Unit block cleaners ‘must be cleared to fight Covid’

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Sydney’s leading high-rise services provider says NSW Health’s reluctance to designate apartment block cleaners and building facilities managers as essential workers is turning buildings into potential breeding grounds for the next wave of Covid-19 infections.

But with more than half of the city’s hands-on apartment block cleaners not allowed to leave Sydney’s hot spot Local Government Areas (LGAs), efforts to fight the virus are being seriously hindered.

In a letter to media outlets, Frank Boross, MD and CEO of the Havencab Property Group says that, due to restrictions on movement by “non-essential” workers from designated hot spots in Greater Sydney, his workforce is down by about 200 employees at a time when they are needed more than ever. Other residential and industrial cleaning and management companies are equally hard hit.

“The NSW Government has forced people to work from home, so waste and recycling in apartment buildings have increased by 40 per cent in some cases where 200-plus bins need to be managed and maintained,” he says.

“Elevators, front doors, railings and all high touch points are being touched by residents thousands of times more now throughout the day as they do their essential food shopping and exercise.

“Cleaning and sanitisation of high touchpoints stops the spread of COVID-19.  If one person in the building has been exposed to COVID and leaves droplets on any of these surfaces, potentially hundreds of people in that apartment building will be infected.”

Mr Boross, whose company specialises in strata cleaning and building management, says cleaners help prevent the spread of infections but with 60-70 per cent of them living within the locked down LGA’s they will not be able to do so.

He says that rather than posing a risk to residents of the rest of Greater Sydney, his staff are battling the virus while themselves protected and being regularly tested.

“Not one has become infected, despite being on the front line of potential transmission,’ he says

Faiure to designate cleaners as essential workers exposes significant health and safety risks for the millions of people living in strata buildings, with a pile-up of waste/recycling and unhygienic living conditions, he writes “on behalf of the hundreds of cleaning and facility management organisations that service the 10,00-plus strata buildings with over a million lots in NSW alone.”  

Mr Boross says equally as important are the building managers who are, in essence, the controllers of residential strata  work places. 

“They check that contractors sign in, ensure they all have COVID safety plans, follow rules of the building etc.” he says.  “Last week we turned away three separate removalist companies as their workers attending the site were from a locked-down LGA.  Only through our [managers’] rigorous checking could this be stopped.”

Mr Boross says his staff go above and beyond the minimum standards set by the state government for workers in that field.

“All of our sites have a detailed COVID Safety Plan, detailed processes and standard operating procedures in dealing with Covid,” he says, adding that Havencab’s cleaners and building managers have been tested on a weekly basis since the start of the pandemic, even before it was mandated by government, they all wear personal protective equipment ( PPE) and follow the company’s and NSW Health’s guidelines. 

“Even though all of our staff are frontline, not one of them to date has contracted COVID, which demonstrates our processes are working,” Mr Boross says.

“The Victorian government has already classified cleaners and building managers as authorised workers,” he says. “We are happy to adopt the construction return to work model, modified for our industry/sector.”

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