Ana Rivera can still remember in the early days of the pandemic the wails of her two children crying outside her bedroom door.
“Mom,” she’d hear through the tears. “I miss you.”
Rivera, 38, wanted to hug them and tell them everything would be okay. She wanted to protect them and comfort them. But in the spring and summer of 2020, she was terrified that embracing her own children could infect them with the coronavirus.
While much of the country’s workforce was allowed to resume their jobs from home — or laid off — Rivera continued to show up to the office building she cleaned.
“Thankfully I had a job,” Rivera, of Silver Spring, said in Spanish through a translator. “But emotionally, I was devastated.”
She was considered an essential worker. But Rivera said she doesn’t feel like she or the other thousands of other cleaners in her union have been treated as such.
Rivera, who is from El Salvador, is a member of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 9,200 commercial office cleaners in the D.C. region and soon will be negotiating a new contract with the Washington Service Contractors Association, which represents the area’s major commercial cleaning companies.
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