When Belgian University Cleaners Swept Out Their Boss
Fifty years ago, women cleaners at a Belgian university went on strike, then set up their own cooperative called the Liberated Broom. A new film shows how they kicked out the boss, starting an experiment in self-management that lasted for 14 years.
University cleaners hold a meeting in a still from Coline Grando's documentary Le balai libéré. (Doclisboa / YouTube)
- Interview by
- Daniel Kopp
In 1975, over thirty women cleaners at Belgium’s newly created Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL) went on a three-week strike, “fired” their boss, and decided to launch a self-managed cooperative instead. Their experiment in radical economic democracy — which they named “Le Balai Libéré” (the Liberated Broom) — allowed them to triple their salaries, grow the cooperative to over a hundred workers, and demonstrate that workers can manage their own affairs. After fourteen successful years, only the forcing through of an open tendering system — letting private competitors undercut them — abruptly ended their project.
The story of the Liberated Broom was virtually forgotten by the time French documentary filmmaker Coline Grando began her studies at the university in the late 2010s. But fortunately enough, she learned about it from a friend — and quickly decided to start recovering its memory. After five years of sifting through archives, door-knocking campaigns to find those involved in the cooperative, and conversations with the cleaners working at the university today, Grando released her documentary film Le balai libéré in 2023.
In an interview for Jacobin, Grando told Daniel Kopp about her film, the successes and challenges of self-management, and whether we could create a similar political imagination today.
Why did the women cleaners go on strike in 1975 — an action that would lead to the creation of a self-managed cooperative?
In the early 1970s, the town and the university of Louvain-la-Neuve had just been constructed. The company, ANIC, that had hired the women was a classic subcontractor — and the university had decided to outsource the cleaning work to it. But the trade union did not agree.
As the university’s budgets were being cut, the subcontractor wanted to send some of the workers to another site in Recogne, in Belgium’s Luxembourg region. He didn’t give them a van to get there. In Belgium, traveling eighty miles to work doesn’t make sense. They didn’t accept this, so some of them went to the union.
The cleaners launched a three-week strike. You can imagine what it’s like when a university, especially one under construction, doesn’t get cleaned for three weeks. The workers told me that the professors and students came to the university square to get toilet paper during the strike. Every strike day, there was some sort of event, such as a demonstration in which they burned an effigy of the boss and put him in a coffin. There was always something to remind the people of Louvain-la-Neuve that the cleaners were on strike.
The union officials had immediately suggested to move toward the workers managing their own work. They were inspired by a self-management initiative in a watch factory at LIP, in Besançon, France, a few years earlier. Some Belgian trade unionists who went to Besançon to see how it worked at LIP came back with the desire to launch self-management. The Liberated Broom is part of this history.
So it was the union that came up with the idea of self-management?
Yes, for the cleaners, they either stayed and jumped on the self-management bandwagon, or they went to find work elsewhere. There were forty-two of them at the time of the strike and thirty-eight who accepted. There were workshops during the strike, for example a legal working group that asked the question: What kind of structure do we want? There were groups with students from Louvain-la-Neuve to popularize the struggle. There were working groups, and every day they came to the site.
Importantly, there was already a triangle of relations between the union, the university, and the boss. So as soon as there was a dispute with the subcontractor, the university was brought into the discussion. Now the biggest problem was persuading the university to accept self-management, as this meant convincing it to break the contract with the subcontractor and sign a contract with a new nonprofit organization that would be called “the Liberated Broom.” But since trade unionists from the Christian Union Confederation (CSC) knew people on the board of the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, the stars aligned a little for the university to accept.
One argument said that it would improve the university’s reputation if it supported this kind of unusual initiative, to test a new form of management. In fact, it worked well — from a contract of a few months, then to a year, then to three years, the contract was constantly renewed until 1989.
The cleaners constantly spoke about “firing the boss.” So this inversion of power in the workplace was symbolic?
Yes, it was in fact a symbolic dismissal. The trade unionist, who was basically at the helm of the creation of this cooperative, wrote a letter to the boss that I found in the archives. In the letter, he explains that he is a bad boss and that he lacks consideration for his workers and does not respect the rules. The workers agreed to sign the letter and it was sent to the boss.
It starts like this: ”Sir, having met for a week in working groups and in a general assembly, the workers of your firm have noted the following: first of all, we note that after an in-depth study of our work, we can organize it perfectly between us. We therefore conclude that you are absolutely useless and parasitic.”
