By Breanna Christensen
christbl@uwec.edu

Janice Eslinger constantly immerses herself in the grunge and grime of society.

Along with approximately 44,100 employees in Eau Claire County her job is a service oriented position.  Only Eslinger’s particular job requires her to get dirty doing it. 

Eslinger is an entrepreneur who owns her own janitorial service, Choice Janitorial, cleaning offices and buildings after they close. 

She said that she occasionally cleans up disgusting or gross things.

“I had an account call me during the day because somebody had pooped in a sanitary box, like a tin thing,” Eslinger said.  “And sometimes it’s a janitor's job to clean it up.”

From cleaning personnel to cesspool management to sanitation to busing tables, Eau Claire provides an abundance of work for a person willing to get his or her hands dirty.  According to the Eau Claire County Economic profile, 47.9 percent of the workforce in Eau Claire County are in service related fields.  The economic profile considers the service sector to include sanitation, health, leisure, education and food service.  These jobs are necessary to life in Eau Claire, but they are often forgotten or underappreciated. 

The University of Arkansas conducted a study in 2002 that found many men and women working in service positions rarely receive admiration for their work.

Researchers said a lack of praise or appreciation leads employees to feel dissatisfied with their job, resulting in a climbing job turnover rate.

“Not everyone can handle being employed in a messy job,” Eslinger said.  

On a scale from one to 10, Eslinger said the job turnover in her field is at a nine, with employees constantly coming and going.

“When they go into it [cleaning], they have no long term choice in their mind of staying,” she said.  “They consider it a temporary place to get income.”

Eau Claire Humane Society executive director, Lauren Evans said that she also has a lot of volunteers who come and go as they see fit.

“I think emotionally it can be draining and that will turn them off pretty quickly,” Evans said.  “It’s not a job a lot of people can handle.”

In addition to the daily tasks of working with dirty animals and cleaning cages, Evans said, it is difficult for employees to see the animals in a caged environment.

For her, Evans said it has slowly gotten easier to deal with the emotional aspect of working with discarded animals.

“I guess I just receive support from the other staff and friends and family at home,” she said.  “I also realize that sometimes I just need to get away.”

Emotions can run high at the humane society.  In Eau Claire, the humane society has an open door policy, which means they cannot turn any animal away.  By operating that way, the humane society may have to put an animal to sleep.

In addition to difficult work conditions for employees in service industries, most community members are ignorant or unappreciative of their role in society, Arkansas researchers said.

Even though Evans' work includes many dirty activities, she said she is most concerned that people are not sympathetic to her cause and naïve about her role in the community.

To combat that, Evans said she strives to increase education on pet overpopulation and let people know about the Eau Claire Human Society.

Service occupations need to rely on education to reduce the social stigma that is attached with their messy work, researchers said.  This will help to improve the perception that people outside the job have. 

The Arkansas University study said that employers need to remind their workers that their dirty work- any job that is physically, morally or socially tainted- is important and valued.  This can help change the way the individual and the community thinks about their field, researchers said.

One way individuals find value in their work is by increasing their job-related education. 

Duane Steinhauer, owner of Steinhauer Enterprises Inc., said that he is one of the most educated men in his field in the Chippewa Valley.

“I have several licenses…and all of them have large code books,” Steinhauer said. “It is almost a full-time job keeping up with some of the interpretations.”

Steinhauer said that as a master plumber with the ability to work in restricted areas, he is required to have six hours of additional training over a two-year period, but he always exceeds that amount.

“Usually I have 20 to 30 hours in a two year period, and I am the only guy in the area that attended the National Onsite Wastewater Recycling Association meeting,” Steinhauer said. 

Long business hours for his small septic company can make it difficult for Steinhauer to keep up on the continuing education required in his field.  He said that while 10 hours is average, 12 to 14 hours is also normal.  Steinhauer understands that this comes with his job because he works with people and frequently meets with them on weekends to discuss his work.

“The paperwork on safety regulations is just as much for my company as a big company,” Steinhauer said.  “I may not have as many employees, but there is a lot of work.”

Additional education and safety standards can also help to protect the customer, Country Kitchen General Manager Jon Moore said.

“Most of our training is on-site,” Moore said. “With most of our employees, we require food handling, hand-washing and sanitation training.”

Moore said that Country Kitchen is very strict with its sanitation and food safety, and they send their employees to any classes that are offered in the area.

Country Kitchen corporate rules also require that someone with a sanitation certificate be present in the restaurant at all times, helping to ensure cleanliness and the implementation of safety measures. 

With long hours, little appreciation and rigorous licensing requirements, service jobs can be taxing on almost everyone.  Dr. Crispin Pierce, professor of environmental public health at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, said that most jobs in his field are unnoticed until disaster strikes.

“Every facet of our lives is affected by environmental public health,” Pierce said.  “We are such an important part of the public health sector because we enable people to live healthy lives.”

Pierce said that most people don’t even think of the impact of public health or service industry jobs.  He said that anytime someone is involved in tasks such as sanitation, waste, food or water, people in public health make a difference.

“It takes a big outbreak for people in my field to be recognized,” Pierce said.

For those in public health, Pierce said that when people don’t get sick or hurt employees in this sector have their greatest satisfaction. 

The Arkansas study said employees in the fields of dirty work are often victims of negative stereotyping.  Researchers said this causes people to feel that their dirty work makes the person dirty, but Pierce said that the people in his line of work are actually true heroes.

“We are the people that step in when it is necessary to make a big difference,” he said.

Eslinger said that in order to feel that her work is gratifying, she needs to have variety and receive compliments on her work.

 “I like it because it’s different every day,” Eslinger said.  “Sometimes when I’m working alone in a building I miss company and yes, [cleaning] gets old, but there’s something different that needs to be addressed every day."

During a telling incident, Eslinger demonstrated just one of the many ways service employees can have an impact on their customer’s lives.  She said that service jobs constantly test a person’s character in her line of work and that is one reason they are so important in a community.

One night while cleaning a facility that had regular clients during the day, Eslinger noticed an envelope on the floor.  Upon close inspection, she found that the envelope contained $780.  Eslinger immediately called the manger and was instructed where to put the envelope, she said.

The next day Eslinger received a call from the facility informing her that the money belonged to an elderly woman who had just received her stipend for the month.  Overwhelmed that a person had returned the full amount of money, the woman gave Eslinger a $50 reward.

“Your character has to show up when nobody else is working,” Eslinger said.  “You have to be responsible and trustworthy.”

Link:

Not everyone wants to work at the Eau Claire County Humane Association, where cleaning dirty cages is an everyday task.