Cleaning up the Cleaners

Not long ago, a plainly dressed woman in her twenties walked into the Tegucigalpa office of a janitorial services company and applied for a job.

The manager attending her explained that she would have to pay for her uniform herself, though if and when she left the company, the company would keep the uniform. The manager also explained that the young woman would have to take a pregnancy test—expecting mothers were not wanted.

Employer discrimination against pregnant women is illegal in Honduras , and charging for a uniform that the company maintains control of is, if not illegal, ethically questionable. Moreover, “the woman interviewing me shouted at me and talked down to me and the other women applying,” the young woman said later.

Unfortunately for those in Honduras ' cleaning industry intent on exploiting the poor, the young woman was working with the AJS-supported labor rights project, and her experience backed up reports of routine violations of the labor and human rights of cleaning workers (almost all women, many of them single mothers) by their employers.

AJS project staff have also received testimony from many cleaning workers who say their employers fire, then re-hire them every two months—an illegal practice used to keep employees from building up severance pay and other tenure-related employee benefits.

Ironically, several of the most prominent companies implicated in such practices enjoy large contracts with government institutions.

The AJS-supported labor rights project is working to improve the lot of Honduras ' cleaning women by publishing reports of abuses on the AJS-supported alternative news website Revistazo.com, and by organizing labor rights workshops for cleaning women.

Thanks in part to AJS-supported consciousness-raising about this issue, the Honduran Ministry of Labor has identified cleaning women as one of three priority groups it will be focusing on during the current administration.

lease pray that through AJS's work, Honduras will become a more just society for cleaning workers.

The Association for a More Just Society (AJS) oversees and funds initiatives carried out by Honduran partner organization la Asociación para una Sociedad más Justa (ASJ). AJS is a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations to AJS are tax-deductible for US taxpayers.