Absenteeism in the cleaning industry: often enough the boss takes the mop himself

If at the end of the afternoon it is still not possible to find a substitute, he “takes the mop himself”, says Sander Florie. Seven of the 85 employees reported sick in January to the director of the Haarlem cleaning company De Spiegel – all because of corona.

This means that absenteeism in one month is already quite close to the twelve corona reports from 2020 and 2021. And then De Spiegel also has ten vacancies, says Stephanie Florie, Sander’s sister and board member of the family business.

Due to the highly contagious Omikron variant, the number of corona infections nationwide is increasing much faster than during previous corona waves. RIVM reported more than half a million positive tests last week, almost half more than the week before. The fact that more and more people are getting sick or have to be quarantined is hitting the cleaning industry hard. More than one in ten cleaners is currently at home due to corona complaints or mandatory quarantine, industry association Schoonmakend Nederland reported last week.

And then the quarantine rules for the cleaning industry have recently been relaxed. Since their work belongs to the “essential business processes”, cleaners have been allowed to continue working since last week after ‘close contact’ – more than fifteen minutes within one and a half meters – with a person infected by corona. The condition is then that the cleaner is free of complaints and does not test positive.

Self test

For Schoonmaakd Nederland, this relaxation is not enough. The employers sent a fire letter to the cabinet last week, requesting further expansion. For example, they want staff to be able to quarantine for five days based on a positive self-test. Now they are dependent on a GGD test, for which there are long waiting times – and as a result of which employees are absent even longer.

De Spiegel has a day job finding substitutes. Between the jerry cans with cleaning products and the bundles of vacuum cleaner hoses in the warehouse, management starts the search in the morning to fill the empty spaces in the grid.

The company should not expect much more from temporary workers, Stephanie Florie knows. Since last summer, the cleaning company has not received any responses from its permanent employment agency. “So we assume they couldn’t deliver.”

The most profitable thing is to ask our own cleaners to work a little longer. If this has insufficient effect, De Spiegel asks its subcontractors to step in. But that comes at the expense of profit margins: last month, that effort depressed De Spiegel’s result by an estimated 10 percent. Turnover remained stable, but growing as the company did last year is not in it for a while.

With three permanent subcontractors, De Spiegel cleans at about 150 locations, including offices, libraries and thirty schools. If the subcontractors can no longer supply extra people, the only recourse is to start scrubbing themselves, say ‘object manager’ Paula Weggelaar (51), responsible for roughly half of the cleaning locations, and material manager Max van der Leij (54). Not only the increasing number of quarantines plays a role, but also the ‘real’ sick people – because corona often lasts longer than those five days of mandatory stay at home. Weggelaar: “We are stuck. In the past month, Max and I had to clean four schools ourselves. Sometimes we even work with a larger group of managers.”

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The managers hardly get around to their normal tasks anymore, says Weggelaar. For her, these consist of taking orders for materials and supervising people. “I haven’t been to one of our cleaners in two weeks, who I know feels lonely quickly. I just can’t get around to that cup of tea with her.”

Foreman sick

The nine women who clean the Haarlem College for De Spiegel also miss that contact with their manager. Cooperating foreman Abdul has been at home with corona for a few days now. He is not very ill, but his duties had to be divided among the others. That is sometimes hard for them. That is why director Sander Florie now comes every day to see how things are going.

At the beginning of the evening, the building stands like an illuminated box of blocks in the now dark Schalkwijk. It’s quiet when the regular users are gone. At the end of the hall Badiriya Salim-Adam (51) is working. She wipes up a blank test sheet and some cookie wrappers.

Now that Abdul is not there, Salim-Adam goes home about half an hour later, she says, as do three colleagues. Nine of them take care of Abdul’s duties; he also always helps them with cleaning. Now they empty the large trash cans in the break rooms and make sure that the dirty cleaning cloths end up in the washing machine.

For example, the nine women have been taking care of each other’s absence since the pandemic started. It would take too much time to train new people who are not familiar with the building, says colleague Karamallah Jaaouti (41). For example, when Karamallah became “champion corona” after six weeks of absenteeism, Salim-Adam worked six hours a day instead of three. The extra hours they get paid as a result are often very welcome.

So they will get it clean, says cleaning lady Jamila Abdeli (47), but that costs extra sweat drops – especially now that she has to empty those large garbage cans, which Abdul would have done differently. And if she’s also mopped ‘Abdul’s hallway’, she can really only lie on the couch afterwards. How many hours did she work extra in the past year due to corona? There are so many, she can’t remember exactly.

Jaaouti especially misses the support that Abdul gave her. Cleaning rooms is not so bad, she says, but the toilets are. “It’s always a question of what you find. Not with the girls, you know, but with the boys you can just find wet toilet paper wads on the ceiling, or soda all over the floor. Abdúúúl, I call very loudly.”

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