A living wage for janitors is the right thing to do

When Cristina punches out late at night on the parking level of the downtown Vancouver office building where she works as a janitor she feels unsafe. This isn’t because she’s alone. It’s because she’s not.

The parking garage room in which she punches in and out almost every day, alongside 20 or so of her colleagues, is about the size of a large bedroom. In other words, it’s not where you want to be in the middle of a pandemic. (Cristina wishes to be identified by her first name only for fear of consequences at work.)

When she asked her supervisor recently if anything could be done to stagger the punching in/out process so that several employees aren’t congregating in the same place at the same time, they told her she was welcome to punch in 15 minutes early or punch out late to avoid the crowd.

But this is a catch-22. If Cristina punches out early, she says, “they deduct your pay.” If she punches out late, she’s waiting around, alone, after midnight, unpaid. Even if she were to show up for her shift early to make up the 15 minutes she’d miss if she were to leave early, she says she was told her wages — $14.35 per hour — would be deducted anyway. The choice is hard but simple. She and her colleagues wait with the crowd, she says, “because we need money.”

Hard choices like this are being made across the country every day by people for whom working at home under COVID-19 is not an option, and who would rather work in potentially dangerous environments than not work at all.

We call some of these people “essential workers.” We call them heroes. But when it comes to professional cleaners, it’s a national shame that we often don’t call them anything at all. You may counter that you personally include janitorial staff in your nightly applause of pandemic heroes, but you would be in the minority. Janitors like Cristina are frontline workers. But in terms of how the public perceives them (or doesn’t) they are at the back of the front line: essential but unseen.

They work for low wages, to little fanfare, doing arguably one of the most important jobs today: keeping our cities and our institutions clean at a time of mass infection.

“We are working in the middle of the pandemic,” says Cristina, “to keep it clean for the people. We work a very physical and tough job. I am working hard to ensure the virus does not spread. The government and employers always forget janitors when they speak of front-line workers.”

Cristina tells me this over the phone on her day off. Or rather, she reads to me, from a letter she’s written to the public in preparation for our interview. Vancouver is expensive, she says. She is struggling to support herself and her family. Every month she sends money to her niece in the Philippines, and to her sister who is sick with cancer.

“An extra $2 an hour would help a lot,” she says. “With a little more money I could live more comfortably while continuing to help my sister and my niece. Please open your heart and open your mind to the janitors.”

And, if you own a company that employs professional cleaners, you can open something else in the process. You can open your wallet and pay them more. There’s a reason Cristina mentions a $2-hourly raise in her letter: like many in her industry she supports a campaign called “From Invisible to Essential” organized by her union, SEIU Local 2. The campaign is seeking an immediate $2-hourly wage increase, job security and a safe environment for workers.

Loida, another Vancouver cleaner who prefers to be identified by her first name to protect her employment, says the mask situation at her workplace — another downtown office building — is spotty. Sometimes she receives one, other times she doesn’t.

“We are doing a lot more work right now during the pandemic,” she says. “If we don’t clean the building it won’t stay sanitized for others. My work is essential to make it possible for other people to work.”

Loida wants her employer — a large janitorial company — to provide masks on a consistent basis. Three of her family members, all of whom live out of the province, were recently infected with COVID-19. “It’s so scary,” she says, “because we can’t see the virus, but we know it’s out there.”

Jules Samuel is a “special cleaner” contracted by TBM Service Group to clean bus interiors for the TTC. He says it can be difficult to physically distance on the job because buses are narrow and not everyone maintains appropriate distance. “I can’t feel safe in that condition,” he says, “because you never know what’s on the bus.”

A representative of TBM Service Group says the company thoroughly disinfects all vehicles, provides masks and gloves, holds nightly “job briefings” about social distancing and is currently in the process of testing an electronic device that would ping when workers get within two metres of each other.

Omar Joof, a cleaner who works at a call centre in Halifax, says janitorial work always carried risk. Now it carries more. “In this industry, coming into harmful substances and material is regular,” he says. (His employer, GDI Integrated Facility Services says it provides face coverings to employees upon request.) “Once you add a life-threatening virus to that it becomes overwhelming.”

In the coming weeks and months, as restless people emerge from their homes to revive the economy and potentially spread the virus — it may become even more overwhelming.

Paying professional cleaners a living wage and keeping them safe isn’t merely the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do. Or, as Cristina puts it much more succinctly in her letter: “Janitor is not a job that should be underestimated.”

In terms of how the public perceives (janitors) they are at the back of the front line: essential but unseen