As you take a train home for Christmas over the next few days, spare a thought for those of us who make sure you’re not sitting in the remains of the last passenger’s mince pie. I work as a cleaner for Great Western Railway – albeit via an agency they use to employ us, Servest UK. Last week we travelled to the GWR head office to challenge the company over our terrible terms and conditions.

When I’m too sick to work, I have two choices: either I use my annual leave allowance or I don’t get paid. If I don’t get paid, I can’t pay my rent, so I have to borrow money from a payday loan company. If I borrow money it’s difficult to earn enough to pay it back – but for me it’s worse to waste annual leave because then I can’t use it to go home and visit my family.

Some people doing exactly the same job as me don’t have this problem. When they’re ill they’re entitled to sick pay and aren’t forced to get into debt. All of us clean for GWR, but only some of us are employed directly by the company – 350 of us, including me, technically work for Servest UK. Same job, different working conditions.

We want the same rights as those employed by GWR directly. Some of us haven’t visited our families for 18 months

The contractor’s agreement with GWR lasts for three years. After that, different companies can bid for the contract and attempt to provide the same cleaning services for less money. There are two ways they can do that: either they make fewer staff do more work or they pay everyone less money. The way things are set up it’s always the workers who lose out. Ultimately, GWR must take the blame for the unequal standards that cleaning staff on their trains must work to – they make the decision to put cleaning work out to tender. But the company tells us that it’s not its concern how the agency chooses to treat its staff.

I joined the RMT trade union and travelled with dozens of other agency cleaners last week to force the company to take responsibility for how we’re treated. We delivered a petition to a company director and we’re hoping he will meet us to discuss what is happening. We want to show him that we are serious.

We want the same rights as people who are employed by GWR directly. Sick pay is the most important thing for many of us, but we also want the Christmas and new year bonuses that all those directly employed by GWR get. Some of us haven’t been able to visit our families for 18 months and we want annual leave entitlements to match those of our fellow cleaners who don’t work for Servest.

For some people, things are even worse than they are for me. Even though they have cleaned GWR trains for years, they are agency workers with zero-hours contracts and have barely any rights at all.

GWR also needs to look into complaints by staff within the agency team, which so far neither they nor Servest have properly investigated. It is not acceptable for neither company to take responsibility for incidents that occurred prior to Servest taking over the contract. For the people there, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Servest UK or the previous contractor, the issues are still the same.

This is why we travelled to the GWR head office, and it’s why we are striking on Christmas Eve, because ultimately they are the company we clean for, regardless of what it says on our payslip. The trains we clean have GWR written on their side. We work hard at our jobs and all we’re asking is that they listen to us and make sure we’re treated fairly.

• As told to Abi Wilkinson