsourced cleaning company that employed Diego lost its contract with the firm. Another company took over and although Diego was transferred across to the new management, he soon began to notice violations of proper working practices – violations he decided to call out. “The supervisors didn’t like that much,” he remembers. “I was told I could leave the job if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. That’s when the disciplinary charges started appearing.”

Sitting in a south London cafe, Diego – whose name has been changed to protect his identity, along with some other details of his story – takes me through a sheaf of papers detailing what appeared to be a systemic campaign of employer harassment. He was accused of leaving his shift early, or of leaving on time but without having completed his daily cleaning tasks. He was accused of poor cleaning standards, of having an inappropriate attitude and, on one occasion, of having touched a sofa with his foot. From a separate folder, he produces the medical letters that spell out the strain all these complaints imposed upon his body: rising blood pressure, crippling anxiety, insomnia. “They wanted me to quit voluntarily so that they wouldn’t have to pay me any redundancy,” he says. “They kept telling me it would be simpler and easier for me just to accept my guilt on all of these accusations, rather than resisting.”

Earlier this year, Diego received a message on his phone from a supervisor ordering him to clean a particular area of the office; the message, which I have seen, specifically instructed him to dust the wall-mounted fire alarm. “It was odd, because the fire alarm is sensitive; it’s normally only cleaned on the weekends and there is an announcement made in the office beforehand,” Diego says. “So I double-checked, ‘Are you sure about this?’ They told me yes. As soon as I started working on the fire alarm, it went off.”

Diego rushed to the building’s security office to inform them of the mistake, but by that point it was too late – hundreds of office workers were evacuating. All too predictably, he soon received a formal letter informing him that there had been a “client request” for his removal and that the fire alarm incident constituted “gross misconduct”. “It later turned out that the client didn’t have any problem with me, but the cleaning company continued to press for my dismissal,” he explains. “I’d been there for years, doing extra hours, working weekends, volunteering for deep cleans, but I realised then that none of that mattered. In their eyes, nothing I did made me valuable.”

Thanks to the support of another independent trade union, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, Diego successfully defied his employer’s attempts to fire him. He’s now back at work inside the media giant, though the battle he’s been forced to wage with his managers has taken a desperate toll. “I feel completely isolated there,” he says softly. “I arrive, change into my uniform and get to work without ever speaking to anyone. The atmosphere is horrible.” And this rare good news story – if anybody could call it that – will be of little comfort to the UK’s other outsourced workers, who now number more than 3 million and remain exposed to formal punishments and dismissals based on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Related: ‘We won’t stay silent any longer’ – 13 protest photographs that changed Britain

As labour rights experts such as Sharp and Fisher point out, this isn’t just a case of a few bad apples in management taking advantage of a flawed system. The vulnerabilities that Diego, Coulibaly and Rodriguez have had to contend with are the inevitable outcome of an economic model built around contract churn and constant competitive pressures between firms.

“These cleaning companies are hired on short-term contracts that go up for renewal every two or three years, so their bosses are incentivised to force out workers at the slightest hint of any friction: be that a misunderstanding, a personality clash, an impression that the worker isn’t sufficiently subordinate, or whatever,” Fisher says. “So humanity becomes de facto stripped out of the working environment. And the notion that this is just ‘how things are’ in this part of the economy, the normalisation of it – that’s an ideological choice, one that we’re all participating in unless we consciously choose to resist it.”

The nascent Labour government has promised a blizzard of reforms that will strengthen a wide range of employee rights, though trade unions fear that they will not go far enough in reversing the many years of setbacks that have landed us here. Of particular concern is the party’s commitment to banning zero hours contracts and so-called “fire and rehire” practices, as well as tackling a generation-long assault on the influence of unions themselves. “Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect in their workplace,” Justin Madders, Britain’s new employment rights minister, tells me. “This government is committed to making working people more secure and will legislate to introduce a new deal for working people to ban exploitative practices and enhance employment rights. We look forward to setting out more details in the coming weeks and months.”

But Rodriguez is not waiting around for anyone in her search for justice – be they in Westminster, or anywhere else. With giddy pride, she describes the day back in February when she and her colleagues converged on Devonshires to protest against her dismissal, blaring music and brandishing cans of tuna as they marched. “I was shaking like a leaf,” she admits. “But I also felt so strong, and so seen.” Within five minutes of their arrival, the CEO of Devonshires had agreed to meet union representatives in his office, and it wasn’t long before the head of Total Clean was on the phone to Rodriguez, apologising for what happened and inviting her to return to her job – albeit months after she had been sacked, and only after negative publicity around the case was reaching a crescendo.

But Rodriguez turned him down, which is why this case is now proceeding to the courts. “They wanted all the noise to go away and for things to go back to the way they were before,” she says. “But we can’t allow that to happen. As workers we need to think collectively, act collectively, and assert our power. Because otherwise, we’ll get trampled on everywhere.”

As she stands up to leave, she says that on the bus coming to meet me, she overheard another passenger complaining in Spanish about their boss’s attempts to fire them over a minor incident. “I interrupted the woman and gave her my number.” Rodriguez grins. “‘Call me,’ I told her. ‘And join a union!’”