Yes, this letter is quite enjoyable. It is read twice in my film because it really is very funny. Of course it was symbolic, but it was also a way of motivating the troops and showing that the union was rolling up its sleeves. But actually, the real dismissal was that the UCL decided to break the contract with the subcontractor and that the subcontractor did not rebel against this. The university could actually be held liable for breaking a contract. I believe it was negotiated that the subcontractor kept part of the university contract, but at another site in Brussels.
What did the cleaners do with the “means of production,” the equipment?
One of the things they did during the strike, again at the unions’ instigation, was to confiscate the equipment. They called it “seizing the spoils of war.”
After the strike, they returned it, because it was the property of the company, obviously. During the strike, they sold stickers to buy the basic equipment, i.e., tea towels and squeegees. Because in reality, that’s what you need to clean: buckets, tea towels, and squeegees. Then when they signed a new contract with the university, they used the money to buy machines.
You should understand that at the Liberated Broom, they really wanted to work with good equipment. As they were the ones who decided what to do with the money, they found this really important. Whereas today, for example, this is no longer the case at all. The workers have no choice in what they work with. As the subcontractors may only be there for five years, because the contract is for five years, they are not going to invest. In the film, there is the story of the vacuum cleaner that doesn’t vacuum. In the Liberated Broom, they had great equipment.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe experienced a wave of occupations. But when we think about them, we often think of manufacturing and factories. This is what makes the story of the Liberated Broom so unique: it is about women cleaners at the bottom of the value chain, not factory workers, who decided to manage their work themselves. Can you tell us a little more about how this particular self-management worked in practice and how they met the challenges they faced?
They were already fairly autonomous. There were lots of small teams that knew how to work, that knew how to organize themselves. General assemblies were held once a month and management committees once a week for more practical matters. They had set up structures, for example a representative from each team went to the management committee every Monday — and it had to be rotated to share responsibility.
As for the success of the Liberated Broom, it is important to know that the profits were enormous. After launching self-management, in a general assembly, they decided what to do with the profits. Do we hire to lighten the workload? Do we invest in equipment because it allows people to work better without breaking their backs? Or should they give themselves a bonus and divide up a sum of money?
So they increased their salary compared to what they had before. Previously, it was 36 francs a day, then they raised it to more than 95 francs. Then there were the working hours. They made sure it corresponded with the bus and train to Louvain-la-Neuve — because none of them lived there. They did everything they could for the workers. If there was a time when they had hired too many people, for example, instead of firing someone, everyone went on partial unemployment: one day of unemployment per week until it balanced out again. They did fire people, however, because sometimes there were serious mistakes.
And the challenges?
The main challenge was to keep the spirit of self-management alive: organizing general assemblies, organizing management committees.
They would have also liked for the teams to be mixed up so that there weren’t small groups that could oppose each other in the general assembly. This didn’t work at all. The workers wanted to stay in their building, because once you’ve mastered cleaning a building, you just don’t want to change. Even today the workers say that there is a lot of conflict whenever someone goes on holiday and comes back and their colleague hasn’t done the cleaning in the same way.
The university buildings were being built as they went along; the work increased and they had to hire people. As in many companies, they hired from within their own families. And so sometimes there were whole families in the company, with the husbands as window cleaners and the sisters, daughters, and daughters-in-law as cleaners. That didn’t make self-management any easier, because there was still this idea of a clan during the general assembly.
The union always kept a foot in the company by sending people to do the accounting and to run the meetings. It didn’t manage to make the girls, the workers, completely autonomous, even though that was what they wanted.
Your film also tells the story of the end of the Liberated Broom in 1989, when public procurement rules were increasingly liberalized. How and why did the cooperative end?
In 1989, the university, which had not done so until then, decided to launch a public tender, and the Liberated Broom applied — and it was still quite competitive. But for some reason, the university relaunched a call for tenders until a Flemish company came along and really dumped the prices.
We can assume that it was a bit orchestrated, but there were several factors. Support for the cooperative on the university’s board of directors was no longer guaranteed. The union officials also say that the workers were much less motivated to fight, and apparently the quality of work was not as high anymore. So there were several factors that meant that at one point the university wanted to get rid of the Liberated Broom.
In the end, the contract was won by this Flemish company, which hired the workers from the cooperative. It’s the system of calls for tenders where the boss changes but hires the same employees — an obligation for six months. Subsequently, the boss just kept them because it makes no sense to retrain people for such a large site. It seems obvious to me that it’s a system that can’t work properly.
Your documentary is not a simple archival work. You decided to have the cleaners from the 1970s cooperative engage in dialogue with those who perform the same functions at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve today. Why did you make that decision?
