"Retail Janitors Clean Up After Holiday Shoppers. They Don’t Get Time Off for Themselves."

The following is an excerpt from an article by Sarah Lazare that appeared in Jacobin on December 11. A link to the article is provided at the nd of the excerpt Many of us will shop at Cabela's and other big box stores for holiday gifts without thinking about the many kinds of retail workers who work to keep the stores clean and in order. As the article points out, their working conditions can change through union organizing. 

For Elbida Gomez, the winter holiday season is not marked by cheer or family time, but by an exponential increase in her workload — cleaning bathrooms and store offices, taking out the trash, mopping entrances, and wiping up food from the floor of the employee cafeteria.

The forty-three-year-old mother of two says she is one of just two people whose primary job is to clean the Woodbury, Minnesota, location of Cabela’s, a big box store chain that sells hunting, fishing, and camping goods. Foot traffic increases as patrons do their holiday shopping. Parents line up with their children to take a photograph with Santa Claus. The floor gets covered in chocolate, candy wrappers, and footprints, and, once the snow comes, the store entrance is perpetually coated in salt and sand, she says.

“There is little time and a lot of work,” says Gomez, who has done janitorial work since she moved to the United States from Honduras around fifteen years ago.

But in a sector where she is — quite literally — tasked with sanitizing the holiday experiences of other families, she is denied the opportunity to relax and rejuvenate with her own. Gomez does not get paid holidays from her employer, Carlson Building Maintenance, which is contracted to clean Cabela’s. Her vacation time is paltry, she says, and management has made it clear that she is discouraged from taking consecutive days off during the holiday crunch, when her labor is needed most. While her store is closed on Christmas, she does not get paid for this holiday, she says. And, crucially, she still has to work on Christmas Eve, despite its central importance to her family.

Read the entire article here.