At my office, the janitorial people work by day. Being a prosecutorial law-enforcement office, we have a good number of professional staff; over one-third are attorneys. As to the investigative people with the guns, most of them have 4 year college degrees, and some have graduate degrees. There are a lot of suits and ties (or jackets and ties, in my case) for male staff, along with heels and dresses for women. There are plenty of desktop screens, laptops, smart phones, and — despite all the talk about “going paperless” — copying machines and red-rope file folders. And wandering amidst the busy office rows and cubicles with their sneakers and smocks and gloves and refuse carts and vacuum cleaners are the janitors, usually middle-aged Hispanic women. <\/p>\n
For the most part, this arrangement works out. The cleaning people are very considerate, although sometimes they have to get in our way. Once in a while I grumble to myself if one of them wants to vacuum the rug in my office while I’m working on a complicated financial report. But usually I just get up and take a walk over to the water cooler, and in a few minutes they are somewhere else. Another moment of consternation occurs when the cleaners close off a mens or womens room for 20 minutes during mid-morning. <\/p>\n
Overall, there is not a whole lot of personal interaction between “them and us”. Some of the clericals who are also Hispanic sometimes get into a chat with one of them in their native language. But for the most part, we exchange polite hellos, they do their jobs, we do our jobs, and the clock ticks until the work day ends for the night.<\/p>\n
I had worked in a handful of other professional offices in the past, both private and governmental, and I don’t remember seeing cleaning staff during the day. You would need to stay late to see them (and once upon a time, I would occasionally work into the night in order to ‘forward my career’; ah, days of youth.) That got me to wondering about are the pros and cons<\/a> of having your cleaners working while the sun is out and the mess is being made, and not having them come in at night when things are quiet. One theory is that most organizations don’t want to interrupt or distract their high-priced professionals and their clients for a maintenance function that can reasonably be done after-hours. <\/p>\n On the other hand, the cleaning workers might get a small premium in salary for working at night (e.g., $2 per hour difference<\/a> between day porter and night porter jobs in Texas), so it could be a bit less expensive to have your offices cleaned by day. Another thought regards security — I know that 99% of cleaning people would not touch anything valuable that they might see on a desk, but there will always be that one percent that will. It is obviously harder to remove something from an occupied office than a vacant one. I would guess that there is also an “impress your client” factor — if you frequently bring customers or financiers or other big-wigs to your office, it might appear sort of “d\u00e9class\u00e9” to have rumpled cleaning people amidst the elegant hot-shot professionals. In an age of radical equality, you would think that such notions are dying off, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still apply in a lot of businesses (especially in high-tech<\/a> or fashion firms<\/a> run by young entrepreneurs, where there is plenty of hypocrisy to balance out all of the liberal idealism<\/a>). <\/p>\n Actually, I am starting to think that having cleaning people wander amidst a company’s urbane professionals during the work day is rather appropriate and desirable, from a social justice standpoint. We are living in a society where the already-rich and the highly educated wanna-be’s are getting richer, and the poor and under-skilled working families definitely aren’t. What’s even worse, we all are becoming more and more isolated<\/a>. Many professionals today don’t have much occasion to rub elbows with the working class. We don’t shop in the same stores anymore (especially in an era when more and more purchases are made on-line, especially by the well-off); we don’t ride the same buses or subways; we sit in different sections of a sporting event; we don’t watch the same TV shows; we don’t go to the same churches; and we don’t send our kids to the same schools. <\/p>\n Seeing someone mop a floor or empty a waste basket makes you realize that struggling people, those who a hip young professional might occasionally hear about on NPR, really do exist not all that far from us. One nice little ritual that has evolved in my office is the annual Christmas holiday collection for the cleaning staff, which is taken up by the lawyers. I always chip in for it. They have a 20 minute presentation ceremony where an attorney will publicly thank the cleaners for what they do and hand them their cash envelopes, as to help with buying gifts for their kids. This once-a-year event hardly changes anything, but for at least a moment, a modern social and economic barrier comes down just a little.<\/p>\n I am not much of a radical in my old age, but still I can’t help but wonder if there should be a law requiring that most professional offices be cleaned during normal workday hours. Obviously there would need to be some exceptions, perhaps for critical medical facilities or government agencies dealing with sensitive information. But why shouldn’t Google and Goldman Sachs and the top law firms in Manhattan and Washington have a few cleaning ladies wandering around while the movers and shakers handle affairs that affect millions of lives and communities. <\/p>\n For now, I am thankful that my employer, in its quest to lower its costs and stay within its taxpayer-funded budget, does have such people among us. Quite unintentionally, my office is taking a small step to overcome the increasing isolation between the classes that is becoming worse and worse in the 21st Century (i.e., the “caste-ification” of America<\/a>).<\/p>\n PS — But one counterpoint — perhaps evening work is a good option for many working class people, who want to be home during school hours to help tend to their children. And maybe the extra dollar or two for night work makes a difference to them. So, had I king-like powers and announced a law requiring professional offices to use cleaning staff during the normal daytime work hours, it might have backfired. I believed that I was helping the poor, but it might turn out that I was making things more difficult for many of them. That would not be the first time that a law intended to improve things for a downtrodden group actually made it worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At my office, the janitorial people work by day. Being a prosecutorial law-enforcement office, we have a good number of professional staff; over one-third are attorneys. As to the investigative people with the guns, most of them have 4 year college degrees, and some have graduate degrees. There are a lot of suits and ties […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7034"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7036,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034\/revisions\/7036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}