HUNDREDS of low-paid train cleaners are striking and campaigning for better pay. The cleaners, RMT union members who work for subcontractor Churchill Cleaning, want £15 an hour instead of their current measly minimum wage rates of £8.91.

On one side you have low-paid strikers under the banner “justice for Churchill Cleaners: fight for £15.” On the other, employers who say they can’t afford to pay it. But follow the money and you can see it flows from minimum wage workers in Britain to people living it up in a Beverly Hills Mansion.

The strikers clean stations and trains across London and the south-east. They make Thameslink, Southern, Great Northern, Southeastern and Eurostar trains tidy and rubbish-free.

Their employer, Churchill, is pretty big, with over 10,000 cleaning employees. Churchill are doing well, financially. Churchill Contract Services Group Holdings Ltd made £8.7m profit on a £212m turnover according to the latest accounts (covering 2020), with both figures going upwards. There is clearly room to increase the workers’ pay.

Churchill’s highest-earning director was paid £246,859 in 2020, meaning pay went up by £16,000 — a 7 per cent increase on the previous year. A cleaner would have to work around 13 years to get what their boss gets in one year.

Churchill was founded by in 1988 by Joel Briggs and Phil Moxom. The highest-paid director isn’t named in the accounts, but it is probably one of them. Churchill is growing and in 2020 turned to another investor to grow more: London Private Equity firm ESO Capital became a major investor, in order to help Churchill “readily capitalise on acquisitive growth opportunities in the highly fragmented business services market.” With ESO Capital’s help Churchill intend to grow more, including by buying other firms.

Private equity firms typically invest in companies through loans and get paid in interest, which can minimise tax. The accounts suggest ESO Capital put around £25m into the firm and also put two directors on the Churchill Board. You won’t find these details in the Churchill accounts. Instead they appear in the reports of a firm called Oscar Topco Ltd which owns another firm called Oscar Midco Ltd which in turns owns the Churchill firms.

So through this chain of “Topcos” and “Midcos” ESO Capital are a big Churchill investor. ESO Capital are run by CEO and founding partner Alex Schmid. According to a Los Angeles-based property gossip magazine, the charmingly named Dirt, in 2021 Schmid put his Beverley Hills mansion up for sale. He bought it for $15.4m in 2018 and put it up for sale for $18.5m.

If any cleaners want to see how some of the money from their hard work makes its way into Californian luxury, they can see pictures of the five-bedroom, five-bathroom, luxury mansion with its own cinema, gym and guesthouse online.

There is an old saying in Yorkshire, where I grew up: “Where there’s muck there’s brass” — brass being slang for money. In this case the Churchill cleaners deal with the muck, while the investors get the brass.