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They Clean the Buildings Workers Are Fleeing. But Who’s Protecting Them?

Janitors are going into offices to battle the invisible germs that threaten public health, sometimes without adequate protection or information about what they are facing.

“I felt as if I didn’t matter,” said Deborah Santamaria, who wasn’t alerted that a person in the San Francisco building she was cleaning had tested positive for the coronavirus. Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — The rumor unsettled Deborah Santamaria.

A fellow janitor at 555 California Street, a 52-story office tower in San Francisco’s financial district, told her he heard that a floor of the building was being closed because a worker had contracted the novel coronavirus. At 63, Ms. Santamaria counted herself among those most vulnerable to a virus that had killed thousands worldwide and was rapidly spreading across the United States.

Her supervisor at Able Services, the contractor that employs her, reassured her that nothing was wrong, she said.

It was not until five days later that a news article appeared saying that Wells Fargo had temporarily evacuated its offices in the building after an employee had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The bank had notified building management, which alerted the cleaning contractor. But according to the employees and their union representatives, no one had told the janitors.

“I felt as if I didn’t matter,” said Ms. Santamaria, who earns $22 an hour.

While many Americans are fleeing their offices to avoid any contact with the coronavirus, low-wage janitors are sometimes being asked to do the opposite. Although millions of Californians have been ordered to shelter in place, janitors are still being asked to go into offices to battle the invisible germs that threaten public health, even as those germs, and the new, powerful cleaning solutions they are being asked to use, may endanger their own health.

They often operate without specialized protective gear. And the increasing demand for their services is adding new stress and risks.

Janitors cleaning the Amazon headquarters in Seattle complained that a new disinfectant they were asked to use made their eyes and skin burn. In San Francisco, janitors said they have been asked to clean offices without having been told that people who had or were exposed to the virus had worked there.

Janitors wonder why they are left in the dark when companies go to great lengths to ensure that the tech, finance and other workers occupying the buildings they clean are aware of the most remote possibility of coming into contact with the virus. It shows, they say, how disparities play out in a public health crisis — how their lives sometimes seem to be valued less than those of people with resources and power.

“None of our families should be treated as second-class citizens,” Olga Miranda, the president of the Service Employees International Union Local 87, told the janitors at 555 California last week. She had gathered the largely immigrant work force in a plaza in front of the building and told them to walk off the job to protest the cleaning company’s failure to notify them about the coronavirus case.

“How are we supposed to know that the companies respect us when they’re not even telling us what’s going on in the building,” she said.

Ms. Miranda on Tuesday asked her members to start staying home, even though office buildings remained open. She said the union was concerned about exposing workers to health and public safety risks, including encounters with law enforcement officers enforcing the shelter-in-place order.

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Wells Fargo alerted the cleaning company after evacuating its offices, but none of the janitors who continued to work at 555 California Street were told.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Able Services executives did not respond to multiple telephone calls and text messages. On its website, the company said, “We advocate for our employees’ health and safety, through consistent training and education, meetings, communications and encouraging involvement in the development and implementation of our health and safety program.”

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said that on March 5, the company told the landlord at 555 California that one of its employees was suspected of having the virus. Wells Fargo brought in a specialized cleaning company that night to clean the floor it occupied, the 23rd, and told its employees to work from home the following day. The employee tested positive on March 7, and Wells Fargo also relayed that information to the landlord, Vornado Realty Trust.

A spokeswoman for Vornado said the company notified Able Services of the potential infection on March 5, the same day it found out from Wells Fargo. That day, Able Services told the two janitors who usually clean the 23rd floor not to work there but offered no explanation, the janitors said in interviews. Able did not say anything to the rest of its janitors, according to the union president.

Although she did not work on the 23rd floor, Ms. Santamaria said all the janitors deserved to know if there was a coronavirus case in the building so they could take extra precautions. The job is already one that takes a toll on their health. Ms. Santamaria has leg and knee problems. The pain is sometimes so bad at night that she cannot sleep. The only safety equipment she wears to clean are gloves, she said.

“That’s really irresponsible if they know that there’s a case,” said Ms. Santamaria, who has worked as a janitor in the United States since fleeing the civil war in her native Nicaragua more than three decades ago.

San Francisco officials issued an order this month requiring the enhanced cleaning of homeless shelters and single-room-occupancy buildings. But in calling for the increased cleaning, officials also set safety standards for the workers who will be doing the cleaning.

City officials recently met with leaders of the janitors’ union to review guidelines that the public health authorities developed for protecting cleaners, said Jeff Cretan, a spokesman for Mayor London Breed of San Francisco. The information was also provided to building representatives, he said, and city leaders were working with both sides to ensure that janitors were properly trained and kept safe.

Building owners and cleaning companies across the city need “to be 100 percent transparent with their employees” about the conditions they are encountering, said Aaron Peskin of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

“If they’re not, they’re going to be morally or legally liable,” he said.

