Mary Kelly in conversation at the Barbican Centre, London

The innovative documentary investigates the exploitation of women office cleaners and follows their fight to gain union recognition and achieve better pay and conditions. In London, in the early seventies, a group of women had begun to leaflet cleaners who worked at night to encourage them to form a union. This labour organisation became the central action of the documentary.

 

Although the collective initially intended to produce a straightforward campaign film, the complexities of the relationship between the cleaners, the Cleaners' Action Group (CAG), and the trade unions led them to adopt a more experimental and self-reflexive filmmaking style. 

 

Through fragmented editing and unconventional narrative techniques, the film examines not only the campaign itself but also the hidden nature of precarious labour and the role of both filmmakers and audiences in representing social struggles.