Who cleans N.Y.C.’s subway?

For a few hours each night during the pandemic, the New York City subway system shuts down for deep cleaning. Our colleague Annie Correal spoke to a dozen of the contract workers, who are raising concerns about their safety, salary and difficult working conditions.

“It’s so scary to be left without work right now that you’ll accept almost anything,” said Yaneth Ochoa, a Colombian woman who joined the subway crew over the summer. Ms. Ochoa, 30, quit after refusing to clean a train smeared with excrement with just a few rags, she said.
Clockwise from top left: The cleaning crew’s break room; a worker wearing winter gloves under surgical gloves because of the cold conditions; the soap that Beatriz Muñoz says she brought to work to clean her supplies; the rags used to clean subways, which some workers said were in short supplyNatalie Keyssar for The New York Times

Full-time transit workers are paid up to $30 an hour with health insurance and are eligible to receive a Covid-19 vaccine. Contract workers are paid as little as half that amount, they said, and do not have access to health insurance. They are also not eligible for the vaccine, even though they say their work routinely exposes them to unmasked passengers and dangerous waste. “We’re invisible,” said Juan, who asked The Times to use only his first name because he is still employed as a cleaner.

The workers said their employers did not provide them with adequate personal protective equipment or cleaning supplies, although the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and some of the contractors who employ the workers have denied some of the claims. Several transit workers said they did not have access to the station bathrooms or a place to eat or take a break.
A member of a cleaning crew at work. As M.T.A. workers were falling ill and dying of the coronavirus, thousands of contract workers were hired as a stopgap measure.Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times

“We were the ones who had to go in there,” said Beatriz Muñoz, 38, who cleaned trains for six months before she was fired without explanation in November, she said. “We would be praying to God that we wouldn’t get sick.”
The New York Times