Based on my family, cousins, friends, everyone I knew as a kid, the idea of hiring someone to clean the house sounded like something that only the upper classes would ever consider.
Related, I see a lot of jokes coming out of the entertainment industry about how everyone has a gardener, and everyone has a nanny, and everyone has a maid, and these people are all from Spanish-speaking countries. People in Hollywood realize that the only non-multimillionaires who could possibly identify with this are people in Southern California, right?
What, that rascally Hawaiian Punch can't swing a mop? Kids these days . . .
I would like coming home to a clean house, but I'm also more than a little freaked out with the idea of some stranger cleaning/wandering my house. I even feel like a bit of a slacker when I hire somebody to do some household maintenance that I could do myself. Outside painting I don't feel bad about hiring somebody, because I hate heights, but I've never hired somebody to paint the interior of a house and neither have my parents.
hire people! it's the greatest! it's like the laundry fairies have come.
We tried hiring a cleaning lady a couple of times, but didn't like it -- very expensive, and we weren't impressed by the results. We may just have had bad luck -- the concept sounds great -- but it didn't work for us.
more strictly speaking, perhaps it's as if the laundry fairies had come.
Based on my family, cousins, friends, everyone I knew as a kid, the idea of hiring someone to clean the house sounded like something that only the upper classes would ever consider.
I recall a conversation I had at about 13, with a friend of about 15, in which the friend commented that he "couldn't believe there were really people who would hire someone else to clean their own house", and that he would take this as an absolute indicator that someone had, objectively, far too much money. A housecleaning service was, in his mind, not merely an exclusive luxury of the wealthy, but a sign that wealth had progressed into decadent excess.
I didn't exactly agree with him, although I certainly never knew anyone who'd ever hired a cleaning service.
Having hired housecleaning cuts out several layers of family arguments. It is an inevitable adaptation to having two working parents. I have very little interest in guilt, so maybe I have nothing useful to say on this. On the other hand, maybe from having had plenty of shit jobs myself and having seen my mom work in some as well, I have no sympathy for elitist mockery of the type Ned mentions, especially so if there's a cultural dimension.
I personally feel scorn for people who have paid lawn care (no energy? live in an apartment! I say), but I recognize that it's a style difference, like scorning people for baseball caps or lucite heels.
It sounds like someone could reasonably come to our house twice a month for $100/month. I would easily teach an extra class in the summer to pay for this.
8: I knew people like that, but I also knew people who were surprised my parents didn't have any cleaning help given their income and whatnot.
Once while visiting my mom I rolled out of bed bleary eyed, and wandered into the kitchen wearing boxer shorts and a tank top, only to stop short. There was a hot guy mopping the floor. Uh . . . "Oh!" my mother said, "Oudemia, this is Paolo!" So my mom has a hot Brazilian guy clean for her.*
*It turns out he is the husband of the hot Brazilian woman who normally cleans for her.
And I'm in complete agreement with 5. Our main problem isn't dirt, it's piles of stuff strewn about everyone. Housekeepers won't do anything about that (or probably they would, if you were willing to pay them a fortune, but none of the services will do it as part of their normal routine), and they're absolute shit about cleaning around it (which is, objectively, difficult, so I don't blame them). For a while it worked because having the cleaning service motivated us to straighten up before they came, so they could clean effectively, but that motivation proved to be temporary, and soon they were doing a shitty job (again: our fault) and we weren't getting our money's worth.
My mum used to work as a cleaner of that type, doing a few hours a week in someone's house. She had quite a friendly relationship with the woman she worked for and I don't think either of them would have regarded the situation as exploitative.
I know a few people my age who've hired cleaners. Mostly double-income people with very young kids where one or both of them work long hours. That said, I've heard horror stories from friends who've done house-cleaning, of unpleasant bordering-on-abusive employers. I used to work as a cleaner myself, but I was always working in the public sector rather than for private individuals.
My family is frugal-style UMC, and growing up we had a cleaner come once a month or so - not from a service, just an undocumented immigrant we got connected to from somewhere or other. At one point we had to replace the person because she wasn't doing it to any level of adequacy.
There's some level of innate discomfort with it all, yes, on both my and my parents' parts. Not sure why - home as a private place, maybe.
We have somebody come in once a week, usually for about two, two and a half hours. We pay her £35 a time, about $20 an hour, which isn't great, but she seems happy with it. When she started she'd just been thrown out by her husband and needed every penny she could get, but she shows no sign of quitting, so we're cool with it. She's been with us about 10 years now; I'm not sure I'd want to start over with a new person. But it is nice to have a pristine house occasionally.
For a while it worked because having the cleaning service motivated us to straighten up before they came, so they could clean effectively
This. It was a family routine to be reminded to pick up our junk before the cleaning person came.
Really, instead of enough money to hire help, I'd like enough money to built a bathroom with a drain in the middle of the floor and water-proof everything. Then, I could just take a power washer (one that I would build into the wall) and hose the whole thing down. The sink, toiletries and towels would be in a little alcove in front of the actual bathroom, like in a hotel except bigger.
Also, the guy in the video. Where does he keep his fucking books?
We had pretty good luck in the DC area, and really having someone in once a week makes a real difference in the lives of working parents.
Really, really real.
My experience is that tiny living spaces aren't easier to clean for the effort one saves by not cleaning large surfaces is spent constantly moving clutter around in a sort of shell game.
At one point we had to replace the person because she wasn't doing it to any level of adequacy.
This, and the fact that our problem is untidiness rather than filth, so the 'either we straighten up or it doesn't get cleaned properly' issue was a big one.
Bitching at the woman we hired about the quality of her work seemed impossibly oppressive, but OTOH I'm not a particularly fastidious housekeeper, and I do a much better job on the bathrooms than she did. Not hiring her again seemed like a much more tolerable solution than working with her to get her results up to our (really not all that high) standards.
We did it twice, and I'm remembering the difficulties with one cleaner. I think the other was similar, but it's not coming back clearly.
Not a shell game. A sliding tile game.
I need sleep.
I have wondered if a service would make the standards problem easier, but my understanding is that they're all horrible to work for, so I can't really go there.
I don't think I could sleep in that bed from the small house video. I'd feel like the walls were going to crush me. Anyway, we live in about 1,500 square feet and I'm constantly having to remind myself that we don't really "need" a bigger house.
I don't understand where one finds a cleaner if not through a service. Just word of mouth?
We never used anything but services, in our few brief attempts with hired cleaning.
re: 27
And newsagent windows, that sort of place [in the UK].
I don't understand where one finds a cleaner if not through a service. Just word of mouth?
To judge from people I know, word of mouth or Craigslist. You also see people looking for cleaning jobs through notices on the bulletin board at the grocery store and other places like that.
Yeah, I thought craigslist after I posted that. Although I just checked, and see more ads for services than anything else. And, among the non-services, I really wouldn't have any idea how to choose someone to call.
A friend of mine worked as a cleaner for a while - freelance - and her experience was that the people who could just about afford it but somehow managed to hire her because there weren't enough hours in the day were fine to work for, but the ones who were actually rich were bastards (and had much bigger houses that they expected her to clean in the same time it took to do a standard three bedroom terrace).
our problem is untidiness rather than filth
But filth does accumulate gradually. As I recall, our cleaning person did mopping, bathroom-cleaning, sweeping, vacuuming, maybe dusting, and that was about it. (And low-quality work was something that redressable, not endemic in the people we found.)
28: Word of mouth -- we were hooked into the babysitter network, and babysitters know cleaners. (We considered paying our babysitter extra to do some cleaning, and did for a while, but while she was the bestest babysitter ever and we still visit on holidays and the kids call her to talk on the phone, she was also a terrible cleaner. After a month or two, we mutually agreed that the extra pay for cleaning experiment was over.)
re: 33
Yes, that accords with what I've heard. My wife used to do a bit of casual cleaning when she was an au pair, and she has similar stories. The upper middle classes are generally bastards, I think. These were the sorts of people who lived in huge houses, and yet who billed (!) their au pairs for using the internet.
But filth does accumulate gradually.
In my experience, filth accumulates quickly.
As I recall, our cleaning person did mopping, bathroom-cleaning, sweeping, vacuuming, maybe dusting, and that was about it.
What else would you expect? In Britain you have people who do ironing, believe it or not, and sometimes they clean too, but they're negotiated separately.
I had some pretty bad experiences when I was a cleaner, but that was with high school teachers, who are fucking bastards, the lot of them.
38: Just confirming that it's about the filth, not the untidiness.
38: Kitchen cleaning? Stovetop and so on, maybe occasionally the oven? Maybe windows? I don't know, but those sound like plausible cleaner tasks.
Wealth is poison, sure.
Brock, ask around. Free-lance cleaners who have vacancies are very interested in filling them, and this way you get a referral from someone who has incentive to be honest with you.
I can imagine a whole lot of you are less organized than we are: our cleaners put dirty clothes in the hampers, mail and magazines in a pile, that sort of thing. What else is there?
So, LB, you're 0 for 3 on people hired cleaning up to your standards, and yet you're sure those standards aren't particularly fastidious?
You're a doily-maker, right? Doily-makers strike me as fastidious people, generally.
I would really like to make the cleaner thing work, because Buck cleans a lot more than I do and I feel guilty about it -- I probably would have given it at least one more shot after our two bad experiences. But he's set against it by now.
42. Oh, absolutely. We have to square away our bottomless piles of unattended to papers, because if we don't we'd never find anything again after the cleaner's been. It's good discipline, though attending to the papers would be better.
You're a doily-maker, right?
This sounds like something with really offensive implications.
And trust me, if you ever entered our house, you'd know I wasn't fastidious. There are snowdrifts of dog hair, and I am embarassed by the bathrooms.
43. Yeah, actually our lady does the stove top, and any dishes that aren't in the machine. She doesn't have to do those, but she's like that.
Windows are done by a window cleaner. It's a recognised profession in these parts, and rounds are jealously protected.
I have wondered if a service would make the standards problem easier, but my understanding is that they're all horrible to work for, so I can't really go there.
You might look around more. I imagine services would have some bare-bones advantages for their employees over daywork - i.e., actually paying payroll tax.
This sounds like something with really offensive implications.
?
Windows are done by a window cleaner. It's a recognised profession in these parts, and rounds are jealously protected.
Many of my neighbors have that. On the other hand, I have never cleaned an exterior window of a house since my mom stopped making me.
I live in DC and it is really common here, at least among lawyers. I use a service and have them come every two weeks. I pay $75 for a two-bedroom apartment.
It's pretty awesome. I'm generally neat, but terrible about things like dusting or vacuuming the couch, so it's perfect for me.
