Imagining Cleaners’ Work, and Cleaners’ Lives

If you’re looking to enter imaginatively into the life of someone who works as a cleaner or as a house-servant, what do you focus on? Their social status? Their economic circumstances? The physical reality of their daily life? Their emotions and their personal life? To even contemplate such questions is of course to have come a long way from the world of Jane Austen, where the very existence of servants is barely acknowledged, and where those whose existence is touched on usually remain nameless. That’s the starting point of Jo Baker’s marvelous 2013 novel Longbourn, which goes over much of the same ground as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but is told from the point of view of Sarah, the Bennet’s housemaid. Extraordinarily engaging and often quite moving, Longbourn is utterly persuasive in its presentation of the realities of a life largely spent in cleaning other people’s dishes and other people’s clothes—the intellectual and emotional realities of such a life quite as much as the physical and economic ones.

A more recent example, Nita Prose’s The Maid, sets its sights much lower. The protagonist, Molly, is a good-hearted, enormously conscientious, neurodivergent employee of the luxurious Regency Hotel. Molly inadvertently becomes deeply involved with a criminal network operating within the hotel, and is herself accused of the murder. The story line works well enough, and Molly is an engaging character; in short, it’s a breezy read of a murder mystery, so one should not expect too much. But (as a former cleaner myself, albeit for only a brief time), I couldn’t help but feel the novel to be rather disappointing as a portrayal of this sort of working life. There is a good deal of description of the sorts of work that Molly and her fellow workers do, but almost nothing about the toll such work inevitably takes on the human body. In reading of Sarah’s life at Longbourn, one is frequently told of such things as “the calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs.” In The Maid, one is reminded again and again of Molly’s determination to return each hotel room “to a state of perfection,” but told little of the physical toll that must take. Nor, it seems to me, are the economic realities confronted as they deserve to be. Prose effectively conveys the financial hardship Molly suffers after her grandmother (a cleaner of houses, who Molly has shared an apartment with) dies, leaving Molly both grieving and falling behind on the rent. But Prose never connects the dots in any way that might suggest a systemic or collective problem rather than an individual financial predicament.

Toward the end of the novel, when Molly is promoted to head maid at the hotel, she receives a raise, and at about the same time she begins again to live in shared accommodation. Even then her circumstances allow her to save at only the most minimal level—“just a few hundred dollars” to start with, though it is described as enough that she can dream of one day being able to enroll in the hospitality program at the local community college. And then she receives an unexpected windfall—a $10,000 gift from a wealthy friend. “Life has a way of sorting itself out,” we are told at the book’s conclusion—one of the nuggets of wisdom that Molly’s grandmother once dispensed. “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” But it is the end of the book, and, much as things may have turned out okay for Molly, in the broader world that the book touches on, things are very far from okay. There is no suggestion that the other maids have received raises when Molly is promoted. Though we understand that their lives will be improved by having Molly as head maid rather than the hated Cheryl (who used to steal the tips meant for others on the housekeeping staff), presumably the ordinary cleaners are still not making a living wage.

A much more rounded portrayal of what life as a cleaner is really like can be found in the 4,000 words of Sherman Alexie’s* superb short story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” (originally published in the 29 May 2017 issue of The New Yorker), the story of Marie, who works for decades as part of the housekeeping staff at a motel. Here is part of the description of what the work does to Marie physically:

Marie’s knees and ankles hurt because she had so often squatted and kneeled to clean the floors.

Her feet hurt because she stood for most of the day. And she’d never owned a good pair of work shoes. She’d always promised herself that she would buy a better pair of shoes with the next paycheck.

But “with the next paycheck” was like saying “Dear Big Bang.”

Her lower back hurt because of all the times she had carried the vacuum and heavy bags of clean and dirty towels, and had thrown garbage and recycling and compost into the dumpsters in the alley behind the motel.

One day, she’d twisted her back so severely that she’d collapsed in pain on the sidewalk.

At the free clinic, she learned that “back spasms” was the fancy way to say “torn muscles.”

Once or twice a year since then, she’d torn her back again. But she’d missed only a few days of work because of her bad back. She’d spend one day in bed, recovering, and then she’d force herself back to cleaning, because she’d read that an injured back heals best during activity.…

Her hands hurt.

Arthritis.

Carpal-tunnel syndrome.

And the recurring rashes caused by the soaps and disinfectants and window cleaners.

Her skin itched and burned.

She tried wearing gloves at work, but that only made her rashes migrate from her hands to her wrists, forearms, and elbows. Some mornings, she woke with hands so stiff that she could not make fists. She could not hold her coffee cup or toothbrush. She’d submerge her hands in hot water and flex and flex and flex until her fingers worked properly again.

“It’s hard work,” she’d said to Father James. “But it’s not like working in a coal mine."

“Maybe it is,” he’d said.

Alexie’s “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” is clear-eyed too on the economic front. There is no $10,000 windfall for Marie; her gift on her last day of work is that she is paid for a full day while being asked to clean only a single room. Then, her retirement send-off:

The owner gave Marie her last paycheck in cash. Two weeks’ worth of money. Six hundred dollars.

Then she got into her car. It started on the fourth try.

She drove home to her husband. He was sitting on their couch watching the midday news. He’d retired from his job at the hardware store a few months earlier.

With Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and good luck, Marie and her husband would survive.

It would be difficult in a 4,000-word story to say much of the collective issues relating to the sort of work that Alexie describes—the urgent need for better wages and benefits for all workers in such jobs-though something of their importance can I think be inferred from a careful reading of "Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest." As Tony Keller pointed out in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the reality today is that those “with the least bargaining power—in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security—tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them.” It is of course extraordinarily difficult for such workers to unionize, not least of all because unpleasant, low-paying jobs will almost inevitably have an extremely high turnover rate (another reality that is brought home vividly to readers of “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”). But a high turnover rate is not the only obstacle; in many jurisdictions, governments have since the 1980s made it far more difficult for workers to act collectively.

It's interesting that the best portrayals of effective collective action over the past several decades have been in films rather than in books. Norma Rae and Made in Dagenham are well known examples; less well known but at least as good is Bread and Roses (directed by Ken Loach, and starring Adrien Brody, Elpidia Carrillo, and Pilar Padilla), a brilliant 2000 film based on a true story of the successful struggle of Los Angeles janitorial workers to unionize. I can’t think of any finer example of a work of art that gives an equally powerful and equally moving sense of individual lives and of the collective reality of life for a group of oppressed workers.

In very different ways, both The Maid and Bread and Roses are heartwarming stories of working-class heroes. I recommend them both to anyone, without reservation. But I have to wonder if the very different levels of success they have met with might say anything about twenty-first century society. The Maid (which will soon also be a movie), a perfectly pleasant portrayal of an individual life that in no way challenges the socio-economic status quo, has been a number one bestseller both in Canada and in the United States. Bread and Roses, a deeply moving individual story that is also a profound exploration of a broader socio-economic reality, earned only $533,479 at the box office, and is not always easy to find today, either on streaming services or as a DVD. It’s worth the search!

*Anyone nowadays who praises any aspect of the work of Sherman Alexie has to accept that some readers may respond with surprise and with disapproval. Given that background, I should make clear that praising “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” as an extraordinarily accomplished and richly evocative work of fiction should in no way be construed as a defence of its author against the series of accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in 2018—any more than praising Le Morte Darthur should be construed as a defence of Sir Thomas Malory against accusations of rape, or than praising Four Quartets should be construed as a defence of T.S. Eliot against charges of misogyny and antisemitism.