Every weekday at 7 a.m., Joana Oliveras punches in for her shift at Baruch College. Over the next seven hours, she will clean all the bathrooms on two floors, empty the trash, and more. Joana, a Bronx native, works at the college as a custodial assistant.
No one would have predicted it, but it was this custodian job that led Joana back to college two decades after dropping out from BMCC. More precisely, being a member of Local 1597 of DC 37. Now she’s at SLU and thrilled to be enrolled in the Labor Studies B.A. program.
As a member of Local 1597 – which represents NYC custodial assistants, elevator operators, security aides and watchpersons – Joana received a notice in the mail one day advertising an SLU certificate program, with costs covered by the union. She began trading emails with Assistant Director of Admissions Cherise Mullins and former SLU Assistant Director Rob Callaghan and learned that her union would cover the costs for a bachelor’s degree, not only a certificate.
“Coming to SLU for Labor Studies because my union formed a relationship with the school was very meaningful to me. I know the union sent out flyers to everyone, but I felt like this was just for me,” Joana said.
Earlier in her professional life, Joana worked in a corporate setting at some of NYC’s biggest banks. She felt some internal conflict after switching to cleaning bathrooms on the daily.
“I used to balance $15 billion accounts, and now I’m scrubbing toilets,” she thought to herself. “But it’s where I needed to be, to find SLU,” she said.
Joana’s been in her custodian job for seven years now and likes it – everything from the schedule to the daily feeling of accomplishment. What she dislikes about it has nothing to do with the work itself.
“What I don’t like is when people get surprised that I speak English or that I read books. I guess they assume I don’t because I’m a custodian,” she said.
In fact, Joana is an avid reader and lover of learning. Prior to enrolling at SLU, she got into reading nonfiction through book recommendations on TikTok, which she’d then find at her beloved neighborhood library. “I read ‘War Against All Puerto Ricans’ by Nelson A. Denis and ‘Poverty, By America’ by Matthew Desmond and I just wanted to keep reading and learning,” she said.
A Bronx Tale
Joana’s path to becoming a custodian is as unpredictable as they come. After high school, she attended several semesters at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in lower Manhattan. College wasn’t for her at the time, for a variety of reasons. It didn’t help that she witnessed the World Trade Center attacks from just blocks away after exiting the Chambers Street subway station on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
She found her way to temping at a major New York bank and was hired as a corporate trust associate. She balanced the books for massive investment accounts to make sure that billions of dollars in financial transactions were all correctly paid and accounted for.
“I was fired while pregnant in 2017, and at the time it felt too huge to fight,” Joana recalled. “I wanted to enjoy my pregnancy since I was already 35 at the time and didn’t believe I would be pregnant again.”
Now baby Judah is a little boy, growing up in the same Norwood neighborhood where Joana did. Her husband John and older son Christoper round out the family. The house where she grew up is close by, and she takes her younger son to the Mosholu Library that she knows so well.
When Joana began looking for a job again, she decided to give the custodian position a try. The early schedule meshed with her family, she found the work manageable and enjoyed making Baruch’s “vertical campus” sparkle. She also realized a family connection through union membership: Her maternal grandmother had been a DC37 member too. Her father-in-law was a porter-custodian in 32BJ, and her paternal grandmother had also been a union member in a factory.
Organizing En Espanol
Now Joana’s ready to move forward in union organizing and take a training course for shop stewards. “I don’t have a shop steward on my shift at all, and that’s a problem. We haven’t had one for a long time,” she said. “I have noticed things that are being overlooked because we lack that someone in that capacity. There have been times where issues about time and attendance or vacation requests or complaints among staff have arisen. I try to be helpful when I can.”
Her family is supportive of her college endeavors. “Everyone is super proud and happy for me,” she said. “They cheer me on, review my work when I need fresh eyes, and take care of other things while I’m doing homework and attending classes.”
At some point down the road, after attaining her degree, Joana says she may want to work as an organizer for DC 37 or elsewhere. She’s sure about one thing: “My dream would be to organize Spanish speakers. A lot of people get nervous, they think it’s not for them, you know, if they’re not from here. You just want to make sure that people get the right information. If you’re in survival mode, you’re not paying attention to these things.”
With both parents of Puerto Rican descent, Joana learned Spanish as a child, but lost fluency as she focused on English in school. These days she spends a lot of time on Duolingo and takes every opportunity to practice.
“Before the pandemic, I worked with one guy continuously in the basement level of our building. He spoke only Spanish and me only English. I learned a lot from him. He was so patient with me and taught me a lot about the job and Spanish,” she said.
“I am working on it because I do work with a lot of Spanish speakers. When I graduate from here, I want to be able to communicate to anyone who wants to unionize or doesn’t know about it. So I need to know more than conversational Spanish – I need to know negocios, the business Spanish.”
With Joana’s congeniality, smarts and calm determination, she’s a natural for taking on important new roles and continuing to put her SLU education into action.