Hidden work at the fissured workplace: ambivalent visibility in daytime cleaning

Cleaning work has been subject to outsourcing since the 1980s, leading to what David Weil has termed fissured workplaces. In such settings, cleaners' work takes place in the complex service triangle of employer, employee, and client. Due to outsourcing and to low appreciation, cleaning work, much of which is done by many female and migrant workers, often takes place as hidden work or invisible work. As I argue in this paper, one aspect that renders cleaning work invisible is the working times, a dynamic that I call temporal invisibility. Cleaning often takes place at the margins of the day and with fragmented working times. An alternative is daytime cleaning, where cleaners and employees of the customer company work at the same time. In this paper, I investigate what happens to cleaners' (in)visibility in daytime cleaning settings. Based on qualitative research in the Austrian cleaning sector including interviews and participant observation, I show that cleaners' (in)visibility is complex and ambivalent. The findings demonstrate that in the service triangle, employees of the customer company can exert a large influence on cleaners' working conditions-in spite of not being formally in charge. They do so by monitoring cleaners, imposing their own working times on cleaners' working routines, and by reproducing inequality in everyday interaction. Furthermore, the findings also show which strategies cleaners use to render themselves more or less invisible. I conclude that contradictions need to be taken into account in the concept of (in)visibility, and that the introduction of daytime cleaning requires accompanying measures that also address the employees of the customer company. To improve cleaners' working conditions in contexts of the service triangle and the fissured workplace, I argue that measures can be taken on different levels at the same time.