Last Wednesday, workers at Temple Mills International maintenance depot reckoned their managers were in a state of ‘complete fucking meltdown’. At the gates of the East London depot where Eurostar trains are serviced, a picket line of striking outsourced cleaners buzzed. The cleaners, who are employed by Churchill but belong to the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, turned out in numbers far greater than what was anticipated.

To management’s surprise, so too did their friends. Of the approximately 100 engineers at the depot, at least 45—all union members—refused to cross the picket line, swelling the ranks of the dispute at different times of the day. Not a single RMT member didn’t respect the picket at the site, which workers only half-jokingly referred to as ‘Fortress RMT’, leading to a complete shutdown of all Eurostar maintenance.

It wasn’t the only spot of defiance. On the day, cleaners on Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, Southeastern and HS1 services walked off in their hundreds. Their demands are simple enough: £15 an hour and a sick pay scheme. So is their reasoning—like too many across Britain, they aren’t being paid enough while the cost of every aspect of life soars.

In a survey conducted by RMT, 61 percent of members had they were struggling with serious financial problems, while 69 percent said they were forced to work sick due to a lack of any sick pay scheme. While workers simply can’t afford sick days, they also notice a lack of workers on shifts, emphasising to Tribune that less workers seem to be doing much more work. This squeeze is hardly felt at the top, where Churchills has made a profit of £1.5 million in the past year—and expect more of the same in 2022.

While the top brass celebrate, those who generate such wealth suffer. Churchill’s workforce, which is an overwhelmingly migrant one, feel it intensely. If they get sick, many are forced to use up annual leave they hoped to use to travel home and see loved ones they’re often working in Britain to provide for. Dozens of workers find themselves trapped in nightmare cycles of debt; some on the night shift, who often can take home about £1,000 a month, speak of borrowing virtually their entire wage from loan sharks in order to be paid straight back with interest on payday.

Some stories are particularly harrowing. One worker told Tribune how for the past six months, they have clocked off work to spend their night sleeping on buses, with nowhere else to go. Down to the decisions of their employers, these workers—whose livelihoods revolve around the vital task of making healthier environments for Londoners—can’t always afford a roof over their heads. But despite being in such a dire situation, this hasn’t stopped the worker paying monthly union dues, preferring to go without the necessities of life than compromise years of unbroken union membership.

This demand for decency is what drives these workers to fight back. Due to the casualised nature of the work, union density among cleaners was weak for a long time. But in the past few years, cleaners began to organise at depots like Paddington. These efforts inspired others; an RMT cleaners’ industrial ballot on Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) in 2018 only narrowly missed the threshold imposed by draconian anti-union laws, with trade unionists on the ground citing issues like language barriers and workplace intimidation as core factors.

And though it’s rare to hear working people have a good word to say about politicians, Labour MP Andy McDonald is an exception to many of these cleaners. After having met a number of them at a meeting he addressed at 2021’s Labour conference, McDonald—then a Shadow Employment Rights minister—resigned after Keir Starmer demanded he oppose a £15 hourly minimum wage and proper sick pay policy. For his unwillingness to repeat this to workers—people who point out to Tribune that their transport season tickets from home to work already exceeds their monthly wages—McDonald went.

But his act didn’t go unnoticed among a new cadre of union members, who were developing fast and had a growing taste for organisation. Animated from being cheered on at the height of the pandemic before being treated like dirt once the earliest semblance of normality returned, these people went after the miserable conditions, the management bullying, and the pitiful wages. The possibility of gaining a better living through collective strength sparked determination in unexpected ways—‘some of these who were as disengaged, as apathetic as you can be on the job’, one trade unionist tells Tribune, ‘are on fire now. They’ve gone from not caring less to being some of the strongest people going.’

And now these people can put together vibrant demonstrations of unprecedented size across the capital. Over 40 different picket lines ran at the same time, and hundreds of cleaners and their supporters even occupied the courtyard of Go Ahead Group, the firm which controls the franchise on Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, demanding that bosses come out and meet workers.

These same workers will also be escalating their strike action, with a 48-hour walk-off planned for 12-13 March. Both employers and workers expect serious disruption—not least because it’s the weekend that Liverpool play Brighton. But the numbers are increasingly on the workers’ side; in the build-up to last week’s strike, RMT membership among workers has surged by 30 percent, and union organisers jokingly complain of the ‘extra paperwork’ of taking in so many new application forms.

Yet despite the obvious challenges they face, its not hard to recognise why these cleaners feel so confident. At the heart of their fight is a recognisable truth to millions: that right now in our country, the people we need the most are treated the worst. As we go into another year of soaring bills and wage cuts, many people know that the current way of doing things isn’t good enough. Something has to budge; perhaps the £15 fight of the Churchill cleaners will be a big part of the push.