Upstairs, downstairs at The Savoy

As my cab pulls up at the front of the Savoy, Bill is standing to attention, waiting to open the door for me. His face is a mask. I look at him, expecting some flicker of recognition. After all, it's not long since we used to chat as I swept this bit of pavement and polished the brass and marble pillars.

"You don't remember me, do you Bill?" I say.

The mask flickers. "I was working here last year. As a cleaner."

The barrier descends again. This situation doesn't compute. This smartly dressed woman fishing in her purse for a tip cannot possibly have a connection with the skivvy in overalls who knelt on the floor of the reception area to scrub the scuff marks off the black-and-white tiles.

"Very good madam," Bill says, ramrod-stiff as I push through the revolving doors, feeling I've broken some unspoken rule of etiquette. In the upstairs-downstairs world of London's top hotels, there are only certain conversations guests can have with staff. And this isn't one of them.

I worked at the Savoy for the princely sum of £4 an hour. I was trying to find out if it was possible to live on the minimum wage in London. It wasn't - how could it be? And I wasn't thinking of frequenting the Savoy in my spare time, or even spending the £2.50 or so it would have cost me for a pint of lager in Britain's most expensive city. I couldn't even afford the electricity I needed to bake a potato.

Later I worked in South Yorkshire on a bottling line, where I could manage the odd night out on my £140 a week pay. In Scotland, on a care worker's wages, I only just failed to get by. My experiences exposed a basic truth about the minimum wage - if it raises people out of poverty in Doncaster, where the cost of living is lower, it will leave workers on the breadline in London.

It felt strange, almost wrong, to be revisiting the Savoy as a paying customer. When I worked here as a night cleaner with a contract company, I came in with the other staff through a sort of dark rabbit hole in the side of the building. I would descend through a sordid maze of corridors, lined with dripping pipes and piles of dirty linen, to collect my bucket and dusters before rising into the light via a service lift to start work.

Now though, I take a seat in the plush Thames Foyer and order two champagne cocktails at £12 each - a round of drinks that will cost more than the cleaners I worked with took home after a night's shift, and more than they paid for their weekly bus passes.

The waiter tonight is Abdul, a smart young chap from Pakistan who's just completed a post-graduate course in hotel management. He has been here only a few weeks. Does he like it, I ask. He smiles apologetically. It will help him to get a good job when he goes home, he says neutrally.

I sip my cocktail and glance at the ornate screen hiding the swing door to the kitchens. My workmates and I used to troop through those doors at 3am to queue up for a meal of chicken nuggets and chips. We would splash through pools of muddy water to get to our food, then carry it through what seemed like miles of subterranean corridors to the staff canteen before we could eat. There, we would sometimes be joined during our meal by the mice that infest the building.

In those kitchens we would meet the only workers in the place who had an even lower status than us - the men in Wellington boots who scraped the grease off the cookers and emptied a stinking mass of chewed-up food from the waste disposal units.

One of them, a man from Abidjan on the Ivory Coast, used to regale us with stories of how his friends survived in London. He knew someone who slept for two hours on the Circle line each morning between his night job and his day job because he didn't have enough time to go home, he said. "You know how the white people sometimes sleep on the pavement? Well sometimes he does that."

My supervisor, who was from Benin, would take a seat in the canteen as far from these men as possible. "Nigerians," she'd say, wrinkling her nose. "Funny people, Nigerians." When you're this close to the bottom of the heap, you really need someone to look down on.

Mind you, you don't have to be an unskilled worker here to be treated with contempt. When I first wrote about my experiences as a cleaner at the Savoy, I had a call from a man called Melvyn White. He worked here a few years back as a chef. He worked up to 65 hours a week for £11,500 a year, and often suffered violence from his superiors if the food wasn't on the plates at just the right moment.

Melvyn got used to being punched in the ribs. But when he was dragged across a hotplate by an enraged sous-chef, leaving him with burns on his stomach, he decided enough was enough. Working at the Savoy was a great opportunity for a young chef, he told me - but not that great. He found another job and left. Charles Dickens would still find lots to identify with in the kitchens and basements of some of London's most expensive establishments.

Even Melvyn's meagre chef's pay would seem pretty good to the army of low-paid workers who travel into the city each night to clean the capital's offices, hotels and restaurants. My pay was supposed to be 30p more than the minimum wage, which was £3.70 an hour at the time. But actually I got £3.43 after my employer deducted my first night's money for "training", failed to pay for most of my overtime and asked me to pay a £10 administration fee so my wages could be paid into my bank account. I even had to pay for my own rubber gloves.

