There’s a crisis looming in the cleaning industry. You may not have noticed it yet, but you will. Since before the Great Depression the industry has been relatively immune to depression, inflation and recession. Bad times never seemed to hit the cleaning industry very hard. Those days may be over.

Ironically, just as we are pulling back our cleaning resources, housekeeping may turn out to be the only legitimate defense against a silent killer that I’ll talk about later in this essay. Herein lies the pending crisis.

For the past 18 months, my consulting focus has been, in large measure, working with companies who are going through recession, even depression economics. Some organizations have been mandated to cut their cleaning budgets by as much as 10-30 percent. One company I’m working with has cut its cleaning budget by more than 50 percent.

These kinds of cuts are occurring in all kinds of organizations. I’ve seen it in K-12 schools, colleges and universities, property management companies, and health-care organizations. Everyone always has tried to do more with less. Now we’re doing more with a lot less.

Sept. 11, 2001 appears to be when this phenomenon started.

High-level administrators who a couple of years ago may have had a budget surplus are now asking custodial operations to give back large chunks of their budgets. We hear repeatedly that funding organizations like states, counties and cities are bankrupt. One large university I’m working with laid off 100 custodians this year
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At schools and businesses nationwide some of the money cleaning budgets lost seems to be migrating toward security improvements.

The invisible ‘terrorist’
There’s another danger besides terrorists — one that nobody seems to be too worried about. Public health can be adversely affected when organizations slash cleaning too deeply.

The same year as the 9/11 attack, approximately 100,000 Americans died as a result of a different tragedy. These people, as innocent and deserving to live as those in the World Trade Center and Pentagon, died of nosocomial infections.

Nosocomial means “hospital acquired.” One gets the infection from the hospital, not just at the hospital.

Typically, nosocomial infections are related to poor hand washing and other hygiene practices among the medical staff. However, these infections are also linked to poor housekeeping practices.

The cross infections and cross contamination in a hospital often take place via fomites. A fomite is a physical object that transmits disease or any infectious agent from person to person. For example, a doorknob, a telephone, a carpet and a water faucet can all be fomites.

More than 100,000 people died from nosocomial infections in 2002. The number of nosocomial deaths has been rising the past several years as housekeeping budgets have been declining. Two million additional patients contracted infections but recovered. If you consider that approximately 36 million hospital visits occur annually, you stand a 6 percent chance of experiencing a nosocomial infection and a 1-in-360 chance of dying.

Nosocomial infections kill more people every year than any other form of accidental death, and that includes car crashes, fires, burns, falls, drowning and poisonings. It also includes terrorist acts.

There is no official designation for an infection you acquire from the workplace, the classroom or many other places people congregate. Those infections may not be as deadly and are not talked about with much alarm.

It’s time for the cleaning industry to wake up and speak out. It’s time to evangelize cleaning. It’s time to educate the public and the policy makers on the important role cleaning plays in every building. It’s time to reduce the amount of deaths that come from an invisible “terrorist,” one whose worst enemy is an effective cleaning process and a thorough approach to sanitation.

It’s time for you to demonstrate the importance of cleaning.

John P.Walker is the owner of ManageMen consulting services in Salt Lake City. He also is the founder of Janitor University, a hands-on cleaning management training program.




POSTED ON: 9/1/2003