Doing Business Differently: Celebrating Clean for Good and Just Helpers

We have wonderful news to share. Two social enterprises the Joseph Centre holds in high regard — Clean for Good and Just Helpers Cleaning Agency — have both been shortlisted for Living Wage Champion Awards 2026.

We couldn’t be more delighted, and we want to take a moment to celebrate why this matters.

Both are cleaning companies. Both operate in one of the UK’s most challenging sectors — low-margin, low-wage, and historically resistant to change. And both were founded by people whose convictions about the God-given dignity of every worker didn’t stay in the pew on Sunday morning. They brought those convictions into the boardroom, the staffroom, and the supply chain.

Clean for Good has been a trailblazer in demonstrating that fair pay and commercial success are not enemies. They pay the Real Living Wage, offer occupational sick pay from day one, and have become one of the first UK employers to adopt the Living Pension ensuring workers can retire with dignity. This is justice. It is a business saying: the people who do this work matter, and we will build our model around that truth.

Just Helpers’ founder Antoinette Daniel has spoken of paying a thriving wage as a “non-negotiable” from the outset. More than a decade of commitment to the Living Wage Foundation has shaped a business culture that seeks a win-win-win for cleaner, client, and company alike. As she puts it, from the moment they came on board with the Living Wage Foundation, they were already winners.

At the Joseph Centre, we believe this is exactly right and it is deeply Christian in its logic. When Pope John Paul II wrote that Christ’s life of labour shows us that the value of work comes not from the kind of work being done but from the dignity of the person doing it, he was articulating something that Clean for Good and Just Helpers are living out in practice. The cleaner matters. The security guard matters. The hospitality worker matters. Not as an afterthought, but as the very foundation of a flourishing economy.

These two enterprises are also a challenge to the rest of the business world. When a cleaning company operating on tight margins can offer a Living Pension or guarantee a thriving wage, the excuses of better-resourced businesses begin to look very thin indeed. Social enterprises like these expose the fact that exploitation is a choice, not a necessity.

We are proud to champion both organisations and look forward to celebrating with them at the Living Wage Champion Awards in July. They are showing the City of London what dignified work looks like in practice.

Congratulations to Clean for Good and Just Helpers. You are already winners.