A Reader wrote to us via MMS:
We face an epidemic of dirt; Senior has stopped cleaning. During the threat of CORONAVIRUS, shouldn’t we be taking greater care of hygiene? Senior is completely unserious and should face consequences.
The following notice appeared in the stairwells:
For the safety of maintenance workers and residents, in connection with the epidemic threat (the coronavirus pandemic),
in order to limit interpersonal contact, we inform you that cleaning services will be provided to a limited extent (with reduced frequency and without washing—no possibility of drawing water) until further notice.If the epidemiological situation deteriorates (with the anticipated rise in the number of infections), the provision of cleaning services will be suspended.
The Management Board of Spółdzielnia SENIOR
Below is the full, authorized statement by Ewa Ziółkowska, president of Senior:
I would suggest that the gentleman who wrote this familiarize himself thoroughly with the contents of the notice and read it with understanding. It clearly says that, for the time being, we have limited the scope of cleaning, not that we have stopped it.
The women swept all the stairwells on Monday, and they will clean tomorrow and on Friday. I wonder whether the reader himself, in this situation, would go and clean the stairwells. Would he dare to do it? If one of the women becomes infected, I am the one responsible for her, not that gentleman. Our employees could also be a source of infection and spread it through the stairwells. That is how the virus spreads. And this is not a matter of panic, but of following the recommendations of the Minister of Health, which I recommend to the entire community. All offices and institutions receiving many visitors are limiting their work. Our employees have nearly 400 stairwells to clean. I cannot imagine that, during an epidemic threat, they should come into contact with hundreds of residents—there are several or a dozen or so in each stairwell.
We are not a company that disinfects. We are a cleaning company, and the contract provides for maintaining day-to-day cleanliness, not disinfection. Carrying out disinfection requires appropriate supplies, protective clothing and, above all, specialized workers. Not to mention the additional costs we would have to bear and the lack of possibility of purchasing suitable equipment and disinfectants, which at present are, firstly, unavailable and, secondly, horrendously expensive. Residents expect us to do this under the existing contract, but its provisions do not anticipate crisis situations. No one was prepared for this.
This is not really about money, because we will all suffer losses anyway. The resident sees everything only through the prism of his own claims, without considering the common good—the good of us all. I expect that we will be able to pay people’s wages for two months at most. The invoice amounts for March will already be reduced proportionally, because, as we wrote in the notice, cleaning services will be provided to a limited extent due to the inability to draw water—the residents themselves announced last week that, because of the threat, they would not make water available. After that, if a state of emergency is introduced, there may be no invoices at all, because everyone will then have to stay at home, including the aforementioned resident.