Hospital Trash: Cleaners Speak of Their Role in Disease Prevention

Abstract

Feminist researchers have contrasted the caring provided by women in hospitals with a more fragmented "curing" approach, which they identify with the predominantly male professions of medicine and surgery. The author spoke with hospital cleaners about their jobs and their health. Several themes emerged: the invisibility of the cleaning function, lack of respect for cleaners, representations of cleaning as undemanding, and assumptions that women's work in cleaning is particularly easy. Cleaners use various strategies to combat these stereotypes but receive little help from administrators or fellow employees. There is a hierarchy in the status of Québec hospital workers with curing (doctors) at the top, followed by caring and healing (nurses, therapists, and attendants), and hygiene (cleaners, sterilizers, and launderers) at the bottom. Authority hierarchies in health care are not related to gender in a simple way, although there is discrimination against women cleaners. The fact that cleaning, especially cleaning performed by women, is invisible to managers, other hospital personnel, and patients has important consequences for cleaners' and for patients' health.

Full-Time Homemakers: Workers Who Cannot “Go Home and Relax”

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Be the fairest of them all: Challenges and recommendations for the treatment of gender in occupational health research

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Cleaning Up After Globalization: An Ergonomic Analysis of Work Activity of Hotel Cleaners

“…Given that cleaning is generally acknowledged to be low in status, cleaners are poorly paid, their workload is generally not recognized, and their work is usually seen as peripheral to the main activity of the employer (Messing 1998). Cleaners often complain of a lack of respect shown them, a lack which seems to be the result of a number of factors, one of which appears to be cultural associations between cleaners and the dirt they must remove (Glenn 1992; Brody this collection).…”