4 - Separate in the Same Boat

Summary

This chapter explores the cleaners’ relationships and interactions within their microcosm. It examines how cleaners show little interest in defining themselves as one group and articulating common interests. Friendships and coalitions as well as divisions and strife characterize the cleaners’ microcosm. Cleaners form alliances and divisions as they seek to establish a status hierarchy, by creating and enforcing markers of difference. These markers range from age, gender and ethnicity to fashion, cultural tastes and educational backgrounds. Some are subtle, some are stark. But despite these differentiations, a sense of equivalence persists, posing a threat to any sense of specialness. It is a negative equivalence of belonging to a stigmatized group of “anyones”. Cleaners wish to believe that their work and their presence are on some level unique and valued as such, that they are not interchangeable and replaceable; and to fortify their sense of worth they resort to the creation and enforcement of status hierarchies. Such constructions all too often rest on the most fragile of foundations, and the risk of collapse plays no small role in cleaners’ dramas of dignity.