It is sort of weird to have other people in your house while you're gone and sometimes they put things in weird places or put the wrong sheets on the bed or whatever. But I can't be there when they're there though -- way too awkward.
3: but I'm also more than a little freaked out with the idea of some stranger cleaning/wandering my house.
Especially if they use their "free reign" to rule in an arbitrary and capricious manner.
I'd get a cleaner if I had an outside job somewhere. With no guilt whatsoever. Plenty of agencies round here.
55: I'm fine with arbitrary, but I draw the line at capricious.
52: Nothing specific, it just sounds like some kind of weird epithet.
51: It's not really a live issue. Buck really hated it, so it's been vetoed.
All my UMC friends in DC had cleaners and loved it. My housemates and I down there had about a year when we had a cleaner who came every two weeks. That was nice, but we could have just done our chores instead.
58: I'm certainly going to start using it as an epithet. I just sounds right.
We have someone come every two weeks, at $100 per visit, which is kind of a lot, but it has crept up gradually (and our house is now bigger and dirtier than when we first hired her).
Nickel & Dimed turned me off to the idea of a cleaning service. Ours was a word-of-mouth hire.
58 & 61: It makes me think of Doilermaker, which sounds like a Boilermaker where it's Dewar's specifically.
Nickel & Dimed turned me off to the idea of a cleaning service. Ours was a word-of-mouth hire.
Me also. The idea of somebody cleaning my kitchen with same appliance just used on some other person's bathroom stuck in my mind much better that that whole "people being exploited" point she was trying to make.
Back in the day, there was a multi-blog conversation about Belle Waring's cleaning people -- she posted about it on John and Belle, and then maybe it got linked on Crooked Timber, or here? This would have been ages ago -- '04 or '05 maybe.
64: I'm not sure. I'll let you know after I use it.
65: She aimed for your heart and hit you in the stomach?
We used to do it in the 90s, once a month to once a quarter. 100-150 dollars for two people for an afternoon, maybe a grand a year. It gave us an incentive to pick up the debris and get organized once in a while.
68: She aimed for my conscience and hit my OCD.
The guy in the video is impossibly twee. So's his house.
It's funny when I think of how arbitrarily I seem to draw the lines for what services for which I regularly fork over cash. I would never pay for someone to change my oil (that's a me-and-my-dad-bonding task anyway), but I eat out probably more than what's normal (shopping/cooking for one is kind of depressing). My roommates are pretty plumber-happy, whereas I'll usually give minor plumbing repairs a shot before picking up a phone. I don't know if I have a point; just thinking out loud.
My mom pays for my housecleaner (and my sister's) as a Christmas present. It is a completely decadent luxury for me (less so for my sister, with her two boys on her own), but I really love it. I actually do keep my house fairly neat, since I like the idea of being ready for guests at any moment. But the couple who cleans my house does the floors, and while I keep clean kitchen surfaces, it takes me a good long time to get around to doing floors.
I'm pretty confident I'm not being exploitative. They're a couple who do all their rounds together. I pay the standard rate, $70 per visit for an already fairly clean two bedroom house. They had been working for a cleaning service run by a woman who is a friend of a friend and advertised as the eco-cleaners, no yucky cleaning chemicals. They went out on their own and I switched to them after I didn't like the replacement the service sent. I had to ask them not to use the yucky cleaning chemicals, which they'd gone to when they weren't with the eco-cleaning service. So far as I can tell, they seem autonomous and willing to exchange this work for my Mom's money and my professional civility. I mean, like, I'm polite in the little we interact.
I could do my own damn chores, but I already do the ones of those I want to. Maybe they free up more of my time to spend on my always needy sprinkler system.
It's pretty awesome. I'm generally neat, but terrible about things like dusting or vacuuming the couch, so it's perfect for me.
This sounds like me. I'm obsessively neat (minus running out of space for books) but I don't really like to do any actual cleaning. Especially not bathtubs.
However, I just don't think I could get over the privacy thing. I have no idea what it is that I think they would discover were they in my house, but I have an incredibly hard time with the idea. Plus, they'd know how dirty I am!
I don't know if I have a point; just thinking out loud.
Shit, our comments are supposed to have points?
Having hired housecleaning cuts out several layers of family arguments. It is an inevitable adaptation to having two working parents.
This is exactly right. Pay a decent wage and don't be an asshole about it. Almost 100 percent of the time any squeamishness is just the residual feeling that The Wife or The Mommy should be doing it.
Related, I see a lot of jokes coming out of the entertainment industry about how everyone has a gardener, and everyone has a nanny, and everyone has a maid, and these people are all from Spanish-speaking countries. People in Hollywood realize that the only non-multimillionaires who could possibly identify with this are people in Southern California, right?
. . . . running away from this comment.
I totally love having a housecleaner show up once a week -- it simply removes a whole giant layer of stress and anxiety and shame from one's life. Of course, it's a luxury, but I'd prioritize it ahead of many other luxuries. I think that people's psychological quirks about this are either (a) failing to clean the house means I've failed as a wife/mother/Martha Stewart type or (b) having a "servant" means you have crossed some Rubicon into being a rich asshole.
(b) seems more understandable than (a), but not something I can really relate to. See point about Southern California above -- it's been pretty normal for as long as I can remember for middle income and above people to have a weekly maid service and weekly gardening service.
it's been pretty normal for as long as I can remember for middle income and above people to have a weekly maid service and weekly gardening service.
Genuine question: is this really true of southern-California, or does R. Halford just have a perverted misunderstanding of the meaning of the phrase "middle income"?
Probably both are true. But I mean "middle income" on the local, not national scale. For example, I live on a not-at-all wealthy (by local standards) street that most folks identify with the ghetto; everyone, including the couple who are both public school teachers, gets a weekly gardening service from the same guy, and everyone I know well enough to know about has a maid come in. These are teachers, IT types, some lawyers, some random business types, etc. And this basic distribution was roughly true, from what I remember, growing up.
I grew up on the northern edge of Southern California, and it was not the norm in the 80s and 90s for middle income families in my (admittedly not quite classic SoCal) region. However, I think the flush years of the late 90s and 2000s did actually change that, to some degree.
Growing up in LA, we had someone clean our house every week, but never a gardener. My father would never have a gardener. That's what children are for.
There was a period recently when we had a nanny, housecleaner, and (twice-yearly) landscapers/gardeners. I'm not sure what is the right word for the feeling I had on the afternoon they were all at my house at the same time.
I've spent quite a bit of time looking at census entries of generally MC (and some UMC) people, and have been genuinely surprised at the number of live-in servants between 1900 and 1930.
I'm not sure what is the right word for the feeling I had on the afternoon they were all at my house at the same time.
Hegemony.
have been genuinely surprised at the number of live-in servants between 1900 and 1930.
There's a line about Agatha Christie, who grew up in that period, believing that she would never be so rich that she could afford a car, or so poor that she couldn't afford servants. We bitch about inequality, but based on the patterns of hiring servants, it must have dropped a lot in the last century or so.
I've hated yard work all my life, and was happy to hire it out as soon as I could afford to do so.
When we bought our last house, we kept the gardener the prior owners had used, and now, having sold, the new owners use him as well.
People also really needed servants in 1900 in a way that we don't now, because you needed more people working longer hours just to do basic stuff. As I learned from watching the PBS show "1900 house" it took fucking forever to toast a piece of bread or do the laundry or clean the floor or put on your clothes or to do just about anything.
Almost 100 percent of the time any squeamishness is just the residual feeling that The Wife or The Mommy should be doing it.
I've pretty much always done the heavy cleaning in our household. Waiting for my wife to do 1/2 of it just got to be too much work.
At one point in the early 20th century my grandparents lived in municipal housing but still had a servant, not living in, admittedly, but coming daily. It was really the only work available to most working class women outside the big cities.
I've spent quite a bit of time looking at census entries of generally MC (and some UMC) people, and have been genuinely surprised at the number of live-in servants between 1900 and 1930.
And if you look at farm families (who maybe weren't even quite MC), you'll also find live-in help (maybe one or two boys/young men hired as farm hands, perhaps one girl/young woman as a live-in domestic).
Also a lot of lodgers. My MIL's grandmother ran a boarding-house after being widowed at an early age. In the 1911 Canadian census, the enumerator lists her occupation as "None."
Well, the 1911 Canadian census doesn't even list my grandparents.
80- Growing up in SoCal, my parents had a weekly cleaning lady for a few years before the recession in the early 90's. And I think weekly gardeners/landscaping was even more common IME.
Like Brock, I would need to get a better handle on straightening up piles of stuff before a cleaner would be worthwhile, and I would feel a little weird on account of Halford's points, both a) and b). But it's a secret guilty fantasy of luxury for me.
I don't even have a 1911 Canadian census.
99.89.106.46
I would need to get a better handle on straightening up piles of stuff before a cleaner would be worthwhile
Getting a cleaner is the best way to get a handle on straightening up piles of stuff, because if you don't the cleaner won't clean that area and you are wasting your money.
92: When and where were they born?
96: I was just joking. As far as I know, none of my grandparents set foot in Canada except my grandmother visited there with us on summer vacation.
There are some things I'd like to pay a cleaner to clean, but I've never done it before and starting to pay other people to do things you've been doing yourself feels awkward. The smaller but "master" bathroom in our apartment is starting to look pretty bad. Related thought: Whirlpool tubs are a bad idea when they're part of a tub/shower combination and not a standalone tub; they get nasty far too quickly from showering to want to ever use it as a whirlpool.
I do know people whose great-grandparents invaded Canada in the late 1860s, but they didn't stay very long.
99: Some of those people stayed longer than they had hoped to, and can be found languishing in the Kingston Penitentiary in the 1871 Canadian census.
I heard Canada had like 30 goddamn censuses in 1911.
100: Yes, the key was to get arrested by the U.S., not the Canadians.
The 1911 Canadian census doesn't even list my grandparents, but they were born on Tuesday.
Also, a census in 1911? Surely that's a relic of Imperial weights and measures. Has Canada switched to the metric census?
99.98% of our population is "nice."
THAT CAN'T BE RIGHT; THERE'S MORE THAN 0.02% OF THE POPULATION IN QUEBEC.
Gardeners who do a mow and blow are pretty standard in SoCal. Usually one crew will do a whole neighborhood.
IME a friend will ask whether your cleaner has a spare day, and if not there will be a recommendation for someone who needs the work. We ended up with the cousin of my father in law's help. She had a MA in computer science and he was an architect. They were lousy cleaners, and my wife worked at getting them jobs that were more suitable. Do not ask about their papers, or you will hear my Sgt. Schultz impression.
Newfies regard themselves as Canadian now? Times change...
Gardeners who do a mow and blow are pretty standard in SoCal.