Rocio Sáenz, the executive vice president of the S.E.I.U., the largest union of janitors in North America with more than 160,000 cleaners in over 30 cities, said the union was calling for increased training and the wider availability of proper safety gear for janitors.

On March 10, about 10 janitors who clean Amazon’s Seattle headquarters as contractors were exposed to an unfamiliar cleaning solution that sent some spilling into the street coughing, said one of the janitors.

A similar incident had happened about a week earlier.

Ismaham Ali, 29, a shop steward at Amazon who has been cleaning the company’s offices for the past four years, said her crew was given an unfamiliar, high-powered disinfectant to use.

Until then, she said, they had been using mostly gentle green cleaning products. But on that day earlier this month, Ms. Ali said, “They just said, ‘Hey guys, corona’s scary, use this.’”

Another janitor who leads chemical safety trainings for janitors who work at Amazon said the new disinfectant was Virex II 256.

“They didn’t say be careful or anything,” Ms. Ali said. “They didn’t mention anything.” Ms. Ali said that within an hour of using the new cleaning compound, her face became hot and her eyes red. Her eyes and skin began to burn, she said, and she developed a rash on her face. She said that there was a sheet with safety instructions but that she did not understand them all.

The next day, she said, the crew was given additional training, along with eye protection.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that several janitors had been sickened earlier this month, but said there had been no further complaints. The company said that Virex II 256 had been used for more than a year at its Seattle offices, and that it had confirmed with its cleaning contractors that janitors had been provided with health and safety trainings for the enhanced cleaning procedures required by the coronavirus outbreak. It said it also confirmed that the cleaning materials had been mixed in compliance with federal safety guidelines.

“Safety is a top priority for Amazon, both with our own employees and the employees of our service providers, such as janitorial staff,” the Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

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Elizabeth Carrion said her supervisor asked her to use an unfamiliar disinfectant to re-clean the 23rd floor at an office building on Sansome Street, center, in San Francisco.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Sales of Virex II 256 have increased exponentially in the past few days, said Peter Teska, the infection prevention application expert for Diversey, the South Carolina-based company that makes the solution. But training has to keep pace with the demand, he said.

“You have to be more careful,” Mr. Teska said. “The workers are probably also spending a bigger portion of their day doing cleaning activities.”

Elizabeth Carrion said she found it strange when her supervisor asked her to use a disinfectant she had never used before to reclean the 23rd floor at an office building on Sansome Street in San Francisco on a recent afternoon.

Ms. Carrion, 48, who asked that her middle name and married name be used for this article, already had cleaned the floor once that day, she said. The only explanation she was given for the second cleaning was something vague about taking extra precautions because of the coronavirus.

As she cleaned, her supervisor called again, and this time his voice sounded more urgent: Leave the floor immediately, he said. He refused to say why, Ms. Carrion said, and told her to wait in the break room. Her heart sank as she pieced together the possibilities in her head. Was there someone on the 23rd floor with the coronavirus, she wondered. Was she now infected?

A different supervisor later met her and several other janitors in the break room and told them that employees of Citigroup on the 23rd floor might have been exposed to someone with the coronavirus.

“I felt like a bolt, like a shock,” she said. “What I was processing was I already had it just by having been on that floor.”

It had not occurred to her that her chances of contracting the virus were actually very slim. She thought about her husband, who needs a kidney transplant and gets regular dialysis. She was terrified that if she got the virus, she would pass it on to him and devastate his already fragile health.

A spokesman for Citigroup said it informed the building management company, Barker Pacific Group, as soon as it learned of the potential exposure. It was unclear whether Barker Pacific relayed that information to Metro Services Group, the cleaning contractor that employs Ms. Carrion. Neither Barker Pacific nor Metro responded to requests for comment.

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Ms. Carrion in the Mission District of San Francisco. She wasn’t initially informed that she was cleaning a space where someone was thought to have been exposed to the coronavirus.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ms. Carrion, who earns $17 an hour, said she would not have gone to clean the 23rd floor had she known about the possible exposure, especially because her only protective equipment was a pair of gloves.

It turned out that the Citigroup employees had not been exposed after all, and that there had been no real danger. It was a relief, but the situation was no less disheartening for Ms. Carrion, who emigrated from El Salvador five years ago to escape an abusive relationship. She said she had also come to the United States because it was a place where she felt everyone would get a fair chance to prosper. Now she has been questioning that.

“We should all be valued the same,” she said. “So who guarantees my safety?”

John Eligon is a Kansas City-based national correspondent covering race. He previously worked as a reporter in Sports and Metro, and his work has taken him to Nelson Mandela's funeral in South Africa and the Winter Olympics in Turin. More about John Eligon

Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture from San Francisco for The New York Times. Before joining The Times, she was a correspondent for “VICE News Tonight.” She has written for California Sunday, Recode, The Guardian, and the San Francisco Chronicle. More about Nellie Bowles

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Who’s Looking Out for Those Left to Clean the Vacant Offices?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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