Cleaning the New Zealand's Housing Area and Corporate Offices

12 Oct 2011

The cleaning company that we worked for was also a sub-contractor of New Zealand's government, responsible on the deep cleaning in the New Zealand's houses before new families move in.

It wasn't an easy job. My colleague even thought that it was even harder than working in a farm. Basically we cleaned every corner in the house, from the ceiling to the floor.

It could have been easier if we were allowed to use a water pipe to wash away the dust and dirt. Unfortunately, all we could do was wiping with a cloth and sanitizer.

There were four of us working on the house and it took us 5 hours to finish. We went home with dusty faces and smelly shirts.

The next morning, we woke up and found out we had musle pain on the body. We received a bad news from Mr D. We didn't have any house to clean for the next two days. We had no choice but to work at night, doing the cleaning in offices.

We prayed that cleaning the offices would be better and easier. Indeed, it was. But the pay rate was based on contract and we had to work really fast in order to earn. Supposed that an office was assigned one hour to clean the pantry, desks, floor, rubbish and toilets, we would have to finish everything in half an hour if there were two people assigned to do the cleaning in that office (one hour divided by 2 persons).

Because we were too new and we had to work with another two seniors originally from China. So there were four of us and and we had to finish in 15 minutes. It was a mission impossible!!! We took 5 minutes to open the door and de-activate the alarm. What could we have done in the remaining 10 minutes? Sometimes, we also spent time in waiting for the other precedent tasks to be finished by our colleague. We ended up getting around NZD5 per hour and it was even more tiring and killing than cleaning the New Zealand's housing area.

We complaint to the boss. He explained that this situation was due to having too many staff assigned in an office. He convinced us that it should not happen when two of us were good enough to work on our own in an office.