Hott!
I'M CANADIAN WHERE IT COUNTS!
YES I SURE DO.
EXCEPT FOR THE CHICKS BUT WHO CAN TELL UNDER THESE HEAVY SWEATERS
I always get tripped up by the exploitation issue. Is paying somebody under the table OK—so long as that's the arrangement they want and I've given up all my future hopes of being Attorney General (I nearly have)—or should I paternalistically make sure their payroll taxes are getting paid? Is hiring an undocumented worker OK? If I go through a service, how can I be sure they're not ruthlessly exploiting their workers?
To my mind, hiring someone to garden for you would be like hiring someone to have sex for you.
The grape vines we put in three years ago are really starting to produce. I'm going to get a book on making your own wine at home. This should be fun.
116.2: My dad did that. He had a great deal of fun, but the wine was, and I'm over-praising because he is my father and I love him, barely drinkable if you washed it down with beer or real wine.
To my mind, hiring someone to garden for you would be like hiring someone to have sex for you.
This is quite common and is called online pr0n. There's probably a huge, untapped market for grainy videos of people pruning vines in ways that make it look a lot more elegant than it is.
I hope they're Muscats. Those are the best.
117: Yeah, wine seems to be much harder than beer. Better than half the homebrew I've ever had was pretty good, but I've never had decent homemade wine.
115: By not paying their payroll taxes, they will never get social security credit for that job. Even if, and this is unlikely, your cleaner is saving for their own retirement, if they are ever disabled or forced to retire sooner than expected, they are going to be in trouble. If they stay healthy, then you're just screwing (slightly) the poor and retired in the U.S. to save yourself a couple of bucks.
121: It is probably easier to get good homemade wine if you use grapes grown in some place that isn't Nebraska.
Actually, they are table varietals--we weren't thinking about making wine when we got them. I think they are concord and niagara, but I'm not actually sure. Molly got them and put them in the ground and then only later did we start to think about how to take care of them or what we would do with all the fruit.
122: OK, so paternalistically insist on paying documented workers' payroll taxes. Fine. What about undocumented workers?
118: Most people watch porn because they can't have sex at the moment. It not like you have some sex available to you, but you don't feel up to it, so you hire an immigrant to do it.
Actually, I take it back, I think that does happen, at least in the movies.
124: Grape vines are relentless. Our neighbor's vine has completely taken over our fence, including the non-adjacent side. It's turning into a bit of a problem.
What about undocumented workers?
You can't ask that question, unless you're in Arizona.
125: It is hardly just paternalism, thought part of that is there. Society has decided that everybody with a job should have some kind of retirement income and (very minimal) disability coverage. Cheating on it undermines one of the few parts of the social safety net that functions half-assedly well.
Someone should convince some libertarian to become an undocumented worker. You'll be off the grid! No taxes! No big government programs cutting into your paycheck! No pesky minimum wage!
Someone should convince some libertarian to become an undocumented worker.
I think libertarians have a self image of John Galt, not Juan Valdez.
131: Also, plenty of them are already tax cheats.
There's plenty of vile homebrew out there, mostly made by people who are homebrewing to be cheap rather than because they really like beer. I don't know if the home-winemaker universe is similar, or if there's a "that's what dad and granddad did with these vines" aspect to it that also doesn't directly lead to being any good at it.
129: If somebody proposes to do some work for me on a cash basis and I say, "No! Because of society!," that's paternalism in my book.
My home brewing days are over (until I retire and am dirt poor again), and I never tried to make wine with actual grapes, because in this country it makes no sense. But my experience, and that of my friends was that however good you get at it, occasionally there's a brew that you just have to write off.
With wine (and I'm talking about 'country wines' here, made from cheap available fruit of any kind, some of them surprise you by actually needing to mature for a couple of year while other want to be drunk more or less as soon as they're bottled. Again, same recipe, different batches.
Yeast has its reasons which are not ours to know. Next year may be awesome.
Our maid in Geneva insisted on us not paying the local equivalent of SS, given that with her work permit she couldn't get any benefit and she wanted the cash. My parents paid somewhat above market rates plus four weeks paid vacation. In the US in the late seventies, my possibly mistaken childhood memory is that most people in our MC/UMC milieu did not have maids, but pretty much all families where the wife worked did have them.
In communist Poland both my mom and my dad grew up with live in maids which was far from uncommon in fifties Poland. In interwar Poland everybody MC and up had live in help and a fair number of those a bit below did as well. Maid work may suck, but it's less exhausting than farming and you don't need to worry about running out of food in the spring after a bad harvest.
136. If you never paid anybody cash in this country, you wouldn't get much done.
136: You can argue all you want, but it is cheating on your taxes whether you both agree to it or you impose it an employee. The employee isn't at fault if they are forced, but the employer is wrong either way.
We had a service when we lived in Ohio (not a big company, but one woman and her couple of assistants) and it was great to get reset back to full cleanliness, including floors, every two weeks. I don't know if we'll get someone here, just because we'll be gone again in a year and it seems like a short time to employ someone -- but it really makes such a big difference to being able to keep up with the day-to-day stuff. I'm just bad at doing serious cleaning, and I don't enjoy it.
136: Agreed. Said cash worker is free to file income taxes as a self-employed person. Of course, self-employment taxes are a bit higher than the taxes one would pay as an employee, so the self-employed worker should be paid at a higher rate than the employee. The self-employed person will also probably like to be purchasing his or her own health insurance, an additional expense, and should, again, be paid a higher wage accordingly.
If somebody proposes to do some work for me on a cash basis and I say, "No! Because of society!," that's paternalism in my book.
No, it's not. A paternalistic relationship is one where you have the power to make decisions on someone's behalf and they have to go along with it. Even if you don't accept Moby's line of argument, there's still the fact that this is a market transaction, so it's two-sided. You have your preferences about payment, payroll taxes, etc, and your make an offer of employment on that basis. That offer is acceptable or not acceptable to someone, based on their own preferences. It's not as if you have monopoly power in this situation, so you can't really be imposing your preferences on the other party.
140: Wouldn't a cleaner coming for an hour or two a week (at most) very likely be an independant contractor, rather than an employee? I wouldn't think it's the responsibility of the person hiring them to ensure their self-employment taxes are paid. Maybe you's have a responsibilty to ensure they can legally work in this country (i.e., aren't undocumented), but I don't believe there's even that.
an independant contractor, rather than an employee
Yes. The discussion applies more to, e.g., nannies than to cleaners because of the non-exclusivity of the service provided by the latter.
142: You are right that it would be O.K. if the employee agreed to pay the full tax and was paid sufficiently to do that. However, an employee who asks to be paid "in cash" is asking to be paid off of the books for purposes of evading taxes. An employee who asks to be an independent contractor is (maybe) doing that.
OT To those who despair about our anti-immigrant shit, just think, you could be European. Sarkozy has just suggested that anyone of 'foreign origin' who threatens a cop should be stripped of French citizenship and sent 'home'.
"Sergent, there's a man of Hungarian parentage over there who just threatened me!"
"OK, Officer Mahmud, we'll sort him out double quick."
To those who despair about our anti-immigrant shit, just think, you could be European
Our anti-(illegal) immigration shit is viewed against some utopian ideal, not in comparison to other actual countries, who are more often than not much worse.
Yeah, I just sent this article to a friend. Pretty horrifying:
Sarkozy vowed to strip foreign-born individuals of their French nationality if they attack police or public officials, in the wake of deadly shootings and other violence between police and suspects in largely immigrant districts.
His declaration coincided with evidence of violent behaviour by the authorities themselves: a video of French police violently evicting Africans from a squat in a suburb of Paris.
The video, published on the website DailyMotion and broadcast by CNN news, shows police dragging screaming African women along the ground, including one with a baby in a sling on her back beneath her and another apparently pregnant.
149. As it should be (not just in the US).
Actually, it's 'naturalized' not 'foreign born'. This is an important distinction since children of non-citizen residents get automatic citizenship, but only at the age of eighteen. Sarkozy has also proposed to change this provision so that any youth who has a felony or misdemeanor conviction will be ineligible for citizenship.
146: An employee who asks to be an independent contractor is (maybe) doing that.
Per 145, a worker who asks to be an independent contractor (not an employee) is exactly that, given that he or she is not working exclusively for a single employer. Whether he or she asks to be paid in cash .. well, a check counts technically as cash, so the cash angle is a bit of a red herring. There is no reason to think that a worker paid by check (or cash) who cleans the houses of numerous people over the course of any month is (maybe) seeking to avoid paying his or her taxes.
Frankly, I think most people who've done any research would prefer to be employees, given that taxes for same are somewhat lower than for self-employment.
Whether he or she asks to be paid in cash .. well, a check counts technically as cash, so the cash angle is a bit of a red herring.
If somebody asks to be paid "in cash" and is given a check, they will not be happy. In discussing employment or a purchase made outside of a corporate-owned retail establishment, "in cash" means off the books.
No, it's not. A paternalistic relationship is one where you have the power to make decisions on someone's behalf and they have to go along with it.
That seems a little oversimplified to me. I've certainly been a party to plenty of transactions in which I was aware I had coercive power (social, emotional, financial, other) even if the other person was technically free to make a deal or walk away.
If I had a housekeeper, the paternalism I'd be in danger of enacting would be a lecture on why it's important to report your income (complete with horror stories illustrative examples of people whose eventual disability payments/survivor benefits were lower because they weren't on record as having paid into the system for 40 quarters), and file your taxes with an ITIN if you don't have a SSN.
So it's a good thing I don't have a housekeeper.
Frankly, I think most people who've done any research would prefer to be employees, given that taxes for same are somewhat lower than for self-employment.
Unless they're not planning to report the income or pay the self-employment taxes, which would guess is the case more often than not.
154: Whatever; I'm more interested in the question of whether one should retain someone as an independent contractor, so that he or she pays his or her own taxes, or not. You seemed to think that control by the employer of the payment of taxes was important; I say it's paternalistic and uncalled for.
Another factor to consider if/when hiring someone for house cleaning: for heaven's sake, if you retain this person for a considerable number of years, increase the pay rate over time as a cost of living raise. This person's expenses are increasing just the same as everyone else's. Don't make the person apologetically inform you that he/she needs to raise the rate, at the risk of you being a cad and downgrading to someone else charging whatever the current market rate is (probably too low).
154 is not my experience. Small business people routinely use separate business and personal accounts. If the cleaner is legal, and prefers cash or personal payment, maybe one should say a sentence about SS paying out only to those who pay in. But past that, an ethical violation to work off the books, really? A painter who uses the boss's tools to moonlight at 70% of the above-board rate, threat or menace?