I took home £110 a week, and most of my workmates got the same. After paying £65 for a stinking bedsit in Streatham and £23 for a Tube pass, there wasn't much left for food. I survived mainly on pasta. Some of the other cleaners I worked with resorted to more desperate tactics. A sweet girl from Prague called Olga used to take greasy, tasteless cheese sandwiches from the canteen to get her through until her next 3am meal of chips and nuggets. Not long before I arrived, a cleaner called Ibrahim was sacked after security searched his bag and found a banana and some uncooked fish.

They needed to keep their strength up, of course. On their wages, they couldn't afford to go sick. I saw lots of my colleagues struggling on despite aches and pains, flu or toothache. One cleaner with the same contract cleaning company as me was sacked after several years' service when she took time off with a bad back.

Nor can the members of this downtrodden regiment afford to stick their necks out. Recently I met Hamza, a night-time cleaner at a major London bank. Hamza takes home £140 after working 40 hours a week of nights. He supplements his earnings with a second cleaning job and from weekend shifts in a minicab. He and his wife have six children to feed, and they really struggle even though he often works more than 60 hours a week.

But things got worse for Hamza after he contacted the Living Wage for London Campaign, which is demanding the capital's lowestpaid workers should receive at least £6.30 an hour - just enough, according to researchers, for a couple with two children to live on. He was moved to different duties and his employers began watching his every move, he told me. He was disciplined for a minor offence, and now he fears he could be sacked despite having four years' unblemished service under his belt.

I thought of Hamza as I crossed the Savoy's grand reception for a second time this week, to take tea. He told me when he went to see the chairman of the bank where he works, accompanied by campaigners against low pay, he was allowed to use the front door for the first time ever. Most of the people who work in that bank probably aren't even aware of the existence of Hamza and the other cleaners who are ushered in through the back door late at night. Even if they did see them, they'd hardly notice them. When I worked at the Savoy I found I was invisible to most of the guests. My overall marked me out as a non-speaking person.

Arrive as a client, though, and it's quite a different story. On our second visit, my companion and I listened to the pianist playing popular tunes from the Thirties and Forties as we picked our way through a mountain of delicately cut sandwiches, fancy cakes and scones.

Today our waiter was Aki, from Japan. He'd been trained in Austria and, like Abdul, he intended to go home after a stint at the Savoy. How did it compare with Austria, I asked him? "Well here it is a lot more international. The staff here are from many different countries," he replied carefully, with a little bow. As we sipped our tea, the ever-attentive Aki hovered close by, ready to top up the cups. With afternoon tea at £23 a head, the clientele can expect certain standards. Would he be able to keep my tip if I put it on the credit card slip, I asked. He assured me he would.

And, to my astonishment, just as I was leaving I spotted a glimmer of recognition on the face of one of my former colleagues. I told him I didn't work as a cleaner any more, and he wished me well. He must have been happy in his work, I suggested, to still be there when most of the people I knew a year ago had moved on.

No, he said. The pay was terrible and the hours were horrendous - often more than 60 hours a week even though he was contracted to work only 45.

"Most of us just stick it out for the tips," he says. "Without them, it just wouldn't be worth it." He was one of the lucky ones. He came into contact with paying customers and that provided him with a means of supplementing his wages. Across London, there are tens of thousands of cleaners who aren't so lucky.

Last week, local authority workers were out on the streets protesting because they had been offered a pay rise of three per cent. The 60,000 people in the capital who earn the minimum wage have been promised a little more than two per cent, putting the minimum up from £4.10 an hour to £4.20. And one thing is for certain - you won't see many of them on any picket lines. As Hamza can testify, on those wages the right to speak out is just one of the many luxuries you can't afford.

When the New Labour Government introduced the National Minimum Wage in 1999, ministers promised they would "end the scandal of poverty pay". But instead they ducked the issue and went for a quick political fix. They wanted a simple, at-a-stroke measure that would fulfil their promise without causing too much pain. So the minimum rate was set low, and it was set the same for London as it was for Yorkshire or Belfast.

It was a nonsense, of course. Britain doesn't need a National Minimum Wage. It needs a flexible minimum wage that takes regional differences into account. And until ministers grasp this nettle their policy will remain - for those in the South-East, at least - an empty shell. Until the minimum wage for London becomes a living wage, not a poverty wage, the Circle line will remain a refuge for exhausted night workers catching a couple of hours' sleep. And the Olgas and Ibrahims who clean the Savoy will continue to be forced to steal scraps of food to survive until pay day.

Some names have been changed.
Below The Breadline - Living On The Minimum Wage, by Fran Abrams, is published by Profile Books. Price £6.99.