TriMet’s cleaners find stability in their frontline role against COVID-19

Over the summer, TriMet began hiring cleaners to disinfect touch points on vehicles, with a goal of doing so about every four hours during regular service.

More than 300 people with diverse and varied backgrounds initially applied for the 124 positions available. Now, persevering through protests, heavy smoke from wildfires and high winds these past few months, cleaners have kept buses and trains tidy and sanitized through the challenging series of circumstances that started with the pandemic.

Kathy Walton

In 2007, Paulo Lessing came to the United States from Brazil, where he’d worked in banking and information technology. He came for an English program but stayed because he fell in love with the country. As a new resident, and someone without a car, he took the bus most places and practiced his English by asking for directions.

He also fell in love with taking the bus— the friendly operators he met on board and the newly adopted city he was free to explore. For him, disinfecting buses and trains is a way of giving back to a community that was quick to make him feel at home.

“As we work, we notice we are doing something not just good for the operators, and also for the passengers, but for the whole community,” Lessing said. “Everybody is working for a good thing, to protect everybody.”

Continuing the cleaners program

Many of the cleaners had found themselves out of work over the spring and summer when the job market tightened, a time when the country felt the collective jolt of mass layoffs. By April, just a month into the pandemic, more than 20 million Americans had lost their jobs, historically the largest month-to-month job loss since data has been collected, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Oregon alone, the unemployment rate jumped from 3.5 percent in March to 14.2 percent in April.

TriMet began hiring cleaners in June and had 124 in the position, along with six supervisors, by August. To maintain a consistent staffing level of 124 cleaners, TriMet has continued to hire and train new employees for these limited duration positions. Some cleaners who had been laid off from their previous jobs have since returned to their old positions, creating vacancies that TriMet is filling with a new crop of applicants. On Oct. 12, TriMet welcomed eight new cleaners into the program. They will receive a starting wage of $18 an hour.