I guess I have a hard time getting exercised about this given disinterest in cleaning up offshore dodges-- the 5-employee office in Bermuda that produces all the profit, exploitation of the Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico for textile and pharmaceutical work that I'm SURE is completely accounted for. Giving your mechanic a lecture when he offers to save you both money seems deranged.
I've certainly been a party to plenty of transactions in which I was aware I had coercive power (social, emotional, financial, other) even if the other person was technically free to make a deal or walk away.
Sure, I understand the issue here (and I am not the sort of person who believes having market transactions be formally free absolves you of all other responsibilities). But in the example as described, refusing to hire someone on cash-only grounds didn't seem to rise to the level of paternalism, any more than accepting a request to be paid cash-only would mean you had been coerced or had been paternalistically subordinated to their "cash is better" view of employment.
There are some things I'd like to pay a cleaner to clean, but I've never done it before and starting to pay other people to do things you've been doing yourself feels awkward.
Whatever awkwardness I feel about paying someone to come clean my apartment vanishes the moment I walk in the door after she's been there. Besides, I'm not just paying my housecleaner to do work I'd otherwise do; she does a far better job than I ever would. And I know myself well enough to know that a) if left to my own devices I won't clean very often and b) that takes a huge psychic toll on me.
156: They're bankrupting the country, I'm sure. They're also not eligible for a lot of the social safety net we have in place; that may or may not balance the country's revenue loss.
So, bottom line, how bad should I feel about just writing our housecleaner a check instead of withholding and reporting the various taxes?
161 and others: I understand that the amounts aren't that huge. And I have in the past done some of this stuff. But, there is no moral case to be made for it beyond, everybody else cheats on their taxes to.
162. She should charge you extra, you have a guilt object that you can bring up in conversation now. She is providing you with an additional service, for which you are obligated to compensate her.
Not remotely bad at all. Unless he or she would prefer that you do the withholding at all, which I doubt, since he/she presumably works for a number of people.
162: 18.3. Or 5!, depending on which guilt register you're using.
Huh-- maybe this is a character failing of mine. I view small acts like these as morally neutral; morality attaches to larger actions only in my mind, there's definitely a cost-benefit calculation for moral evaluations.
Littering, for instance, is in my mind tasteless rather than immoral, similarly illegal parking is either inconsiderate or not, depending on circumstances.
163: Look, I think it's a bad idea for a self-employed person not to report income and pay taxes, but if we go down your road, no one should be self-employed, because they might cheat on their taxes, nay, probably will. (Because they're all nefarious ne'er-do-wells?) Come on.
167.2: If you're the asshole who keeps parking so close to the corner that I have trouble making the turn on to my street, I'm going to key your car.
Let's have that conversation again about how we would never be friends with immoral people.
169: That guy parks on your street, too? I hate that guy.
168: Yes, but I can't cheat on my taxes because they can check everything on it.
All this talk of maids and guilt reminds of the Maudeepisode in which she hires a new maid. Does anybody else remember this? What did Maude want from someone she was going to hire as a maid? Who did she hire?
(I've been thinking that my new role at Unfogged should be old sitcom guy -- I'm tired of being the irrelevant Dylan quotes guy)
170: Maybe that's why I have no friends. I refuse to even befriend myself.
I pay a cleaner $30 an hour for three hours a week to clean. She mops the floor, vacuums, dusts, does some laundry and cleans surfaces. I love it. I didn't know that sheets could be reduced to flat squares so easily.
I'm supposed to do all the cleaning (except laundry) even though both my husband and I are both lawyers and work the same hours. I was spending most of my weekend cleaning and it made me very bitter. My husband was the one to suggest hiring someone. I resisted for awhile because I felt like a failure. But after having a consistently clean house and more time during the weekend, I got over it.
Who did she hire?
Florida
Or that scene in Serial where Nita Talbot hires a maid, and tells her not to wear a uniform. To which the maid replies "oh, you want people to thin I'm your black friend who stops by and happens to straighten up".
I'm supposed to do all the cleaning
Supposed by whom?
175: $30 an hour seems decent to cover the cleaner's expenses (not just the labor but the supplies, taxes, health insurance). I'd feel guilty myself to pay less, just because I suspect that less would leave the person unable to buy health insurance, put away for retirement, etc.
177: Yeah, that sounds like a lousy deal. I feel bad about not cleaning enough, but I'm feeling guilty about falling below half, not that I'm not doing it all.
177: We divided things into gender categories. I clean, cook and handle the bills. My husband fixes things, installs things and takes care of the lawn. It works better this way because I'm better about performing regular tasks. My husband is mechanically inclined and pickier about things being done "the right way" so if the roles were reversed we would fight even more than we do now.
how bad should I feel about just writing our housecleaner a check instead of withholding and reporting the various taxes?
See 144. Your cleaner is an independant contractor, not an employee. I'm sure she wouldn't agree to have you withhold and report the various taxes, nor should she. How do you think your plumber would react if you suggested you were going to withhold employment taxes from any payment you made on a service call? It's no different. Whether or not your housekeeper (or your plumber) is properly reporting all her income is her concern and her business, not yours.
My mom used the money she made from cleaning houses to leave my dad. It's a convenient job for a SAHM with flexible hours. So please don't feel guilty about hiring someone. That money bought my school clothes and supplies and the references helped her get a full time position with good benefits. When we had days off, we came with her to the houses and watched tv or if she was mad at us we had to help. She only snooped for chocolate, so maybe keep some treats in plain sight to discourage that? People found her by word of mouth, small town style.
Cleaning companies seem more exploitative than hiring an independent cleaner, but if you can't find someone through your social network they might be safer than total strangers.
My mom used the money she made from cleaning houses to leave my dad.
Now, we also have to worry about being responsible for breaking up families?
She only snooped for chocolate, so maybe keep some treats in plain sight to discourage that?
I did the same as a teenage babysitter. Spent a lot of time figuring out how much of anything edible I found I could eat without being noticed.
(There was food at home, but I was a greedy child. Still am.)
175: Yeah, I think it's a pretty good wage for Utah and she does bring her own cleaning supplies. My greatest concern was to find someone trustworthy and willing to accommodate any requests like the full page of instructions that I provided on how to do the laundry.
This thread has gotten me even more excited. This perpetual cloud of guilt of mine will be as clean as our floors.
In the formal manner for hiring independent contractors, I believe one is supposed to keep records and submit a 1099 if it adds up to $600 or more in a year.
179: So, the thing that gets me....$30/hr before taxes is actually more than most of the people I know make. I know, all kinds of benefits accrue with the college education, etc .... but I clearly went into the wrong field. I'd do a damn good job cleaning for that much money.
Heebie, if it makes you feel better we have a cleaner and also a nanny who does all the laundry and cooks dinner five nights a week. Squeamishness be damned.
Of course, it's one of those things where you can't schedule your days so that all your days are 8 hours paid.
190: You mean, more than they make at their regular job? If so, higher wages for contractors reflect in part the fact that they are very unlikely to be working full-time.
keep some treats in plain sight
Yeah, I'd certainly, if I had a cleaner, occasionally leave out some of the cookies or whatever with a note: help yourself! This person is spending several hours at your house, and is a person who might like a snack while he or she works.
193: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of, and the full time makes sense. And I mostly know grad students. I myself am worth $15/hr according to the university.
190: I always think about the description from Nickeled & Dimed about how brutal it was for Ehrenreich to bend over scrubbing and vacuuming all day. Maybe the $30/hour does help reduce my guilt too. Minimum wage here is $7.25, so that does seem like a good amount. Plus, $90 a week to have my Saturday back is worth every penny.
190: $30/hr before taxes is actually more than most of the people I know make. I know, all kinds of benefits accrue with the college education, etc
Right, all kinds of benefits accrue which will presumably pay off in future; a housecleaning job doesn't particularly pay off in future. Also, do you buy your own individual health insurance? If so, are you 45 years old, doing so? Do you have children?
183: I'll walk back, if I may, to Brock's position on this. If I may not, then I want $30/hour until I can.
Really, everyone should read Nickeled & Dimed. I thought I generally knew how bad it was to work in penury at extremely labor-intensive jobs; I didn't.
196, 197: I'm sorry if my comment implied that I thought cleaners shouldn't make $30/hr. Not at all what I meant, just more commenting on the sorry status of wages among my peer group and that such a wage sounded attractive to me. (And I know it's hard physical labor, and I would not want to do it.)
(Also, parsimon, my mom raised two children on a smaller hourly wage than that as a physical therapist, so yes, I'm aware of the difficulties.)
I can't believe I missed a Kobe opportunity. And, I agree that Nickled and Dimed is quite illuminating.
it's one of those things where you can't schedule your days so that all your days are 8 hours paid.
I like to entertain annoy my bandmates when we're on a long trip to a good-paying gig by running the numbers. "If you think about it like we're just getting paid for the time we're setting up and playing each one of is worth $250 an hour! Neato-burrito, right, guys? However, if you calculate the entireity of travel time, the cost of gas, food, and lodging, the cost of equipment, including the trailer, it's probably almost minimum wage, and you lost your weekend! Livin' the dream!"
Aren't you supposed to sleep in the van or on the floor at the place of some girl you meet at the venue?
191: We have the same (nanny is on the books and gets paid vacation, cleaning woman gets a very healthy hourly rate). Don't feel squeamish.
202: Heh. I heard an interview with the guy (forget his name) who spent time turning the Grateful Dead around into an actually not-bankrupt outfit: he basically ran that down in the same way. In order to keep things under control, he had to insist on limiting their entourage to some small number, giving each band and crew member a daily allowance for food and whatnot, and so on. They wound up not paying themselves minimum wage ... eventually.
the floor at the place of some girl you meet at the venue
I keep suggesting this, but usually when we travel really far for a single gig, it's a wedding, and it seems uncouth to hit on the bride's sister or whatever.
I can't believe I missed a Kobe opportunity. And, I agree that Nickled and Dimed is quite illuminating.
Kobbertunity!
Also, our students were depressingly unmoved by Nickled & Dimed. They know lazy when they see it.
206: The caterers and waitstaff probably have apartments.
207.last: You've mentioned that before. WTF is that about? They felt no empathy whatsoever? I found myself appalled; the whole thing was grim and stunning. (I should say, I've only read a 40-page or so excerpt.)
They just discount it as not representative of poverty. Sure, those exceptional people that she describes have hard lives. But if we liberals took our blinders off, we'd see what a small portion that is.
Also: not all our students are assholes; those are just the ones that make an impression on me.
