Team Project Summaries from 2004-7

1. Investigating Janitorial Chemical Hazards: "So Safe You Can Eat It"  
2. Overhead Drilling in the Construction Trades
3. Summertime Blues: Heat Stress in a Fabric-coating Factory
4. Heavenly Beds, Backbreaking Work: Hotel Room Cleaners
5. Day Laborers in Los Angeles  Survey of Hazards
6. Bricklayer Exposure to Silica Dust
7. Heat Illness among California Farmworkers
8. Chinese Restaurant Worker Hazards
9. New York Public Employees Federation (PEF) Violence Prevention Project
10. Health and Safety at Work: Immigrant Retail Workers in Brooklyn

Investigating Janitorial Chemical Hazards: “So Safe You Can Eat It”

Project Sponsors and Mentors

• The Leadership Training Education Fund (LTEF), a joint labor-management fund of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877 and 35 cleaning companies in the San Francisco Bay Area
• The Community Occupational Health Program (COHP), a project of University of California, San Francisco

The Janitors Project team investigated the health hazards of cleaning products used by workers to clean large commercial buildings. The goal was to provide a foundation for a three-year project by COHP and LTEF to identify safer cleaning products. Team members were a first-year medical student from the University of Connecticut, a University of California Berkeley (UCB) graduate interested in pursuing a nursing degree; and UCB pre-med undergraduate. The students toured several worksites, administered a detailed questionnaire to over 20 union stewards, and conducted "key informant" interviews. The Janitors Project team investigated the health hazards of cleaning products used by workers to clean large commercial buildings. The goal was to provide a foundation for a three-year project by COHP and LTEF to identify safer cleaning products. Team members were a first-year medical student from the University of Connecticut, a University of California Berkeley (UBC) graduate interested in pursuing a nursing degree; and UCB pre-med undergraduate. The students toured several worksites, administered a detailed questionnaire to over 20 union stewards, and conducted “key informant” interviews.

To help create a database of cleaning products, the team collected and categorized Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) from selected worksites; products were classified into three levels using criteria developed by the EPA. The students also identified products used by the janitors for which no MSDS was available and identified the rapid turnover of cleaning products on the jobsite as a major concern of janitors. All three students spoke Spanish, a necessity given that up to 90% of the janitors are Spanish-speaking. Finally, the interns presented their findings at an interactive educational session to SEIU stewards and members.

The students' report concluded: "The circumstances in which these janitors work encompass broader issues of social justice. Workers often become the 'canaries in the mine' and the same chemicals that are toxic to janitors enter the environment and are toxic to building occupants, the surrounding population, and the environment… Because of our summer experience, all three of us are committed to working in the field of occupational health, a field that is at the intersection of health care, public health, as well as economic, political, and environmental justice."