Workload Issues among Commercial Cleaning Workers (Discussion Panel)

Abstract

Cleaning is a generic and essential job in various sectors and workplaces, commonly under the categories of janitorial or custodial services. Cleaning activities in organizations are often not the main business outputs of those organizations that they serve. Such jobs are performed either by an organization’s own employees, or more often, contracted out to external service providers. Therefore even organizations may have well-established occupational health and safety programs, the issues of cleaning workers’ work conditions are often overlooked (Seixas et al. 2013), thus resulting in high workers’ compensation claims (Lynch 2011, Smith and Anderson 2017). In the University of California system alone, there were 761 workers’ compensation claims among the custodial workers in 2010, with an actuarial estimated ultimate direct cost of $7.1 million (Lynch 2011). It has been suggested that workload among commercial cleaning workers has been increasing over the years, which may be responsible for the increased workers’ compensation claims among cleaning workers (Simcox et al. 2013, Teran and vanDommelen-Gonzalez 2017). It seems that it is necessary to understand the workload situation among commercial janitors so that proper protection ideas and mechanisms can be developed and implemented. However, current knowledge about cleaning workers’ workload is still very limited. Standard worktimes, which are normally based on time studies, are often used to develop “acceptable” janitorial workloads in the cleaning industry (Walker 2018). However, ergonomics researchers have been observing high musculoskeletal disorder risks among janitorial workers (Messing et al. 1998, Norman et al. 2003, Schwartz et al. 2019). Since the risk factors are multifaceted, this Discussion Panel consisting of a number of content experts including researchers, government health and safety specialists, and industry practitioners aim to help janitorial/custodial work conditions. We hope we will be able to develop a framework for future research on establishing healthy and safe workload for cleaning workers.