Also: Their views aren't particularly well-formed. There's a lot of echoing-an-earlier-authority-figure and a lot of contradictory views within any particular student. Also, I think they sometimes feel like they're betraying their dad, or whoever, if they don't convey his emotional reaction on a given topic.
a housecleaning job doesn't particularly pay off in future
It pays your bills and keeps you away from dangerous people and places. Many other shit jobs put you in contact with dangerous people and places, probably worse for women. An opportunity benefit of indoor work as opposed to an opportunity cost.
betraying their dad,
This says a lot, I think. I was not at all interested in adopting my parents view of the world between 17 and twentysomething.
211: Sure. It's not like working toward a Ph.D., nonetheless. Quibbler.
They just discount it as not representative of poverty. Sure, those exceptional people that she describes have hard lives. But if we liberals took our blinders off, we'd see what a small portion that is.
In your experience, does this come hand-in-hand with their real-life experience (that is, do they cite personal examples)? I'm sympathetic to the developmental stage of "But this personal experience looms so largely in my mind! I can't yet grasp that it might not be representative."
The "feeling obliged to represent the views of absent family members" is really interesting. I don't think I'd ever conceived of it that way, but it rings very true to group discussions in courses I've taken. The intense contradictory pressure on some kids to stay "true" to working-class roots while also succeeding by white-collar standards can be brutal.
But if we liberals took our blinders off, we'd see what a small portion that is.
I don't get this part. The students in question are conservatives, I take it. The message is that we liberals, with our blinders, see only the small portion of those in poverty who are, uh. Who are in poverty. Who, uh, have shitty lives. Most of the people in poverty don't have shitty lives.
I gather that's the idea. Well, these kids are just too young yet to think independently. Or something.
Sorry, but I just don't know what to do with that kind of thing.
does this come hand-in-hand with their real-life experience (that is, do they cite personal examples)?
I think there's a giant dose of confirmation bias in their personal examples. For example, one student kept citing a housing project he'd seen where young people hanging out, not working, and the teenagers look fit and healthy to work.
The message is that we liberals, with our blinders, see only the small portion of those in poverty who are, uh...
...not lazy. We overfocus on the virtually nonexistent, nonlazy group of people in poverty. Most nonlazy people are, by definition, not poor. See?
It's been a long time since I read Nickled & Dimed, and while the parts of it about the work she did were pretty good, I remember finding the expense of housing and the situations around that pretty hard to get my head around. There seemed to be an impractically large objection to a roommate situation that left her paying exorbitant by-the-week motel/SRO rates. It doesn't invalidate the work, but it seemed like a huge blind spot to me.
217: Ah. Thanks, I hadn't gotten the reasoning.
Seems like a person could use some statistics on the working poor right around now.
I return from the dead to speak here as someone who read lots of libertarian science fiction as a teenager and to some extent was heavily influenced in the background by the attitude evinced therein. I am also speaking as someone who has spent lots of time being self-employed and "living off the grid" as a construction worker, an apartment cleaner, doing maid services and as a computer technician. Since I got paid with checks and since I was an "independent contractor" I didn't pay my taxes. It was as natural as sunshine to not pay my taxes. It was also important because I often did not find enough work to be profitable when taxes were accounted for. (The money that would have gone for taxes often was needed as working capital, but allowed more money to be drawn out as wages.) As a result I am one of Witt's horror stories: someone who doesn't have enough quarterly credits to draw disability even though I have worked enough that I would be set if I had paid it all in.
So I can speak from a perspective comparable to an undocumented worker and I will say that getting paid is good, regardless of whether I paid my taxes or not. Even though I would have been better off as an hourly employee with taxes, steady wages and benefits. I am saying here that if someone is willing to work a maid job then they need the money, whatever type of paternalistic you feel. What you should do to assuage any guilt is to make sure that you're paying enough per hour to make it worth coming out to clean. Otherwise the self-employed wind up in Stanley's position where, when you add in extra support work for each job, travel, working capital costs and the like, the self-employed can wind up making less than minimum wage on an hourly basis.
Trying to do withholding will just make life complicated for the self-employed and reduce their wages, whether they pay their taxes or not. Lecturing about horror stories of people who didn't get social security benefits is probably useful. Beyond that, just make sure you pay enough. Thirty to fifty dollars an hour is not too much for a two-hour stretch, when you consider travel times, equipment maintainance, supply costs and extra work. (An extra two hours for all of the above on top of the paid two hours can turn 30$/hr into 15$/hr pre-tax and pre-benefits in nothing flat, and don't forget to throw in cleaning supply costs. But, given that that a two hours job may be the only job that day, that 30$/hr becomes 60/8 = 7.5$/hr, pre-tax and pre-benefits for a 'day's work', or all the work you're going to get for a day, anyways.)
To summarize, to assuage any guilt, lecture a little about paying taxes, but followup by paying a decent hourly rate. You should expect good value for a good rate, by the way, as long as the task allotted isn't too large for the time paid.
Enjoy your clean house.
203: the idea is you're in a band, some girl turns up at the gig, she loves it, she comes backstage after the show, you hit it off, she invites you back to her place, and you gratefully accept and sleep on her floor?
I think you're missing something here.
218: In the admittedly only 40-page or so excerpt I read, the biggest problem with housing is that one needs, quite often, first and last months' rent, plus security deposit: quite impossible a sum to amass. Even if it's just first plus security or whatever, still extremely difficult.
Whether Ehrenreich was stubborn on some front regarding a roommate seems trifling: even were she not, it's difficult to see how cooperation there would help for bootstrapping herself out of the general situation.
One of the most striking things to me in the excerpt I read was just that, about the housing: a striking number of the people she worked with in various hotel diner jobs, or cleaning jobs, were essentially homeless in one way or another, with no permanent address.
Can you vote if you have no permanent address? Are these people (the ones who wait on you in a diner, etc.) essentially disenfranchised voters? We haven't talked about the underclass in a while.
220: Hi Calvin. I agree, people should probably pay more than $30 an hour.
Can you vote if you have no permanent address?
Yep. But...
Are these people (the ones who wait on you in a diner, etc.) essentially disenfranchised voters?
Yep.
218: I had the same thoughts about Nickle & Dimed, w/r/t roommates or lack thereof. I know plenty of people who breeze into MPLS with nothing but a backpack and have a place to live set up within a few days. The catch is that they're part of a social network that supports that kind of thing. The conditions Ehrenreich set for herself (IIRC: recently divorced single mom of adult kids who had exhausted welfare benefits and had been out of the workforce for some time) make it fairly likely that she would not be able to plug into social networks like that. Unless you do have relatives who can take you in (which would kinda obviate the point of the whole exercise, and which, in any case, is not true for lots of people from many different backgrounds), you're basically looking at nightly shelters, your car, hobo jungles, or if you are very, very lucky, some kind of transitional program that offers real housing while you look for work/amass enough money to pay first+last+deposit.
The other facet to this is of course that there are hardly any SROs left. Certainly not many that anyone who had another option would want to live in, which just drags them down further. So you're stuck with weekly-rate motels, one of the more parasitic institutions in our society.
221. The Beatles got a good song out of that.
221: before sleeping on her floor they have sex on her bed.
221: I was assuming she'd only have sex with one person in the band and the rest would have to sleep on the floor. I didn't know how attractive the rest of the band is relative to Stanley and I didn't want to assume.
Methinks Lynyrd Skynyrd also had a song about groupies, although not crashing at the groupies pad, cuz a hotel is mentioned. Hell, half of rock and roll is songs about groupies.
It's not like working toward a Ph.D.
I'm still struggling to find the relationship between this and a future payoff.
Yes, yes, lowest-hanging fruit ever.
223: That is probably highly regional. I realize that a self-employed cleaner would be in a worse situation because of health insurance, but $30 for 40 hours a week, that puts you quite a bit above the median household income in neighborhood and my neighborhood is much higher than the average for the city. Even if take home after health insurance, expenses and dead time was 1/3rd of that (which seems generous), you'd still be able to find a nice house where you could make the mortgage payment and have over a thousand a month left over. Which is my long winded way of saying, somebody would underbid a cleaner who tried to get $30/hour by so much that Ehrenreich herself might decide to go a bit closer to market rates.
Indeed it is. I'm tired of talking about the upper middle class and its wants and needs.
232: How about we mock the clothing and hairstyles of the lower middle class? Or is that cruel.
231: Which part about not working 40 hours a week did you miss?
235: In 231, I mention "dead time" which was meant to figure time for which you didn't get paid.
Even if take home after health insurance, expenses and dead time was 1/3rd of that (which seems generous), you'd still be able to find a nice house where you could make the mortgage payment and have over a thousand a month left over.
On 1/3 of $30/hr? Do you know anyone who makes $10/hr, buys their own health insurance, lives in a nice house and has a lot of money "left over" every month? Anyone I know who's near $10/hr is struggling to scrape by.
Even if take home after health insurance, expenses and dead time was 1/3rd of that (which seems generous), you'd still be able to find a nice house where you could make the mortgage payment and have over a thousand a month left over.
OK. So after health insurance, expenses, and dead time, you have $10/hour? Before taxes? And you're going to be able to make a mortgage payment on a nice house and have over a thousand left over? This seems highly doubtful to me.
In any event, dude, dead time already accounts for half of the $30/hour. That's travel and set-up time, time for going to the store to replenish supplies.
237: The $10/hour was take-home pay after health insurance. That would be about $1,700 a month, which would let you buy a $120k house with a thousand left for after that. Yes, I know people who do that. They certainly don't have much leeway for trouble or luxury, but they are certainly not far below average.
The weak point would be that in most places the self-employed can hardly get health insurance for any money.
222, 225: You're right that it can be more difficult than just finding a place with a room to rent on Craigslist or the local bulletin board, but my recollection is that she turned down or avoided a couple of possible situations, and was pretty down about the co-worker who moved in with her boyfriend to save money. I really got the impression that "living by myself, even if it means crappy & expensive quarters" was a priority for her, which I found very weird.
Jesus Christ Pittsburgh is cheap.
I really got the impression that "living by myself, even if it means crappy & expensive quarters" was a priority for her, which I found very weird.
Maybe she thought have to keep up the lie with a roommate would have been too much.
The book had value, but the situation she put herself in was pretty artificial.
227: how do you know that, nosflow? Were you watching through a window?
My understanding is that John Lennon deliberately kept this ambiguous, because he was married at the time.
239: My health insurance is nearly $500/month. The only conceivable way your calculus works is to edit out the health insurance altogether, which of course many people do (and assume no other significant expenses, like children or student loan repayments). You're being quite glib here, even aside from the health insurance angle, and I'm not sure why.
Is there some stake in claiming that housecleaners charging $30/hour are more than well enough compensated?
227: And it's pretty clear that he goes off to sleep alone and not on the floor -- "crawled off to sleep in the bath."
