Mirko Laic and his family have been scrubbing and sweeping Torrens Primary School for more than 20 years but under the new carve-up of school cleaning contracts, the 64-year-old fears he won't have much of a business left to pass onto his son Branko.
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Cleaning contracts for the 87 ACT public schools were recently split into eight packages to make it easier for officials to ensure individual cleaners weren't being ripped off.
The change came after more than two years of strikes and lawsuits, which ended with one ACT school cleaning company, Phillips Cleaning Services, facing hefty fines for underpaying their migrant workers.
But Mr Laic, who migrated from Serbia and spent the better part of three decades building up his cleaning company - M & V Cleaning Services - said the split will likely send him out of business as his company is too small to take on the large packages.
Although he has a couple of office blocks on his books, the bulk of his work comes from Torrens and Garran Primary Schools.
"It's a small business and a family business and we are doing the best that we can. One package is 24 schools, which I'm not able to do. What are we going to do in the future?" he said.
Branko Laic said the company is just family - his parents, his aunts and uncles and his siblings share the cleaning between them.
He said the business enabled his mum and dad to give their kids "a good education and a good upbringing".
Now the kids are a part of the business and cleaning the schools was like a "family get-together", Mr Laic said.
"We've put forward a tender anyway but do we have the capacity to do 24 schools? No we don't. For us to be able to compete and apply for a tender of 24 schools we need to have at least 100 employees. There's about seven of us doing the two schools at the moment," Branko Laic said.
"[They said] this is an easier way of managing contracts and making sure contractors comply with industrial regulations. I find that unfair as they should probably put people on that are capable of regulating contractors not reducing the amount of current contractors for their own benefit."
An ACT Education Directorate spokesman said the contract carve-up was not intended to disadvantage small businesses.
"The packages were sized to balance the government's goal of improved contract management with a need for the packages to be accessible to firms of varying sizes, including small firms," he said.
Three of the eight packages only contain three school contracts and one package only has two schools.
However with a maximum of eight contractors, Branko Laic pointed out most of the 30 current contractors will miss out.
"It's been targeted at the big companies that have got employees of 100-plus staff so it's pretty much cut all the small Canberra businesses out of the race," Mr Laic said.
