CLEANERS AND POP CULTURE REPRESENTATION

t is no longer credible to claim that building cleaners/janitors are invisible in popular culture today.1 Increasingly, we find them in film, videos, novels, and even television sitcoms and commercials.2 The manner of their representations, however, is an altogether different thing. It is this I seek to examine and discuss in this paper. The assumption too that cleaners are invisible in society, is also no longer tenable. This is largely due to the militancy of cleaners themselves in cities like Los Angeles, where they have mounted campaigns to disrupt the normalcy of corporate office operations (Bread and Roses, 2001; Waldinger et al., 1998) and protested their evaporating labour rights, employer abuse, and the latter’s reluctance to recognize cleaners ’ unions (Aguiar, 2004; Waldinger et al., 1998). In the United States, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been instrumental in asserting this visibility through its Justice for Janitors (J4J) campaigns (Waldinger et al., 1998). These have been deployed across the United States, often grabbing news headlines by the staging of festivals of resistance (Klein, 2002) for better working conditions