239: That would be about $1,700 a month, which would let you buy a $120k house with a thousand left for after that.
Also plus! Is this person not buying food? Paying utilities and fuel costs? Property insurance? Vehicle, perhaps, what with to tote about the mops?
I say this person should be charging $40/hour at least for housecleaning, in any case. Let him or her actually breathe for a change.
I don't know why you think people should be choked like this.
Data point: count me into the great California domestic employer class. Our every-other-week housekeeper has worked for my in-laws several days a week for many years and, FWIW, was a guest at our wedding, too.
Ehrenreich herself would find Goneril's 77 insufficient. From Nickled and Dimed:
But I will say this for myself: I have never employed a cleaning person or service (except, on two occasions, to prepare my house for a short-term tenant) even though various partners and husbands have badgered me over the years to do so. When I could have used one, when the kids were little, I couldn't afford it; and later, when I could afford it, I still found the idea repugnant. Partly this comes from having a mother who believed that a self-cleaned house was the hallmark of womanly virtue. Partly it's because my own normal work is sedentary, so that the housework I do - in dabs of fifteen minutes here and thirty minutes there - functions as a break. But I rejected the idea, even after all my upper-middle-class friends had, guiltily and as covertly as possible, hired help for themselves, because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.
The paragraph after that begins with "Let's talk about shit, for example;" the one after that hypothesizes that the pubic regions of the upper-middle-class must be entirely bald based on the number of pubes she has removed from bathrooms.
I think that combines a utopian gesture and a naive fantasy of autonomy. The utopian gesture, which I think Ehrenreich has made explicit somewhere I can't find, is that we could have a society where we all were more responsible for cleaning up our own shit, and we all had more time to pursue our actual interests.
The fantasy of autonomy, of course, is that in order to have that society, wages would have to be high enough, labor tight enough, and income equal enough to discourage housekeeping as a profession. We would need a social upheaval (which Ehrenreich knows full well; N&D closes with a plea for it) and in the meantime the gesture is just a gesture. No one will clean your shit, but someone will mine your coal and pluck your tungsten. And shit has been with us longer than internal combustion or iPads -- while shit work has always been low, something still strikes me as historically contingent about the ne plus ultra of undesirability she ascribes to it here. Someone will still get paid to change diapers in the hospital or muck out the sewage system.
While searching for a cut-n-pastable version of that quote, I found the book Marriage and Violence, which empathizes with Heebie's original post: "The morality invested in cleaning one's own house is thus a complicated one."
My health insurance is nearly $500/month.
Mine is more than that if you count the employer contribution. Quite a bit more since I have three people on it. You'd certainly need government help to get the health insurance. In PA, you'd be able to get on a government plan or you might not be able to afford it on $70/hour if some of the complaints I've heard are representative.
Is there some stake in claiming that housecleaners charging $30/hour are more than well enough compensated?
No. I don't have and have never had a house cleaner, nor have I worked as one.
I'm not being glib. I'm pointing out that in most places the majority of people support themselves on less. It isn't good, but there are states, many of them, where the GDP per capita is below $40k, which would be before taxes. What you apparently consider nearly unbearable is also just a bit below par.
We would need a social upheaval (which Ehrenreich knows full well; N&D closes with a plea for it)
Clearly I need to read the entire book.
That said, I admit to a strong discomfort with the 'Clean my shit for me; I am unable to do it' that hangs about this issue. I'll think about this. Thanks, k-sky.
Of">http://www.bls.gov/oes/">Of the 15 largest occupations, only 3--general and operations managers, registered nurses, and elementary school teachers--had mean wages above the U.S. average of $20.90 per hour or $43,460 annually.
248.last: I know that, and I'm among them (just so we're clear).
My suggestion is that we not compensate any housecleaners we might employ just at some bare minimum to get by, and consider that we're being fair thereby.
And then the windmills. We'll get them with the lance.
Well, there is something one can do, without succumbing to the pundits: for the day when the Congress rolls up to our doorsteps and asks for our legislative initiatives, maybe it is up to every citizen to know what is in his heart and have his true bills and resolutions ready. Call it "political surrealism"--the practice of asking for what is at present impossible, in order to get at last, by indirection or implausible directness, the principles that would underlie the world we'd want rather than the one we have.
--Mark Greif in n+1. Don't tell neb.
Comity. I don't understand about the lance, but that's fine if it's important.
Count me as a vote for social upheaval. Y'all.
255: You are, unless I'm very much mistaken, in the book business?
257: Oh right. Sorry. I didn't have that particular hat on; this has been my social justice hat, which is a very serious hat indeed.
Patience...
Two weird indie "cubicle" black comedies, the first I watched last night
Visioneers with Zack Galifianakis. Exploding office workers. Given huge teddy bears to relieve tension. Meh, but Judy Greer. I can't explain.
He Was a Quiet Man ...with Slater and Cuthbert. About a postal. Got a 7.0 at IMDB, but I was bothered by the sick geek fantasy aspects.
Anyway, does anybody here work in cubicles in a huge open office, staring at one or screens all day? I know it pays a lot better than cleaning shit, but I have worked on fast assembly lines, and worked in cubicles. Cubicles paid better, but the stress and bullshit. Lie Lie all day long.
I guess my point is, maybe all we white and pink collar workers, like Ehrenreich, are just a little too repulsed by shit work, liberally empathetic to blue collar labor and somewhat callous about the brain deadening service and IT and managerial jobs that we feel are "normal." Cubicle is hell.
255: Tilting at windmills requires a lance.
Anyway, comity, and now that I see Bob here it is possible I was being extra pessimistic because nobody else was.
Speaking of movies, I just saw "Land of the Lost" with Will Ferrell. I got it at the machine by the grocery store of a buck and paid too much.
Mr. Blandings, will you please remind me about that wine you recommended some time ago? I ordered some, it hasn't arrived, and I can't seem to find any evidence of my order.
Produttori del Barbaresco 2006 Barbaresco. Judging from your comment in that thread, you ordered it here.
252: But that argument really depends pretty heavily on what you mean by "bare minimum to get by." When Rory was born, UNG was making just a little over $10/hour and I wasn't working. We were pretty damn comfortable. (Though, having acclimated ourselves up a few income levels, going back to that income would be harder now.) If $30/hour is unfair, then is it better should I decide that I can't afford or don't value a clean house enough to pay that much and then just don't hire the housekeeper at all? If $30/hour is fair, then how do you decide how many hours it should take to do a proper job? What's so horrible about not having enough time to do it yourself?
262, 263: Why do I bother with a filing cabinet when I could just mention shit here?
264: We both called "comity." No fair going on.
267 to 263. But I think you're awesome too, Moby.
I type slow on the blackberry -- you hadn't called comity when I started to weigh in... Also, *I* never called comity!
266: Wait, so if two people agree, we're done? If we can't argue about cleaners' wages, I'm definitely ready to argue about this. Anyway, I'm totally behind the social justice angle, but many of those who employ cleaning people do in fact face budget constraints. While it's probably better not to employ a cleaner than to hire someone who will do it for <$10, several hours at $30 per has got to beat no hours at $40.
Speaking of wine: if I make zabaglione with something other than Marsala, with the food police break down my doors?
If we were just willing to use our dominant military power for old-fashioned imperial benefit, rather than piddling it away on silly "nation-building" exercises, we could probably just allot everyone (citizens) a $50k annual stipend, and be done with it. Then we wouldn't have to worry about whether we were exploiting anyone we hired at $40 or $30 or $20 or $10.
It's not like we're not already exploiting third-world peasants anyway; we might as well be up front about it, and get some real benefits.
I would not recommend making zabaglione with the food police.
Seriously, though, what were you considering as a substitute?
It's not like we're not already exploiting third-world peasants anyway; we might as well be up front about it, and get some real benefits.
Why wait for society to get behind your plan? Just to go Home Depot and mug the guys looking for work outside.
It might constitute fraud if you use non-marsala and then submit a claim on your food police.
It's not like we're not already exploiting third-world peasants anyway; we might as well be up front about it, and get some real benefits.
Tell me about it. I'd like to have been a dissolute 19th century Scot escaped to the Raj who, after a suitable period of oppressing and impregnating the natives, died at 36 of some horrible tropical disease. Thanks to the modern neo-liberal concentration of opportunity, I can do no such thing.
Moby, those guys don't have any money, or they wouldn't be standing around outside Home Depot looking for work.
281: We don't have that here, so I don't really know, but I assumed they'd have pay from earlier jobs. They probably don't have a bank account.
263 I was meaning to ask you, do you know of any wine shop here that carries the Barbaresco?
Just to go Home Depot and mug the guys looking for work outside.
A guy in my high school did this a few times, except he targeted the foreigners standing around in a certain park. He ended up in an emergency room after a rather nasty beating and decided that stealing from his parents would be safer.
Brock is probably a better mugger than that guy. Don't you think he paid attention at law school?
if I make zabaglione with something other than Marsala, with the food police break down my doors?
You should be ok; just don't substitute coconut milk for yogurt in any braised south asian dishes. Someone might call the Korma police, and you don't want to mess with them.
Bud: Fucking trash. Makes you wonder how much they owe. Most of them are on the run. Don't even use their fucking social security numbers. If there was just some way to find out how much the motherfuckers owe and making them pay.
Otto: Jesus Christ, Bud. They're winos, they don't have any money. You think they'd be bums if they did?
283: Chambers Street, Astor, Garnet, and Sherry-Lehmann all have it.
Seriously, though, what were you considering as a substitute?
Something that I have in the liquor cabinet in order to avoid a separate trip to the liquor store. Would bourbon work, do you think?
Would bourbon work, do you think?
Regardless of context, the answer to that question is 'yes.'
Anyway, my point about the Home Depot wasn't to give you a specific money making plan. Local knowledge is probably required. I just wanted to point out that now is the best time in history as far as convenience for exploiting people. You need to think outside the box, but you don't need to travel like back in the day and you aren't going to die from a bug bite (probably).
We are living in a golden age of exploitation and don't let anybody tell you different or they aren't just insulting you. They are insulting the very modern advances that have helped exploitation become so easy. You could say they are telling science to go fuck itself. They may as well be flat earthers and you should go find a peasant to exploit or science will die.
Also, dziękuję, Panie Blandingsie
Bourbon should be fine. Just note that it has more than twice the alcohol of Marsala and none of the sugar, for which you may or may not want to adjust.
Bourbon is too alcoholic and not winey enough. Try some other sweet syrupy strong wine like a cream sherry or port.
Moby, I don't want to go out and exploit anyone myself. That's (1) work, (2) possibly dangerous, and (3) distasteful. I want the government to go out and exploit someone for me. Again, why spend as much money as the rest of the world combined on armed forces, if you aren't even going to use those armed forces for subjugation and national profit? It makes no sense.
