Only three-quarters of the workers return after the break.

WHEN THE CLOCK HITS 3 AM, the stadium falls silent, and the workers break for “lunch.

At UFC 100, one worker found and kept a wallet with $1,500. That’s a month’s wages. Other cleaners have found diamond rings, iPhones, BlackBerries, digital cameras, transit passes, sunglasses and umbrellas.

He will eventually return the wallet, a little lighter, to security.

FEW CLEANERS ARE AS SCRUPULOUS as Coutinho. Many hate being there

This atypical attitude caught management’s attention and within a year she was promoted to team leader.

I knew I would be doing jobs that no one else wanted to do

To become the binocular boss, Coutinho had to start from the bottom. In 1989, just a month after the SkyDome opened, she immigrated to Canada from Portugal. Her husband already lived here and told her about the opening of an amazing new stadium. Coutinho remembers being unimpressed; some stadiums in Europe hold 100,000 people. But the retractable roof that gave the building its name was, she was told, a sight to behold.

The workers are on to her tactics. Once, a group of Mexican cleaners developed a system of whistles to alert the others when she was watching. Coutinho translated the calls and changed her moves accordingly.

resident manager

assess the situation and get things moving.

The last stage of cleaning is accomplished with four thirty-metre yellow hoses, spraying highly pressurized water into the aisles, aimed by workers in rubber boots. The Rogers Centre is one of the few North American sports stadiums to get the pressure-wash treatment—visiting teams have been known to remark on the building’s uncanny cleanliness. 

The mixture leaves behind a slick residue that makes the stairs treacherous. Workers sometimes slip and hurt their backs.

“carrying an obese baby around all night.”

In the summer of 2012, I worked as a cleaner, on-and-off, for three months. I participated in roughly twenty-five cleaning shifts as an employee of Labor Ready, joining the agency after struggling to find journalism work in the city.

Both groups of workers are predominantly immigrants or down on their luck.

One season produces 1.2 million pounds of garbage. Eventually, someone must clean it up. Enter the cleaners—exhausted, poorly paid and largely anonymous.

Are you ready for more torture

They’ll work until dawn, gathering up some 15,000 pounds of garbage, scrubbing, rinsing, bending and lifting with painstaking thoroughness.

Standing on the curb as the game wraps up inside, these are the cleaners.