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NEW: We asked janitors from airlines to offices to Disney how things are really being cleaned as coronavirus rages. Many raised alarms and revealed glaring problems. Dirty rags. Bathrooms that are not disinfected. (Thread) https://nyti.ms/3fGY8b3
2/Think about how many custodians work: Unseen. At night. Jobs go to the lowest bidder. Median wage is $13 an hour. In recent years, many workplaces have cut back on cleaning. (I hadn’t known this.) Now: Enter coronavirus.
3/Airplane cleaners say many between-flight cleanings are still under 10 minutes. “Just pick up trash, check the seatbelts, cross them, make it look good, and if a tray table looks dirty, you wipe it,” said Barbara Gomez, who cleans American Airlines planes at LAX.
4/Pilots and flight attendants back this up: in a survey, only 44% of flight attendants said the planes they flew on were thoroughly cleaned and disinfected between flights during the day.
5/Better news: some businesses are doing much more! Sanitizing like crazy. Raising custodian wages. Have you noticed how cleaning has become a marketing tool? But because there are few standards and regulations, it’s tough to know what’s really being cleaned or how frequently.
6/Case in point: Martha Lorena Cortez Estrada, a cleaner at a luxurious, high-design Miami office tower, said she resorted to bringing her own Clorox to work.
7/Or consider a @Cheesecake Factory that reopened in CA last month. Maria del Carmen Mendez, a pregnant cleaner, said that even when her husband was hospitalized with Covid, she was expected to fill her shift-- and she did, voluntarily.
8/OK, let's talk Disney. I've been following the custodians there for weeks in advance of reopening. The new standards there are intense. Custodians can use their company iPhones to quietly report guests without masks.
9/But those measures weren't enough for Disney's *Anaheim* custodians and workers, who helped halt the California park's reopening. (See Ellie's logic.) Which raises questions:
10/This is Elizabeth Martinez, a cleaner at a fancy NYC office building (and her mom on the right.) Her dad, also a janitor, died of Covid. She went back to work weeks later. Her real job, she realized, was to make white collar workers feel confident about re-opening.
11/THANK YOU for listening to these cleaners and reading/sharing this article. If you have a story about cleaning during Covid, or if you're a cleaner yourself, I'd love to hear it here. https://nyti.ms/3fGY8b3