261: Land of the Lost actually cracked me up: it's a stoner comedy for children. Definitely worth a dollar.
291 is possibly the greatest quote ever.
292. What is disturbing is how much that guy looks like me.
297: How about we just exploit you since that is probably safer for us?
Thinking about the housekeeper (above)'s 30/hour as a wage is really pretty silly. The clear model is a small business, that bills $30/hour. At least the lawyers amongst us ought to be able to see the fallacy in equating billable hours to income per hrs/per week.
Perhaps nobody here has the information to give a decent estimate of her equivalent pay, but every analysis here I saw seems naive. Where's the accounting for transportation costs (probably a vehicle, so add insurance an running costs), equipment and consumables, transportation time, let alone contract acquisition, dealing with non or late-paying customers, etc. ? Healthcare is important, sure, but it's hardly the start of the whole story.
Just back of the envelope from not-so-similar situations I do know suggests she'd be lucky to see equivalent to a $10/hr job. Subtracting 1/3 as "accounting" for all the rest of costs is inept.
Delurking, you should keep posting if for no other reason than your pseud is entertaining, and violates zero of the LB rules.
302: Comments like this remind me that I hate it when I say something stupid on the internet. (IOW, yeah, really hadn't thought about any of that stuff.)
157
Whatever; I'm more interested in the question of whether one should retain someone as an independent contractor, so that he or she pays his or her own taxes, or not. You seemed to think that control by the employer of the payment of taxes was important; I say it's paternalistic and uncalled for.
By helping people cheat on their taxes you are facilitating criminal activity just as when you buy merchandise you have reason to believe is stolen.
264: Is this a series of rhetorical questions?
If $30/hour is unfair, then is it better should I decide that I can't afford or don't value a clean house enough to pay that much and then just don't hire the housekeeper at all?
Whether that's better or not is a question to be debated between you and your conscience, a personal calculus on these matters: for example, is it really the case that you can't afford $30/hour? Does the difference between $30/hour and $40/hour really bankrupt you, or are you spending that extra $10 on coffee and a bagel every day anyway? Or is there some kind of notion in play that services provided by people one might call "the help" just aren't worth very much? Is that a defensible notion? And it's obviously really up to you how much you value a clean house. Hey, I'd love a clean house provided at a rate of $7.50/hour, and there are quite probably people out there who will do it at that rate, but I'd feel like kind of a jerk paying only that for something that would be worth a lot more than that to me.
If $30/hour is fair, then how do you decide how many hours it should take to do a proper job?
How many hours would it take you to do what you consider to be a proper job? This seems straightforward and answerable.
What's so horrible about not having enough time to do it yourself?
Nothing. If you don't have enough time to do it, you either wind up having a messy/dirty home, or you pay a fair price for the service. Again pretty straightforward.
$30 an hour pro ratas to approximately $60,000 per annum. I should make so much. Are you assuming that it's you're responsibility to make up the difference on the assumption that the cleaner is under-employed, or are you expecting them to buy their own materials, or is it conscience money?
What does "under-employed" mean? As Mr Riefly pointed out, what she bills isn't salary, it's much more like what a lawyer bills. It wouldn't be remotely possible for her to do forty hours of billable cleaning in a forty-hour week, what with travel and having to work around clients' schedules and so on.
Sorry, iPhone dropped my name there.
IME, it's been flat fee. We supply materials. It's a lot easier to get around Bethesda than NYC, and I expect they were usually grossing around $200 per day.
308. In NYC I suppose that's true. In our little city (400k) almost nowhere is more than 20 minutes from anywhere else. If our person wanted to clean full time (she doesn't, she's got another job) I should think she could make 7.5 hours a day easily easily. What's the problem with employers' schedules? She's got a key. If we're in we say hello and chat. Usually we're at work and don't see her for weeks at a time. Nothing to work around.
It wouldn't be remotely possible for her to do forty hours of billable cleaning in a forty-hour week
She could probably average 35 if you don't count commuting. She'd just need a relatively large client base and an ability to deal with fluctuating hours. It'd be easier if she got together with a couple other maids, but it's doable.
280: White Mughals is pretty good, but historical re-enactment is a harsh mistress.
"Harsh Mistress" is a pretty good name for a historical re-enactment.
314: If you're into that sort of thing, sure.
She could probably average 35 if you don't count commuting.
In my (limited) experience with similarly billed services, this isn't remotely close to true. If my experience holds, averaged over a year, you'd be likely closer to 25 hours billable on 40 hours of "work". You're going to lose 1/2 days on short to no notice; you're going to lose clients, and you are going to sometimes have schedules imposed on you that force extra travel.
In a perfect setup you would show up at a large apartment/condo and clean units there all day. That would approximate a salaried job, I expect.
OTOH, If my experience with hiring office cleaners is anything to go on, that setup exerts a strong downward influence on the rates you can charge. I couldn't get my house cleaned for anything less than 5 times the hourly rate we pay office cleaners for the same basic vacuum, tidy, dust and clean the kitchen service. Of course it's not exactly the same thing, but since they contract with most of the fifty or so clients in the tower, they do a pretty efficient sweep through the building every evening with a team of people.
Easy enough to bill 35 hours, so long as you tie up 50+ to do it.... but that isn't the fair comparison.
The clear model is a small business, that bills $30/hour....Where's the accounting for transportation costs (probably a vehicle, so add insurance an running costs), equipment and consumables, transportation time, let alone contract acquisition, dealing with non or late-paying customers, etc. ? Healthcare is important, sure, but it's hardly the start of the whole story.
I disagree; it's the start of the whole story.
These aren't wild variables. I would expect that a housekeeper with a full schedule could clean roughly two houses a day, for a total of five billable hours. Supplies would either be a surplus charge or provided by the employer. Transportation and gas aren't that much worse here than any other job, especially given that the hours are pretty flexible.
Contract acquisition? Uh, word of mouth? Sure you have lean times and busy times, but I don't see how this was excluded from earlier comments.
At 4-5 billable hours/day, someone would make $2500-3000/month. At that point health care is clearly the main variable that non-self-employed people don't have to deal with.
so long as you tie up 50+ to do it.... but that isn't the fair comparison.
Why not? When I was working, I'd routinely put in 50 hour weeks, and I don't think that was that unusual. I'd argue that paying $20/hr and donating the balance to the Sierra Club or whatever is a more efficient assuager of the social conscience, but pay your maid anything you like. The only people you are hurting are those just barely rich enough to afford maids, and they'll get by somehow.
I actually know several people who clean houses for at least a partial living. Unfortunately I don't see them as regularly as I might. I will quiz them though, next time I see them, and get back to you all.
Uh, word of mouth?
Matters a lot. Our cleaner was working for a service (a local, non-brand name one), basically this one guy and his phone, who of course took a substantial cut of what we paid. This is what you'd expect and at the beginning it was the price we were paying for a reliable/insured service and also the price the cleaner was paying for getting work. Then we caught the fucker engaging in wage theft, arranging for the cleaner to come near Thanksgiving, having us pay, but then turning around and telling her that he didn't pay for work done on holidays. So after some strategizing with the cleaner we arranged to end the service at a date convenient to her, making up a plausible excuse about our schedule changing, and then re-hired her directly. She's now self-employed and we get calls pretty regularly from people looking for references.
So, boo wage theft (amazingly common) and boo middlemen, I guess.
Why not? When I was working, I'd routinely put in 50 hour weeks
Because we're comparing to hourly wage jobs at 40hr/week. So nothing wrong with comparing to a 60hr/week, say, but then you are comparing with a full time hourly wage job, plus a half time hourly wage job. Which is fairly common of course, near the low end of wages.
320 is common, it seems.
Why not? When I was working, I'd routinely put in 50 hour weeks
Because we're comparing to hourly wage jobs at 40hr/week. So nothing wrong with comparing to a 60hr/week, say, but then you are comparing with a full time hourly wage job, plus a half time hourly wage job. Which is fairly common of course, near the low end of wages.
320 is common, it seems.
You're going to lose 1/2 days on short to no notice; you're going to lose clients, and you are going to sometimes have schedules imposed on you that force extra travel.
This bears repeating. It amazes me how comfortable people feel canceling at the last minute -- anything! Dentist appointments, music lessons, housecleaners, you name it. My dentist actually instituted a $60 fee because it was getting so common.
I grew up in a context where time commitments were strictly honored, almost to an extreme, so if I were extrapolating from that to think what the housecleaners my parents employed could expect, I would imagine that 51 weeks a year would be predictable for them.
But having seen firsthand what many people feel comfortable doing -- or don't even notice they're doing -- with regard to last-minute changes in schedule, I would say that Mr./Ms. Riefly is if anything understating the problem.
It's not that different from other low-wage jobs -- a lot of hotel housekeeping positions require you to work a "flexible" schedule, meaning you're ready any time they call you but could end up working 8-50 hours per week depending on how busy the hotel is. But it's still crappy and hard to predict cash flow.
Sure, many employers are exploitative, and hijacking someone's life to have them on-demand for erratic hours is certainly pretty bad. But Riefly's comment was refuting whether it's reasonable to pay someone $30/hour - what others were defining as what it would take for one of us to be a responsible employer. Presumably that includes being courteous about their schedule.
But Riefly's comment was refuting whether it's reasonable to pay someone $30/hour
That wasn't actually my intent at all. I was refuting the method of converting that to an equivalent wage/salary for purposes of deciding if it was reasonable.
I'm not sure I can touch the issue of what's reasonable . I suspect (but don't know) that $30/hr billed is on the high end of what people typically get. I'm certain that a typical cleaner billing X/hr has a take home pay nowhere near what a X/hr hourly wage job would net.
But Riefly's comment was refuting whether it's reasonable to pay someone $30/hour
That wasn't actually my intent at all. I was refuting the method of converting that to an equivalent wage/salary for purposes of deciding if it was reasonable.
I'm not sure I can touch the issue of what's reasonable . I suspect (but don't know) that $30/hr billed is on the high end of what people typically get. I'm certain that a typical cleaner billing X/hr has a take home pay nowhere near what a X/hr hourly wage job would net.
Sorry for the double posts, not sure what's happening.
I'm certain that a typical cleaner billing X/hr has a take home pay nowhere near what a X/hr hourly wage job would net.
Comity!
Hence a certain willingness on the part of independent contractor cleaning folk to be paid cash.
Our parents, middle-class in the 1930's, living in London England, had a live-in maid.
Nothing surprising about that - except the maid came from Switzerland.
Seems hard to believe it not - but in those days the remoter parts of Switzerland were dirt poor.
