5 - When Worlds Collide

Summary

This chapter explores what it means for cleaners to enter the upperworld. It discusses how cleaners approach the upperworld, and interact with upperworlders. Forays into the upperworld constitute both blessing and curse. Through access, cleaners may gain insight, and stories, and the upperworld’s exclusivity may rub off onto cleaners. More often than not, however, the opposite is true. The more exposure cleaners get to the upperworld, the more they come face-to-face with an inflexible status hierarchy that poses a serious ongoing threat to their dignity. The issue is not just stigmatization and abuse by customers, but denial of the cleaners’ personhood. Cleaners are not passive victims, though. They frame their situation and debunk their environment in ways that provide them with a defensive superiority. To varying degrees, they confront upperworlders, sometimes just by making themselves seen and heard. As to escape from the indignities in the upperworld, cleaners also turn to the invisible underworld. Call it the Potsdamer Platz paradox: encounters between those who work and live in the upperworld and those who labor there out of sight tend to drive the worlds further apart.