Window Cleaning: Two Owners Talk

Steady climb up ladder of success: John Phillips has worked since he was 12. He now owns his own business, AAA Window Cleaning. John Phillips hates to fly. But he has no problem scaling skyscrapers. That's a good thing when you make your living washing windows. Phillips owns AAA Window Cleaning in Omaha. For seven years, he has wooed new clients and wielded a squeegee. “I will rappel off a 14-story building, but I can't stand flying,” he said, laughing.

Phillips is one of thousands of workers in Nebraska and Iowa who will take a day off to celebrate labor. Labor Day has evolved over the years from a day of fiery speeches on behalf of the “workingman” to a day of family and friends gathering over a hot grill and cold beer. The holiday was first observed in 1882 in New York City, the brainchild of a labor union. A little more than 10 years later, in 1894, Congress made it a national holiday.

Phillips is one of the hard-working men and women Congress sought to honor. Phillips grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Omaha, one of seven children. His got his first job at 12, washing dishes at a diner. “My father always told me, ‘If you work for someone, you work your tail off. You take nothing you don't earn,'” said Phillips.

For nearly 25 years, Phillips worked for lumber companies, managing their inventories in Kansas and Ohio. Eight years ago he returned to Omaha with his family and, shortly after, started a new adventure cleaning windows. “If I can sell a stick of wood, I can sell window cleaning,” he said.

He is now his own boss and loving it, despite the recession and physical demands of the job. Among them: He is constantly climbing up and down ladders, arms in perpetual motion. At age 50, he says he feels better than when he was 40. “Window cleaning is a constant aerobic workout.”

ELGIN - It's all in a day's work for a window washer. Pictured above: Mario Loya (from left), Raymond Torez and David Graf, of All Window Cleaning Services, clean the second-floor windows of Gail Borden Public Library on Tuesday in downtown Elgin. Compared to rappelling from the peak of a 20-story skyscraper, cleaning the windows on the two-story Gail Borden Public Library downtown is like a day on the beach for David Graf and two co-workers from Elgin-based All Window Cleaning Services. But the 22-year-old Elginite actually would prefer to be working on one of those high-rises the company also cleans. "Heights don't bother me at all," he says as the other guys start leaning 20-foot ladders against the library.

Some are tuning up the company's reverse-ionizing water treatment machine that removes dust and minerals from the water they use so it will dry without any spots. But he does get enough of those heights on the job, Graf adds. His weekend fun doesn't include skydiving or mountain climbing. With a green plastic holster on his right hip holding the weapons of his trade - sponge, hand mop and, of course, squeegee - Graf will climb up to the second floor holding a 20-foot-long metal pipe that delivers the purified water to him. When they do the inside of the windows, he will use a bucket.

Here on the library exterior, he also will be using his hand sponge to smear a spider-repellent chemical around each window frame, hoping to discourage those eight-legged creatures from building unsightly webs. "When we're doing a high-rise, sometimes we'll also change light bulbs for the client as a favor," he says. Window washing is in Graf's blood, he says. "My uncle, David Ashley, owns another window-cleaning company, and he's the son of this company's owner, Raleigh Bray. I started doing this when I was 12 or 13 as a summer job, and I kept doing it after I graduated from Elgin High."



He declined to say how much he gets paid, but says rookies start at about $10 or $11 an hour. "Some guys can't do the high jobs, so they get paid less," he says. As Graf and his crew raise the ladders, perspiration is dripping off him, and it's not even 9 in the morning yet. "You go from sweating all summer to freezing all winter," he says. Having your hands wet as you hang from the 20th story of some skyscraper in January doesn't help any. "You're really only comfortable in spring and fall," he says.

Still, he says, "this is a good job for a young man," and he plans to keep doing it indefinitely. "In fact, my fiancee cleans windows, too, for another company, though she spends most of her time going to Elgin Community College."