Cleaners on front lines — with little protection,
Low-wage workers, already vulnerable, say they have few protections
With a decade’s experience as a cleaner, Veronica Zaragoza has seen it all: 13-hour days, cash payments below minimum wage and chemicals that made her head spin. As concerns around COVID-19 in Toronto deepen, so too has her concern for loved ones. Last week, she picked up the phone and started dialing — working her way through a list of a dozen friends who scrub grocery stores and skyscrapers across the city.
For some, office closures spell devastating job losses.
For others, work is intensifying — and with it, fear.
“I’m thinking one of the most vulnerable groups to be affected is cleaners. Why? Because we clean everything,” Zaragoza says. “We are in contact with this virus directly.”
Ariadni Marin works Monday to Saturday cleaning a large downtown Toronto grocery store. On Sundays, she rotates to a different building. She is paid $13 an hour, she says, minus a 2.5 per cent cut her boss takes for paying cash.
While non-essential businesses close across the province, disinfection regimens in Marin’s workplace are more demanding than ever. Every department at the grocery store is anxious for extra cleaning, she says; there is no time for eating lunch or taking breaks.
“The work is very, very heavy, and no one is helping us,” says Marin, who is originally from Colombia. “Sometimes they ask us to stay for longer but don’t pay extra time.”
She does not have a face mask to wear and has to wash her plastic gloves at the end of each shift so she can reuse them. She has been provided with new cleaning agents; she says she does not know what they are and has received no training on how to use them. The new chemicals make her feel ill.
Above all, she is worried about contracting the virus. “We are always in contact with people and we don’t have the necessary equipment,” she says.
Zaragoza, who now educates fellow cleaners on their rights through the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre, says long-standing concerns in the cleaning sector are thrown into harsher relief by the pandemic.
Cleaners are among the lowest-paid workers in the city. Many are undocumented, making them easy targets for exploitative bosses, she says.
“This is a huge barrier because they have fear asking for their rights.”
Recent measures passed by the Ontario government mean workers no longer have to provide doctors’ notes if they are ill and cannot be fired for not working if they contract coronavirus. But the legislation does not include access to paid sick days — a particular problem for low-wage workers who cannot work from home.
Marin’s boss has told her not to come to work if she exhibits virus symptoms. “But I have to work for my food,” she says.
Even though all workers — regardless of immigration status — are entitled to Ontario’s basic labour protections, cleaning is notorious for employee misclassification. Many cleaners are categorized as independent contractors, not covered by employment legislation.
Testing and treatment for COVID-19 will be free to all Ontarians even if they are uninsured, the province says. But undocumented workers are not eligible for new employment insurance relief funds set up by the federal government.
One cleaner, whom the Star is not naming because she does not have legal status in Canada, says she recently lost her $12.50-an-hour job at an office building downtown, after its occupants began working remotely.
“I’m on my own here. Honestly, I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” she says. “I have money to pay just one month of rent. That’s it.”
“I think a lot of Canadian people don’t want to do these kinds of jobs. Cleaning jobs are very demeaning. I have been sexually harassed, verbally harassed,” she added.
In 2013, Toronto declared itself a sanctuary city after noting that while undocumented workers “contribute to the Canadian economy by paying for basic needs of shelter, food and other services, as well as paying provincial sales tax,” they often face “multiple barriers to living healthy fulfilling lives.”
“They are particularly susceptible to situations where they are required to work for low wages, under poor and unsafe work conditions, and where they have no protection against unfair dismissal, abuse and/or exploitation by their employer,” says a staff report from the time.
Francisco Rico-Martinez, the co-director of the FCJ Refugee Centre in Toronto, says his organization has seen an uptick in concern — often from cleaners — about paying rent, accessing health care and growing xenophobia in recent weeks.
“I know many families who have opened their houses for non-status people to clean and to serve and to take care of children,” he says. “The cleaning they do in many places, in downtown and in buildings and restaurants, we take it for granted. These are the lowestpaid jobs that we have.”
Rico-Martinez says he will be appealing to the Mayor John Tory this week to enable three months of emergency access to Ontario Works for those who normally wouldn’t qualify — so that Toronto’s sanctuary status isn’t “false advertising.”
“This is what we are asking for — an emergency plan for the poorest of the poor,” he says.
“They deserve to be treated as human beings.”
For Marin, a seven-day work week scrubbing box stores has always been short on relief. Only now, the stakes are higher.
“I feel like they are asking us to clean everything because they care about everyone’s health,” she says. “Except cleaners.”