BY MIA GREGERSON
For the Kent Reporter
Rosa is a single mother who supports her three children by cleaning at a busy mall. Although she works at an upscale mall, she still is exposed to all kinds of things –vomit, blood, feces and other potentially dangerous bodily fluids.
One day while cleaning a restroom, Rosa reached to grab the feminine hygiene disposal bag and was poked by a needle.
While waiting to get test results back, she was depressed with anxiety about who would take care of her kids if she died.
Although Rosa didn’t contract HIV from that needle poke, she continues to be at risk while trying to support her family. Every shift, she is expected to clean bodily fluids without training or safety equipment.
The people who clean your office or favorite store are men and women trying to support families. But the job isn’t easy or safe. And they don’t have any protection.
In the evening and late into the night, while many of us are home with our families eating dinner or curled up in bed, in cities and towns throughout Washington, there are thousands of people just like Rosa working hard to clean and maintain our schools, offices and stores.
The work that janitors do is invisible to many of us. Yet we cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the high injury rates that janitors suffer.
It’s not just a lack of training and equipment. Some evidence suggests that many injuries in the janitorial workforce occur when an employee is rushing through their tasks, trying to clean too large of an area during a shift. This is what happened to Antonia, the sole provider for her and her child.
A few years ago, Antonia was hurrying to finish her assignments so she wouldn’t get in trouble with her supervisor. Her duties included trash, dusting, sweeping and mopping, moving furniture and vacuuming and cleaning tables, windows and mirrors. And she was expected to do all of this for four different floors of the building.
When Antonia was mopping one of the multiple kitchens she needed to clean that night, she slipped and fell, hitting her head, shoulder and hip. After 10 minutes or so had passed, Antonia got up and although she felt dizzy, she went back to work – working was necessary to support her family.
After working in pain for a few months to continue feeding her family, Antonia finally went to see a doctor and has been unable to return to work. As a single mother, not being able to work is an enormous hardship – both financially and emotionally as Antonia cannot be the mother she wants to be for her child.
Reducing the workload and providing training and equipment would have helped Antonia and Rosa avoid their injuries.
There are always going to be inequalities in workplace injuries. Some of this is common sense. More injuries will occur on a construction site than in an office. But there are more injuries in janitorial work than would be expected or are inevitable with this type of work.
Why? We don’t know. There isn’t enough research to understand why the injury rates are higher for commercial janitors. What we do know is that janitors have higher rates of injuries and compensable claims even when compared to other service workers.
Among janitors, some groups experience higher injury rates. Many people working as janitors are lower income individuals, immigrants, or have limited English proficiency. These people are being injured at even higher rates.
The problem is even worse for female janitors, who have nearly twice the rate of injury as male janitors.
Last year I introduced legislation to study safety in commercial janitorial and other similar industries. Because we can’t fix problems if we don’t know what they are.
While the bill failed to pass, reintroducing it next year is necessary to find answers to questions about why the injury rate is higher and what types of activities pose risks.
These hard-working men and women keep our buildings safe and clean. The least we can do is protect them in return by discovering why there is such a high injury rate.
Reach Rep. Mia Gregerson, D-SeaTac, 33rd Legislative District, at 360-786-7868 or mia.gregerson@leg.wa.gov.
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