Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, they have been particularly mobilized. Employees in the cleaning sector would also like to earn a better living. Eco guest of franceinfo on Monday February 21, Frank Lacroix, CEO of Elior Services, one of the leaders in the sector, affirms that he wants to give more value to this profession and regrets that the cleaning market is “driven by price“.
The subsidiary of the Elior group employs 21,000 people at 2,400 sites in France. This market is perceived “as a kind of convenience of little value“: “When our customers make calls for tenders, they have more and more requirements, but at the same time, they put pressure in terms of price which is extremely important.“. The director of Elior Services believes that“all the actors around these cleaning and bio-cleaning issues must do their part“.
For his group, he sees a solution: “create more value” at customers, with more elaborate services, and therefore better remunerated, “taking advantage of what happened during this crisis to bring something other than just the cleanliness of the building“. He proposes to “put sensors in buildings to measure a whole series of elements in the air, measuring the confinement index, the viral transmission index, the air quality index“.
On this condition, according to Frank Lacroix, Elior Services will be able to further increase its employees, generally unskilled and with low salaries: “To increase our collaborators, the company must have more income. And for it to have more income, it must create more value for its customers”. In the meantime, he would like the negotiations at branch level “be up to the challenges of the moment“: “We didn’t drop out of the Smic, neither up nor down, but we have to go further“.