Paper short abstract

Recent years have seen growing challenges to political economies of racialised depletion in London’s commercial cleaning sector. Contrasting scientific and legal concepts with cleaners’ own knowledges, this paper asks how movements (might) navigate the epistemic politics involved in these fights.

Paper long abstract

In a competitive and labour-intensive industry, the profitability of outsourced cleaning services in London relies on a political economy of racialised depletion. An ensemble of political, economic and social processes and practices over-expose migrant workers to preventable occupational health risks, while under-protecting them in case of injury or illness.

Propelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, recent years have seen growing challenges to this political economy of racialised depletion. Migrant commercial cleaners have taken their fights for H&S and sick pay rights to bosses, judges and politicians. Like those before them, these representational struggles necessarily make strategic use of scientific and legal knowledges and vocabularies that are closely entangled with the patriarchal, colonialist and social democratic genealogies of the British ‘health and welfare state’. Occupational health science knowledge of commercial cleaning, for example, is limited by a ‘regime of perceptibility’ (Murphy 2006) constructed around the economic productivity of the white, male, able-bodied worker-citizen.

Yet in the descriptions, discussions and analyses shared during my research in 2021-2023, migrant commercial cleaners espoused ways of knowing, imagining and enacting health, sickness and the body that are not reducible to – and furthermore often challenge – scientific and legal concepts and logics, and the political economies that they help to sustain. In this paper, I contrast these two forms of knowledge and ask how movements (might) navigate between them in pursuit of an emancipatory and intersectional politics of health and healing.