Housecleaners
Some interesting conversation going on at 11d, Asymmetrical Information, and Raising WEG about the ethics of hiring people to clean your house. Long time readers may remember that I’ve written quite a bit about housework before.
I don’t think there’s anything inherent to housecleaning that makes it less moral to hire someone to vacuum your floors or scrub your toilets than to hire someone to mow your lawn or cook dinner. And while Jody’s points about the lousy pay that most housecleaners get are totally on target, there’s a huge swath of the economy that is just as underpaid, but not as visible. And most of us eat at restaurants without interrogating them as to what the busboys are making.
We don’t use a housecleaning service these days (we got a roomba!), but I didn’t feel guilty when we did. My personal moral line is that I won’t use one of the big services (e.g. Merry Maids, that sort of thing), because too little of the money that you pay goes to the people doing the dirty work. (And Barbara Ehrenreich also convinced me that they don’t get the house particularly clean.) I know a few people who have worked as housecleaners, and while it’s hard work for not a whole lot of money, the fact that they have multiple employers gives them a degree of independence that lots of low-wage workers don’t have. (I do think the DC area is probably atypical, in that the Zoe Baird
history has created a real market for housecleaners and nannies who are
legally allowed to work and are reporting their income for taxes.)
The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has a really good action packet you can download with information about ethical treatment of domestic workers. It talks about things you can do, from treating any workers that you hire justly, to advocating for expansions of various labor standards to include domestic workers. It also includes a link to this article from Lilith magazine that offers a Jewish feminist perspective on hiring a housecleaner.
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:23 am
I posted almost the same thing last night…
And I couldn’t live without Roomba. Actually, I am currently, temporarily, living without Roomba. I dropped the poor guy and he no longer works. We are hoping that a change of the battery pack will fix things up. Of course, Roomba broke the same week we got two kittens. Cat hair galore!
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:28 am
Actually, my point was that the cost of the cleaning goes down as our uncertainty about the legal status of the workers increases. I’m surprised no one has asked me the inevitable follow-up question about my stance on immigration — I tend to think that we’d be better off with as few barriers as possible, not least because the barriers aren’t working anyway and the twilight status of undocumented residents makes them some of the most vulnerable members of our society.
An incredibly large number of the people I know who hire housecleaners “because it’s so cheap, it pays for itself” are paying cash to people who don’t speak English. Some percentage of those workers are certainly citizens or legal residents, but they’re also certainly not paying into social security or medicaid. The minute you start adding the costs of documentation and full tax payments to the hiring of housecleaners (and yard workers), some huge percentage of people are going to say “you know, that’s just not worth the money after all, I’d rather do it myself.”
At least, that’s been my response.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:47 am
I worked as a housekeeper in the DC area because it paid $23 an hour, much more than I was making as an administrative assistant. Of course, I was told by the woman who placed me in the job that I could “demand” a lot more from the clients because “I was from America and spoke English.”
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:39 pm
hmm..I have never felt guily hiring someone to clean my house. On the other hand, I haven’t used a service – I have hired individuals. Although I’m not sure I buy the issue with hiring services — if you don’t use them, won’t the people who work there have NO job, instead of a possibly bad job? We actually have two differnet people –one who cleans our house biweekly and one who does laundry bi-weekly. I feel we pay a fair wage. Our current housecleaner used to be our babysitter – but due to a truly traumatic experience, she gave up babysitting. I was mortified to realize I was paying her more to clean my house than I did to babysit (and we paid her $12/hour for sitting). I will read some of these threads. Thanks!
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I don’t feel any shame about hiring a cleaner – my wife works, I work, and our kids are hungry for our company. We have enough money to do this because we both have decent jobs. I do think people who hire cleaners for cash, when the cleaners are here legally, are (besides, of course, exploitative) just nuts: a cleaner or nanny can work for you for a couple of years, then report you to the Feds, and you are on the hook for Social Security and withheld income tax. If it’s a caregiver for your kids – there was a nice story about one of the astronauts, when someone exclaimed about the wonderful technology etc., the astronaut said, ‘How would you like to go to the Moon in something built by seven thousand lowest bidders!’… You want someone who gives good care, and has an interest in the relationship succeeding, both with you and your kids. This is much more important than getting it for the lowest possible price. If it’s a cleaner, it’s a little less strong, but you want someone who knows where the dishes go and how you like the rooms arranged, you want someone to stick with you. So I’m claiming that there should be pretty powerful incentives to be a good and responsible employer.
We have tried to be good employers, and hiring people has worked out well I think because we have.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Another thought on being a responsible employer in the DC area. Montgomery County (and likely other local jurisdictions) publishes a pamphlet on the rights of domestic workers in several different languages. http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/content/cfw/Publications/cfwbrochure_english-fullfinal.pdf
October 9th, 2007 at 12:18 am
I had been thinking a lot about this post and (Raising WEG’s) – trying to decide if I feel guilty about our housecleaner … kind of going back and forth with myself about it. Then I thought of our dog walker. She’s a white lady who stepped off a business fast track to do something less stressful – drive neighborhood dogs to the off-leash park. I have no idea if she pays social security, etc. from her dog walking income. We write her a check just like we do to our housecleaner. Different?
October 10th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
We have hired a housekeeper in the past because truth be told, I suck at cleaning and when our kids were younger, I was even worse at it than I am now. I actually ended up costing us money by trying to do it myself. I single-handedly destroyed the finishes on every single one of our faucets by using the wrong kind of scrubby thing. Now that the kids are older, they help clean so we no longer have a need for any additional help and I have learned to use the right kind of scrubby thingy.