Author Description

""Jana in the underworld," muses Norbert, a foreman with the major German cleaning company CleanUp, when I tell him I will study cleaning work at Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. For Norbert, as for many cleaners, this large, four-level underworld is the nodal point of his work. Cleaners spend much of their time in what is also known as the "minus area": windowless storage and break rooms, labyrinthine corridors, stairways and elevators that descend to the lowest point - garbage collection. In the underworld's tunnels and interstices, cleaners move around and interact with fellow workers. This underworld is the setting for my ethnography of the cleaners' largely invisible work life"--