Portrait: His job? “Cleaning man” in Luxembourg

“Once, in an office, I arrived and there was only the secretary. She saw me and said: ”Ah, a man, that’s nice”. Mathieu Giordanengo would almost be amused to arrive with all his cleaning paraphernalia, with his feet in the dish, a little unexpected. This 27-year-old Franco-Brazilian is a “cleaning man”, a name that he validates, even if we will more officially speak of a multi-purpose cleaning agent.

“I am not the only man in this environment, and besides, it is not a job for a woman or a man,” replies the cross-border worker, who lives in France, and comes every day to beautify our decor in Luxembourg . “It’s different every day, that’s what I like,” says the man who has been on a permanent contract with the Propper company for a few months. On a daily basis, he goes to offices, but also to supermarkets where the mission can last six hours: “There is interior cleaning, parking, putting away trolleys, trash cans…”.

Every two weeks, and it’s a little undisguised pleasure, he also cleans the workshops of prestigious sports car brands. A tough and demanding task, “on two floors”, but which reflects the often unknown exhaustiveness of his profession, which is carried out early in the morning or late in the evening, hidden from the public.

A profession that he took up by chance. Then studying in the agricultural sector in the Vosges, in France, he came between 2018 and 2020 to do extra cleaning work in Luxembourg, by responding to a classified ad. But afterward, Mathieu was in turn employed in fast food, a kitchen designer-salesman, assistant manager of a bakery and even employed in a motorcycle dealership.

“I came back to housekeeping, it’s an area that I love. There is pressure, everything is timed and my goal is to evolve. Mathieu enriches his training internally: products, machines, brushes, managing the right dosages, avoiding chemical reactions… nothing can be improvised to make it shine.

But how do those around him view his choice? Benevolent, he assures, just conceding that certain customers “can sometimes make it clear that they are afraid that I clean less well because I am a man. But I prove them wrong.”

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