Elections on Tuesday
You start with the bathrooms. You are to wait until they are empty. The occupants of the building must not be disturbed. It is 6 in the evening. Five floors of bathrooms, two bathrooms per level. Your uniform is dark pants, T-shirt, sneakers, blue cotton apron. You push your supply cart noiselessly down the plush, carpeted hallway. Executives brush past, ending their day as yours is beginning. There is no eye contact. They are expensively dressed, unlike you.
You start at the front of the room, with the mirrors. The sound is of white fluorescent lights buzzing. From your cart, you pull your feather duster, your Easterday Janitorial Supply Co. spray bottle of industrial-strength glass cleaner, a fistful of paper towels and a plastic jug you’ve rigged to hold a toilet brush. Your spray bottle is broken, so you unscrew the top and dump clear blue solution onto a towel so the mirrors will get polished. The fumes hit you like a faceful of Windex. The mirror goes to the ceiling. You clean what you can reach.
Quickly-because, besides these 10 bathrooms, your shift requires that you clean five floors of offices, a job the size of five single-family houses-you unlock the stainless steel trash bins and pull out the trash. The receptacle opens to reveal wet paper towels, strangers’ gum, wads of Kleenex with red lipstick on them. You change the trash bags, lock the bins up. You swab out the sinks, start with the urinals and toilets. Lift the lids, wash them top and bottom, clean around the base, down the sides.
Dunk the brush in a solution of water and Bowl Kling urinal cleaner. Hold your breath as more fumes rise from the suds. Try not to think about the dried rivulet under the toilet seat, the brown deposit of unflushed feces. In the ladies’ room, go stall to stall to stall to handicapped stall, disposing of used, bloody tampons. As night settles in--over this high-rise, this city, your unseen form, your sleeping children--use aerosol stainless steel cleaner and a damp, soft cloth to swipe at the scent, almost more palpable now than you are, of rich strangers’ excrement.
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To understand the strange, ragged vehemence of the janitors’ strike that has dominated Southern California for a week now, it is necessary to experience-just for a moment-the job. This isn’t the case with all strikes, which tend to be variations on the old theme of what work is worth in the new economic order. But the janitors’ strike has an extra dimension, one that has brought to the surface something deeply resonant about the lives, now, of all 1.3 million of the region’s working poor.
It is a dimension that has, with time and rising middle-class prosperity, become so accepted here as to go unnoticed, in the same way that no one at the Landmark Square high-rise in Long Beach, on this particular evening, notices Maria Castel. This is last week, days before the rolling strike will hit Maria’s Ocean Boulevard building. She is 51, a short woman with pinned-up hair, a silver front tooth and two tags on her apron, one bearing the name of her employer, the American Building Maintenance company, the other reading “Justice for Janitors.”
She and 10 other janitors (“Manuela, Cristina, Silfa, Antonio, el otro Antonio. . . “) are paid $6.80 an hour to clean this 24-story building from top to bottom every night between dinner time and 2:30 a.m. Her two little girls are home with their father, whom she’ll see for two hours before he leaves for his work as a welder. Janitorial jobs, the women say, are tough on marriages.
Also on bodies. Maybe an hour into your shift, the knees start to twinge and the back starts throbbing. “They promised us benefits a year ago, but so far we haven’t seen them,” she confides in Spanish, parking her cart in front of the fifth-floor men’s room. But that’s not the side of the work that eludes the public. Cleaning is hard, but it can have a satisfying, almost moral feel.
No, to understand, it is necessary to let the silence fall as you spray and wipe and breathe the glass cleaner. To feel the yellow mop handle as you scrub your way across the tiles and out the door. To shine even the silver doorplates with their symbols for “Men’s” and “Women’s” until you can see the reflection of someone-an executive in a white shirt, working late, coming toward the men’s room.
It is then, as he brushes past you--without acknowledgment or eye contact, leaving just the fresh smudge of his handprint--that you finally understand. There is a dimension now in which whole human beings can be rendered invisible, just erased, by the classes, by the millions. And something wells up, something palpable, as you consider that silver doorplate. Something like: I exist. I demand.
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.