In the last decade, the number of female night shift workers has grown almost twice as fast as their male counterparts. Meet a woman in charge of a team of dedicated late night cleaners.

In shadowy corridors, empty lecture theatres and deserted labs, the day is being washed away. Chairs are straightened, carpets are vacuumed, toilets scrubbed and surfaces polished.

There are hundreds of classrooms, tearooms and offices to be tidied and sanitised. 

Armed with dusters, mops and spray bottles, a squad of cleaners works through the night to restore order to the sprawling University of Waikato campus. Their Queen of Clean is Mere Enoka, a 59-year-old supervisor.

Enoka starts in the early evening, the first on site. Her tiny office is just off the entrance to the Faculty of Education. Through the night it becomes the hub of the shift, cleaners on their break gather to warm up, gossip over mugs of tea and check the roster.

Enoka picks up and folds laundry and organises supplies for her team of 24. “We use only eco-friendly chemicals,” she says proudly. Each cart is loaded with a mop, feather duster, cloths, spray bottles, polish, cloths - and most importantly, toilet roll.

“Toilet areas is the main place we get complaints. Be it no soap or no toilet paper. 

“It happened to me one night, and I didn’t have my phone on me. It was one of our areas - oh my gosh, did I give her a blow up.”

The crew arrives at different times throughout the evening, and she assigns them to a different area. And when she’s not doing paperwork, Enoka roams the corridors.

In a computer lab, Vicky, 64, is scouring a toilet bowl. “She’s not the oldest. There’s a couple in their 80s. Pension doesn’t pay,” Enoka says.

A floor above, Mel is vacuuming in between the bookshelves in a library. Wastepaper bins line every corridor, placed outside each office to be emptied. 

In another block, Max, from Samoa, is hard at work in a bathroom, carefully but quickly wiping each surface. “It should take five minutes, at the max, 20,” Enoka says.

“If I come and clean an area, first thing, I would do the rubbish. Then the toilets, wiping the tables. At the moment, vacuuming is always last.

“I don't like them to try and dust every night…. We spread the work out because I can't do it all in one night.”

To cover the sprawling campus, the pace is relentless. “Depending on the area, staff could be basically running to get it done. The timing in some of the areas is unrealistic.

“We've got maybe close to 30 areas, and sometimes I can't check all those in one night.

“I do concentrate on the ones that I know are a bit of a handful. I know the ones that I can trust to do the job properly.”

Students are messy.  “They'll leave  drink bottles on the floor, their rubbish anywhere and everywhere.

“We actually made a big complaint to the management and it's obviously worked because we're not getting that a lot now.”

Occasionally, the team is picking up around the students as they continue to drink and party. “We're not their mums. They're young adults, they should know how to clean up after themselves.

“Sometimes, day after day after day, it's just trashed. It's like, why can we not get someone to talk to these students [tell them] to clean this mess up, clean up after themselves?”

It can be spooky, after hours in deserted buildings, and Enoka has asked for extra lighting. “A lot of our staff do work alone. I do have staff that are scared to go to some places. I've been here for years so I know the place.”

Enoka and her team work for OCS Group, an UK-based facilities management company. She’s been a supervisor for four years, stepping in when her boss moved on. “It took me maybe a month to make my mind up. I just thought about the stress that was involved with the job. That kind of put me off a little bit.”

A cleaner for 30 years, she’s long worked nights. It made raising her family of seven easier. They are now aged between 29 and 41, and she’s got 17 grandchildren and one five-year-old great-grandson. “The whanau is quite huge,” she laughs.

After years, she’s used to “short” sleeps. “The most I’ll sleep for is six hours.”

Fatigue is a huge problem in a job that’s physically draining. One of her staff, Gordon Pollock was recently hospitalised after collapsing with exhaustion and shortness of breath. He’d also been working as a window cleaner, and sleeping only in the van on the way home from his day job.

Fully recovered, Pollock is back on the job, blowing autumn leaves from a courtyard. 

With a huge grin, he opens the boot of his car, full of a collection of  brushes and other gadgets he’s modified to make him more efficient. “He buys those with his own money,” Enoka says.

“They call cleaning easy money. I don't know, I think a cleaners job is thankless. It is a hard job.”