I am a cleaning lady, the one who cannot be seen and who does the dirty work

Only one qualifying skill: cleaning up the shit

In the evening, I work on a site which hosts the management of a large French group. In two hours, I have to ensure the cleaning of forty offices, several meeting rooms, toilets. This represents almost two minutes per office; at this infernal pace, I am required to be a “Wonder Woman” of cleanliness.

When I take my service, most of the employees of the company are still present at the scene. No longer able to erase my presence, I then become visible: you see me walking around with my cart, a bucket of water, rags, a feather duster, a broom, a mop, various harmful products, a garbage bag.

Sometimes I knock on your door to beg you, reverently, to grant me royal permission to empty your trash and vacuum . To believe that I am your domestic ! I don’t care, I continue my chore.

Do I only have a choice? I am a cleaning lady, but I am called “cleaning agent ″ . Offensive euphemism . I do the dirty job . I am only a uniform, devoted to a task. Harassing. Demeaning. I am a metonymy of my post: a stain. To endure the insults, I learned to ignore, to bury my pride, to grit my teeth.

A rule certainly in force: do not greet the cleaning lady

My work is scrutinized. No deviation is tolerated. No trace. No speck of dust. A grievance book is made available to employees of companies in which we operate. Slayers with the power to overwhelm the cleaning lady and make her run faster than her shadow. I remember a complaint against me, in which the author scolded me about the presence of a spider web behind the radiator in his office. Sheepishly, faced with the reproachful look of my manager, I hastened to go and suck up the object of the offense.

Moreover, beyond these small daily pettiness , one rule is certainly in force within companies: do not greet the cleaning lady. I remember that elevator that I called and that opened up to a group of young people. When I saw them, they laughed. Obviously, this abstraction in a blue blouse (a sign of the outcasts) that I was, decked out with two big black bags containing their droppings, made one laugh.

“Hello!” . No answer.

And for good reason, my task is vile, it makes me humanly insignificant. I am part of the needy mass, that of the little people, I am an untouchable, a failure. This is what I embody in their eyes. I am disqualified from the race for success.

“If you’re fed up, you can go home!”

We has just given me additional tasks: cleaning chair legs and cupboard doors, but also meticulous disinfection of door handles – an epidemic context requires. The company I work for considers, according to its careful calculations, that I am capable of doing more work on the same hourly amplitude. I am in a hurry. Like a citrus fruit. These productivity goals are unachievable. But there is no room for rebellion.

“If you’re sick of it, you can go home!”

Even after years of seniority, no complacency; at the slightest disagreement, we are forced to resign. So, to keep your place, you have to submit to diktats, unpaid overtime. Because we are interchangeable. A complaint and presto! With a magic broom, the agitator is wiped off the map to make room for another soldier in a blue uniform.

No one will notice this change, since we are little things that will remain less than nothing from the beginning to the end of our career.

Incarnation of social misery

After having finished cleaning, I have to push the two garbage containers located at the entrance of my work building to a dedicated room. I have chronic tendonitis in my right wrist and low back pain since February. These disorders are directly linked to the repetitive movements and the weight of these bags that I am dragging. If I reveal that my physical suffering is caused by my professional activity, I fear that I will be considered unfit and lose my job.

So I shut up and suffer . Under the sweat, the tears. Tears of pain and injustice. An injustice that grips the guts, those of the unskilled worker that I am, reduced to servitude by the system that created all these absurd outsourcing strategies. A painful, thankless, intense job, which wears out the body and annihilates thought. An absence of recognition, a degraded image. I embody social misery.

Shadow workers

The first rays of the sun coming through my bedroom window wake me up with candy. I stretch, slowly. A delicious smell of coffee emanates from the kitchen. On the radio, we announce the last prices of the CAC 40. Chimerical vision. The alarm rings. Screeching noise tearing me from deep sleep. No time to chase my dream. Four thirty-five. From midnight. I have to get to work. In prison. I extricate myself from my blanket. Mechanical gestures.

I wash, get dressed. Make a coffee, strong. Swallow it, get out. The first metro runs at 5:10 am. I hasten the step towards the station. Inside the cars, I always meet those same crumpled faces, eyelids still swollen from a shortened night’s sleep, that gaze into space. I am part of another France, that of invisible workers. Mostly, we perform the most tedious tasks, but which turn out to be of undeniable social utility; the health crisis linked to the Covid-19 epidemic perfectly reveals this strange antinomy.

We, cleaning employees, are shadow workers. We are here and there, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We are more than 2 million in France. But we can’t be seen.

See also on The HuffPost: Housekeepers, home helpers … With “Debout les femmes!” Ruffin signs an ode to feminism

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