I wanted to make a film that resonates in the present, that asks us questions about today.
I found it great and extremely rich in the conversations between the former and current workers that there is a vocabulary, like all trades, that is extremely specific. Or the older ones could still tell you whether it was linoleum or tiles in a particular building. The film shows all the work that the people who take care of these buildings do. And even today’s workers have told me that it’s moving to see those who maintained these buildings.
It’s a job that conditions all the others. Without it, no one works. And these workers never get their say. I had the feeling that this exchange between generations was going to teach us things. What is the world of work like today? While I had started working on the history of the Liberated Broom, I realized that in the film, the cooperative was going to be a pretext for talking about working conditions today.
I went to the university to meet the cleaning team just after the first lockdown was eased in August 2020. The cleaners today had just been swept up completely by the COVID-19 crisis. They desperately needed the spotlight. Although I had barely met them, fourteen people agreed to be filmed talking about their work. With all the mistrust of the media, especially in the world of work, this is not insignificant. I thought, “They have something to say about the present.”
With almost fifty years’ perspective, your film also tells the story of the evolution of cleaning work. In French, it even has a different name today. They are no longer called “cleaners”; they are called “surface operatives.” The workers in the documentary even talk about “factory work.” For instance, the Liberated Broom employed a hundred workers at one point, but today workers clean a much larger university with an area of 350,000 m² with fifty people. How has the nature of the work changed since the time of the cooperative?
I must say that the working conditions at the Liberated Broom weren’t the norm in the 1970s either. But clearly, the pace of work was not the same and it was much more family-like. That doesn’t mean that working conditions were great, or that they didn’t suffer at work.
With the tendering system, the only factor the boss can adjust is the number of workers. The salary cannot be changed because there are collective agreements and the equipment cannot be made much more productive. The fewer people hired, the faster the pace and the heavier the burden on the workers’ shoulders. In the case of the university, which is spread over many buildings, people are alone all day. They barely see their colleagues.
In addition to the physical damage, there is enormous moral damage: they are no longer allowed to do their job properly. This is the big difference with the Liberated Broom, where they were proud of doing a good job with good equipment. They said it sparkled, that there wasn’t a line of dirt on the floor, that they washed the walls. Every summer, they would remove all the furniture from the offices and give the whole room a thorough clean.
Today they aren’t asked anymore to clean properly; they are asked to make it look clean as quickly as possible.
Moreover, with outsourcing today, the workers are isolated symbolically. They don’t wear the same clothes as the people who work for the university. In theory, they are not allowed to have their coffee in the cafeteria used by researchers and university administration staff. They are constantly reminded that they are not part of the university. But they have been working at the university for twenty-five years and when asked what they do for a living, they don’t say, “I work for a company that will change in three years.” They say, “I work at the university.” I found it very harsh that they are denied this feeling of belonging. They already have a devalued job, and they are not even allowed to be part of a rather prestigious organization, the university.
The workers also expressed this feeling that collectivity, community, and solidarity are no longer there, that it’s more like every man and woman for themselves. But the workers of the Liberated Broom said that solidarity was really the basis of their cooperative. The film gives the impression that it would be much more difficult to repeat this experience today, because the workers are much more isolated and fragmented. How do you see it?
With regard to the solidarity at the Liberated Broom, I would like to emphasize that people did not get along better or be more supportive of each other. There were many who couldn’t stand each other there. But the organization of the company meant that if there is no solidarity, the ship sinks. Even if you can’t stand the person in your building or next door, you will come and help them because an unsolved problem means less money for everyone. And that forces people to show solidarity.
So the structure of the company shapes solidarity?
When I hear that people no longer show solidarity, I get the impression that what they imply is that we have all changed individually. But it is today’s structures that are pushing us to be individualistic.
What did the workers think when they watched the film?
When the film was finished, before it was shown on TV and in cinemas, I organized a screening just for them so they could watch it in peace. They were all really happy. They told me, “I wasn’t expecting that.” I don’t know what they were expecting. But maybe they weren’t used to this kind of film where you take the time to listen to people. TV documentaries, in contrast, are often fast films with a voice-over.
I also showed the film in a university course. Some teachers decided to include the film in their curriculum. In the Socrates lecture theater, the largest auditorium at the university, we showed the film to 350 students who were obliged to be there. A lot didn’t really care, but I had some great questions after a discussion. One student asked me what we could do to help the cleaners. I think that this is really one of the issues — solidarity between classes and the convergence of struggles. After all, that is what enabled the Liberated Broom to exist.