From the Archives: “Night Shift”

Walking through Central Academic Building at 9:00 p.m after a hardcore study session in Cameron Library, it’s easy to notice the over-spilling garbage cans lining the halls.

In the morning, however, the piles of Panda Express boxes are gone without a trace. Logically, we all know that there’s a cleaning staff behind keeping our campus habitable by public health standards, but it’s easy to forget how much work goes into keeping roughly 12,652,000 square feet of campus clean.

As a reminder to appreciate efforts behind this feat, The Gateway revisited the feature “Night Shift” from the 15 October 2014 edition which shadows the night shifts of two U of A cleaners.

By: Kate Black — The Gateway 2013-14 Managing Editor

“Ladies’ laughter and the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee spill out of the Area B cleaning staff’s lounge. Small talk about grand-children, doctor’s appointments and the weather percolates as the staff don their fleece Operations and Maintenance jackets. One woman passes out homemade coffee cake. Another sits in the back corner of the lounge, idly flipping through a Metro.

The staff perk their attention to the door when Penny Milligan, the night shift supervisor for Area B, emerges from her office into the lounge. Milligan quickly debriefs the workers on tonight’s tasks, turns on her radio, and wishes them good luck.

And with that, the night shift begins. At 11 p.m, nearly 300 cleaners erupt from their meeting places to their respective buildings — together, they will cover nearly 12,652,000 square feet of space on campus in a night.

Milligan’s silhouette snakes in and out of the eerie orange haze of the Quad streetlights as she walks towards the South Academic Building. The autumn breeze nips at her skin, and she pulls her fleece further over her writs.

“It’s a whole different ball game at night. There’s nobody around. It’s really quiet,” she says. “It’s really a strange shift, that’s for sure.”

Her footsteps echo against the concrete, only to be swallowed by the massive silence wallowing over the Quad.

Shylaja, who chose to withhold her last name, is Milligan’s “lead hand” on the shift, which entrusts her with the role of cleaning South Academic Building (SAB) floors, including the Office of the President’s quarters. But, she’s starting her shift cleaning her least favourite place — the bathrooms.

With no windows in the hallway, SAB feels like a purgatorial daytime. The fluorescent glow beating down on the linoleum creates the illusion that maybe it isn’t so late out, despite the time on the clock.

When Shylaja wraps up her shift at 7 a.m., she’ll head over to work at the childcare centre by Lister Hall for a couple of hours. It makes for a long workday, but for her, it’s worth it.

“That’s my passion. I love to work with kids.” Her voice trails off under the drumming of the faucet streaming water into the bucket. She smiles.

Shylaja left Grant MacEwan University on year short of finishing the Early Learning and Child Care program. With English as a Second Language, it was difficult for her to keep up with her studies, she says.

She’s been cleaning at the U of A for 17 years, and working with children for the past 23.

“It’s a job. I have three kids, a family to support,” she says. “When you have a family to support, it’s survival.”

But she’s content cleaning. Night shifts go by faster than day shifts, she says, dipping her hand into a chemical swirl and gently ringing out a cloth.

Across Quad, Borka Hadzic is training a new worker in the SUB Bookstore. This isn’t her regular haunt, because she’s usually stationed in SAB. She’s been on the night shift at the U of A for 30 years, and has been full-time for 20 years.

After showing her trainee around the back end of the store, Hadzic snaps lavender latex gloves and sets off to empty the garbage bins in the bottom floor of the Bookstore.

She squints through shimmery blue eyeliner at the stray pieces of trash on the floor. Used Kleenexes and granola bar wrappers seem gradually more substantial as Hadzic bends over to each one up herself.

As she thrusts a bag of garbage out of its bin, she reflects on how her job has changed over the years.

“It’s not too, too bad. The only bad thing is that it’s the night shift. Sometimes you don’t get enough sleep,” she says.

She says that while she has never had issues with students, it’s easy for people, especially management, to pick up on places that she missed, without recognizing the amount of effort that she puts into each shift.

“I can just come and go. There’s no appreciation,” she says.

Milligan says that the management side, though, is taking steps to recognize the night staff.

“I know for a fact that our management team has a tremendous amount of respect for the job that we do,” she wrote later in an email.

The Office of the President hosts a recognition dinner for the afternoon and night shift workers every year, she says. As well, the trades workers with U of A Facilities and Operations hosts an annual BBq for the cleaning staff, in addition to an awards breakfast for staff that have perfect or near-perfect attention.

But Milligan admits the job certainly isn’t without its challenges — especially the toll it takes on its worker’s bodies. More than half of her 20-person staff have been working at the U of A for at least 20 years and, sometimes, staff members will take a couple of months off at a time to be able to recover from their ailments.

“We have an aging workforce. These ladies have been doing their jobs for 30 years. Your age catches up with you. There’s cataracts, there’s carpal tunnel, injuries that need attention,” she explains.

And the management of the cleaning staff is only continuing to change. Milligan says the university is contracting out an increasing number of Bee-Clean Building Maintenance cleaners instead of hiring more internal cleaning staff. (The Edmonton Clinic Health Academy building is now entirely maintained be Bee-Clean staff, she says).

But Milligan says she believes the internal staff, like her Area B team, are irreplaceable in terms of their dedication to the university.

“I think that’s really the way it’s going,” she says. “But I think they’ll always keep a core (university staff) for the higher-level labs and that sort of thing, like chemistry. They want someone to be a little bit more committed, engaged to their positions.”

“The employees here feel like they’re a part of the team, part of the university, so they have more interest in the property”

The quiet corners of the Bookstore would feel lonely to anyone who’s used to the store busy and teeming with students. Hadzic, however, finds solace in the room’s silence. Her favourite part about the job is the solitude, after all.

“It’s very peaceful.”

As the morning light streams onto the campus, the cleaning staff will put their supplies back in their respective closets and return home to nod off as the sun rises. The day will continue as per usual, almost as if they were never here,

But soon enough, they’ll emerge from the shadows again, cleaning up behind students they’ve never seen.”