When the World Stopped, These Essential Workers Started Their Engines
Danny Villalobos, Illinois
Danny Villalobos has worked for Scrub, a contract cleaning firm at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for nearly three years. The 58-year-old worker makes $15.96 per hour sanitizing airplane lavatories.
It was not his first choice of occupation.Villalobos completed two years of college before spending 22 years in manufacturing with Wesley-Jessen Corp., a pioneer of color contact lenses, where he earned a steady salary of $60,000. But when his job moved to Atlanta, he stayed in Chicago to remain close to his son, Alex. He spent the next nine years in linen service at a large hospital network before a round of layoffs in 2010 led to a post refueling planes at the airport. When he got laid off again, he found work running an after-school program for a social service agency, but he left in search of more full-time work. He couldn’t find any.
“That age discrimination they never talk about, because you can’t prove it, is real. Every time you apply somewhere, they say you’re overqualified.
That’s how I came to the job I have now, dumping shit from planes,” he says, chuckling. “I’m a joker. So I’ll say it in my words: I have a shit job.”
Still, Villalobos is thankful for the work after a year spent underemployed like so many others. The pandemic walloped his income. “The travel industry just went south. Flights were being cancelled. There were no more conventions. Business people weren’t traveling. And when business travel went down, so did work, because planes weren’t flying.”
Scrub began furloughing employees in February and then in March, slashed the shifts of those who remained. Villalobos’s weekly work schedule plummeted to 20 hours, and his representative at the Service Employees International Union Local 1 advised him to go on partial unemployment. In April, Villalobos was furloughed, but his company called him back to work later that month.
Villalobos lives in an apartment on the first floor of a two-level building owned by his 84-year-old father, Antonio, a Catholic deacon who raised eight kids in Humboldt Park. He’s his father’s caregiver and pays $750 a month in rent. Some days, Villalobos will work just 2.5 hours; other days, he’ll clock in four. Even if his hours get bumped to 30 a week, Villalobos would take home around $1,400 a month, but it would also mean he’d be ineligible for partial unemployment. Regardless, Villalobos says, after electric and gas bills, plus transportation expenses, he’s barely scraping by. “In this pandemic, we’re at the mercy of the company,” he says. “I’m not afraid anymore to go to a food shelter.”
Villalobos recently became a union steward to help fight for respect, protection, and fair pay he says is overdue to workers like him. “We’ve been working through this pandemic, putting ourselves in harm’s way every day, keeping the airport clean, making sure everything is sanitary inside and out, and that people are protected against this pandemic. We just ask to be treated fairly.”
The newly passed COVID relief bill provides $11 billion in grants to airports and aviation manufacturers and another $12 billion to help airlines and their contractors avoid layoffs. But so far, he says, the federal stimulus boost to airports and airlines has not been trickling down to workers.
“We know that these companies have been getting COVID relief monies, and we haven’t seen any of it, no kind of hazard pay during this whole thing,” Villalobos says. “God bless the nurses and doctors. But there are other people out here who don’t get any mention. We’re essential workers. We have gone unnoticed.”
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