A Window of Opportunity

Window cleaning is serious business. The word “professional” gets thrown around a lot in the cleaning industry, but whenever a person’s occupation requires him or her to consistently hang from the side of skyscrapers, you can be sure that the word professional is entirely appropriate.

Professional window cleaning demands specialized equipment: carriages, ropes, pulleys, cast-iron reinforcements and harnesses to name a few. It also requires specialized training; professional window cleaners must know how to maneuver equipment and chemicals using methods that are safe and effective — all while they are dangling hundreds of feet off the ground.

Safety Overdue
One would assume that safety regulations and standards would have been enacted decades ago for such a precarious profession. However, that is not the case. Although high-rise window cleaning has been around as long as high-rise buildings, the International Window Cleaning Association (IWCA) was formed less 15 years ago (1990), and formal safety standards were not developed until October of 2001. Those standards, known as the I-14 standards, are voluntary, and they were long overdue.

“The industry had been somewhat fragmented,” says Jack Pitzer, executive director of the IWCA, an association that now boasts 750 member companies. “There were a lot of window cleaning contractors who had grown up in family businesses and had their own tradition of cleaning windows in a particular way. Unfortunately, there weren’t any uniform standards.”

No standards meant there was a greater risk for accidents, which could end in fatality as easily as injury.

In 1998, for example, a Washington state window cleaner and his 15-year-old “helper,” both fell from the top of a building because a harness was not correctly attached. The helper died instantly and the window cleaner suffered multiple injuries. This accident, and others like it, alerted the IWCA to the unavoidable need for standards.

Interestingly, it was a jan/san distributor (and former window cleaning contractor) who led the way in seeing the idea of national standards become a reality. “Stefan Bright has really been the driving force in bringing together all aspects of the window cleaning industry — from the little guy with the bucket and squeegee to the biggest professional contractor,” says Pitzer.

Bright, safety director for the IWCA and vice president of sales for J. Racenstein Co., a distributor in New York City, compiled the standards with input from window cleaners around the nation. Eventually the I-14 standards were adopted by both the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the IWCA. But with so many different styles and methods of window cleaning, negotiating universal regulations wasn’t easy.

Compromise Cleaning
One of the most important accomplishments of the IWCA was developing standards for adequate anchor points. An “anchor point” is what a window cleaner uses to hang cleaning supplies when cleaning tall buildings. Many accidents occurred because professionals had anchored supplies to an unstable part of a building. “We had to decide if it was the building manager’s responsibility to have those in place, or if the window cleaner needed to be responsible for them,” says Bright. Ultimately, it was decided that building managers needed to provide adequate anchor points.

Building owners and cleaning contractors both have responsibilities to adhere to, according to the I-14 standards. Building owners must inspect permanent equipment on rooftops and update maintenance records. Cleaning contractors are responsible for including adequate documentation of training, complying with all current government regulations, and properly inspecting all cleaning equipment. The full standards can be ordered at the IWCA’s website.

“A lot of people worked thousands of hours to see this come to completion,” says Jerry Tobe, president and owner of Hoosier State Window Cleaning, Indianapolis. “ I served on the IWCA board in 1994, and I can tell you that we were really combing over all the different issues back then. At times, it seemed like one group of standards would be hard to achieve.”

Knowledge is Power
Most distributors do not have the background or knowledge of window cleaning that Stefan Bright has, being a former professional window cleaner himself. “The average distributor representative is probably going to have a difficult time understanding my needs,” says Tobe. “It’s a specialized working environment and a specialized area of cleaning. Cleaning the side of a tall building is different than using floor wax.”

However, the information is there for distributors who choose to make use of it. The IWCA website is one place to start; research, testimonies, company profiles and the I-14 standards are all readily available.

Distributors who are well-informed about these standards will not only prove to be valuable resources for their current customers, but they can also branch out to supplying the needs of new customers who are window cleaning contractors. “[Distributors] have one of two options: they can find out about regulations and help their customers, or they can be disinterested in the standards,” says Bright. “Hopefully, if they’re not interested

The standards are divided into two sections, A and B. Section B applies to the design and structure of window cleaning that manufacturers are responsible for. Distributors may also want to peruse this section of the standards to make sure the products they sell meet the standards.

“The thing that really makes this a beautiful document is that when everyone came together, they started listening to each other, and it evolved into a document of compromise,” says Pitzer. “The window cleaners really embraced it right away, then the building managers took to it, and now it seems to be making its way into every part of the supply chain.”