I don't understand this 'schedule thing', will somebody please explain. You hire somebody to clean for, say, three hours on, say, Thursdays. So they turn up on Thursdays and clean for three hours. If they aren't going to make it, they call and say so; if there's no point in them coming because you've got a plumber taking the house to bits you call and say so. If they're taking the time off, you pay them 'holiday pay' (whatever you'd have paid them anyway) unless you're a total shithead. If you're asking them not to come you pay them anyway because it's you that's breaking the contract.
Where is the issue?
I expect the issue is that the rich and upper middle classes tend to be the sorts of skinflint bastards who don't pay when they cancel [breaking the contract, as you say], and who certainly don't pay holiday pay.
Even in the past when I used to do the odd bit of freelance teaching, and/or IT work I used to sometimes struggle with this -- getting people to pay up when they cancelled at the last minute.
332. Which goes back to the question I was trying to raise before: if you're negotiating a contract as the hiring party, is in incumbent on you as a responsible employer to offer a rate based on the assumption that others will be irresponsible employers? If so, then the irresponsible employers are not just ripping off the employee, they're ripping off other employers as well.
I don't know the answer to that, but if so I feel I ought to have some sort of sanction against the skinflint bastards.
re: 333
Yeah, I wouldn't personally see it as my duty to compensate for others being bastards. I'd just pay whatever was fair, and behave like a decent person while I was at it.
Some of the scheduling thing isn't just about people being jerks. At least some people care when the cleaning person shows up -- they don't want to be there, or they do, or whatever. So if you've got a client who wants you there at 10:30 am, who takes about two hours, and one that wants you there at 2:00, the space inbetween is going to be hard to fill with paying work, even if we're not bothered about travel time. And people (like, say, us) might hire a cleaner a couple of times, but then decide against it long term, people move, people find another cleaner -- if your pay depends on fifteen/twenty different clients (which is about what you'd need to put together a forty hour week, right?) on any given week, I'd guess at least two or three of them are going to be disrupted somehow.
At least some people care when the cleaning person shows up -- they don't want to be there, or they do, or whatever.
For me this counts as being a jerk. At the low end of jerkitude, sure, but still.
Well, okay, but we're talking about how to calculate the cleaner's takehome. And it's one thing to say that it's not your problem that other people are jerks, but if you're trying to figure out what a cleaner actually makes from a given hourly fee, then you mostly need to do the math on the basis of something approximating their actual work patterns.
Yes, but you're implying minimal agency on the part of the cleaner. If I want to hire a plumber, the plumber tells me when they'll be able to come and I can take it or leave it. If I'm lucky I'll get to choose between two or three slots. Why shouldn't a cleaner be able to plan their work to the same extent? Sometimes it'll mean they don't get the job; sometimes I have to call a different plumber. But life's a bitch and then you die: if you need your shower fixing or your house cleaning and you can't/won't do it yourself, you have to accommodate somebody else or you don't get it done.
Because you often need a plumber for an unplanned one-time visit in an emergency, and even non-emergency visits are still one-off or limited-time projects, not an ongoing relationship. He gets paid vastly more per hour, partially because he's got rarer skills, but also partly because he really can't schedule his time.
In a tight market, where cleaners are hard to find, they'll be able to schedule more tightly and refuse unreasonable clients. But given that it's a pretty low-barriers-to-entry profession, that's rarely going to be true.
I'm coming to the conclusion that there's a real difference between Britain and the US (at least NYC) in how much control over their work schedule a contractor can expect. This makes no sense to me:
but also partly because he really can't schedule his time.
I accept that cleaners face a different market, but good cleaners, who you'd want to hire for an extensive period of time are probably as rare as good plumbers, so unless you're surprisingly indifferent as to who's running loose in your house, I think you can overstate this.
331
... If they're taking the time off, you pay them 'holiday pay' (whatever you'd have paid them anyway) unless you're a total shithead. ...
It would never even occur to me that I should pay a cleaner who didn't show up. And I doubt I am alone.
In general the people making the point that billing $x an hour is not at all the same as a full time job paying $x an hour are correct. Among other things the assumption that the only problem in billing 40 hours a week is scheduling is optimistic. If in the local market there are 100 cleaners chasing 2000 hours of cleaning work a week obviously they will only bill 20 hours a week on average.
331. Yeah well, we know the American right think vacations are immoral. Autres pays, autre moeurs.
340
... If he wants to do something not work related at the time which would be most convenient to you, you're shit out of luck and he's at the zoo with his kids.
Actually I would probably call a different plumber. And if I liked the work they did I would call them first in the future.
Your BIL can choose when not to work, but he can't choose when to work -- if no one calls for a particular morning, he's not working then. If demand is high enough, the occasional unplanned morning off is no problem, but he can't fill his schedule if the demand isn't there.
So even for a plumber, his takehome isn't going to be his rate times the number of hours he can work.
With no offense to Chris Y's brother, who I'm sure is great, I am strongly opposed to importing the British way of plumbing to the United States.
Also, I do give my housekeeper vacation pay, but she's worked for me for a while and her family has worked with my family for 20+ years.
My own housekeeper works (intentionally) part time, takes public transit, and lives with some other wage earners. I haven't talked to her about it for a while, but the last time we talked about it she said she cleared about 25k/yr for roughly 3.5 days/wk of work.
I didn't know that independent hourly contractors could be paid at times when they didn't show up, except of course when the person who hired them had cancelled.
What percent of your income could you expect to come from not doing any work, in that situation?
So even for a plumber, his takehome isn't going to be his rate times the number of hours he can work.
True, but the main reason plumbers charge so much over the apparent cost of the job is because they have to allow for the invisibles, like when they take on what looks like a three hour job and then drill into a wall and find a mess of pre-war lead plumbing.
All of the lead plumbing in my house was installed in 2004, so it should be O.K.
re: 347
Chris will be talking about people with whom one has a regular arrangement, like the person who cleans you house every week, when, it seems to me, it's not unreasonable to pay them holiday time.
348: True, but the main reason plumbers charge so much over the apparent cost of the job is because they have to allow for the invisibles, like when they take on what looks like a three hour job and then drill into a wall and find a mess of pre-war lead plumbing.
This confuses me very much. If a plumber comes in, looks at everything, and gives an estimate of 3 hours, but it turns out to be an 8 hour job, I'll be expecting to pay for 8 hours of his or her time. That why the 3 hours was an estimate. It seems to me that the main reasons that plumbers can charge so much (at least here in the US) are: 1. The plumbers union keeps the number of plumbers in line with aggregate demand. 2. There are dead times during the year where plumbers are working less, so $135/hr does not actually equal a $270,000 salary (plus all the licensing, bonding, continuing education, tools, travel time, 24/7 on-call, etc.) and finally 3. If you try to do plumbing yourself and screw it up, you're probably going to have to call a real plumber to un-fuck it anyway. (Likewise, if you did it yourself and the inspector didn't like it.)
It's interesting to me that this entire discussion seems to be premised on the assumption that the house cleaner is a self employed independent contractor. Back when we had someone to clean our house, it was through a service. We paid the company, not the cleaing lady directly (though we did directly pay her a decent cash tip). I would never have considered offering her/them (it alternated) holiday pay any more than my dad, who has a solo law practice, expects his clients to give him holiday pay.
352. Agreed. If you're using a service none of the above, on any side, applies. but my (indirect, through my parents in their last years) experience of services though is that they're generally crap, whereas a good freelance, though hard to find, is actually worth the money they earn.
re: 352
If you are paying an agency to provide you with a cleaner, then that person is employed by the agency, and you pay the agency for the service. In that case it's the responsibility of the agency to provide vacation pay. The employee of an agency isn't in a parallel situation to your dad.
There are a couple of different situations under discussion here. The individual hired directly by you: not unreasonable, I think, in that situation to expect you to provide some sort of pro rata holiday pay (although I imagine a lot of people don't). The individual employed by a cleaning agency is a different situation.
Yeah, sloppy writing. My intention was to set up my dad's solo practice as akin to independent contract cleaners. Basically, until the relationship crosses the threshhold to employer/employee, holiday pay doesn't strike me as at all obligatory.
355: Yeah. I'm not sure where I think the crossover point is -- a full-time nanny obviously should get paid vacation, and I think I'd feel the same about someone doing household work half-time or close to it. But someone who works a couple of hours a week for you, while I could see possibly paying for a couple of holiday weeks if they were reliable and it was a long relationship, holiday pay seems generally superogatory.
I missed most of this conversation but let me add to the people saying that people always underestimate the amount of dead time that contractors have.
I've had a couple of friends go into business for themselves and I've told every one of them that, whatever they're charging when they start out, they will find themselves raising their rates after they've been doing it for a year -- just because they will learn how much unpaid time they have.
I've done a moderate amount of contract work and my experience would match the idea that if you can average 25 billable hours in a week than you're definitely doing better than average.
I have a friend who does a lot of contracting [in a technical area] who always says that if you aren't embarrassed about how much you are charging, then you aren't charging enough.
Probably good advice, though it would just confirm that I didn't/don't charge enough.
Is there a place where cleaning people are unionized? That wouldn't seem unreasonable, outside of the punny headlines ("Cleaning People Organize, and Not Just Your Cofee-Table Magazines").
Is there a place where cleaning people are unionized?
Hospitals? Nowhere else I can think of. Large scale contract cleaning firms, not the agencies who do your house, hire desperate people on minimum wage, by and large.
I envy the plumbers in the twin cities. The British plumbers union, or any other union, doesn't give a shit about you unless you work for a firm that's big enough to collectively bargain with. Also, pre-entry closed shops, such as would restrict the number of registered plumbers, are illegal now in Britain (exc. Equity) as far as I know.
When I was a cleaner, I was in a union. TGWU, as was, in my case, although I imagine these days a lot would be in Unison. However, that was in the UK.
I've been a cleaner twice.* In both cases I worked for what had formerly been a public sector cleaning department that had been privatized, but which still worked for the public sector. In both cases the workforce was unionized, which was, I assume, a condition that had been agreed when the private sector had become involved.
* mental hospital [where my duties were somewhat broader than just cleaning and I was referred to as a 'Domestic']; and schools.
In case this helps with your analysis: the woman who cleans my house for $30/hour owns her own business. She does almost all the work herself but sometimes her mother helps her with certain clients. She brings in ALL her own supplies (cleaning solutions, vacuum, towels, etc.).
I live in Salt Lake City. SLC itself is pretty densely populated but once you get outside of the city the population density drops dramatically. SLC has a population of about 200,000. All of Utah has a population of 2.8 million. At least some of her clients live one hour away from me and she doesn't live in SLC, so there is probably a fair amount of driving involved.
Also, part of my calculation was paying extra for someone that I could trust 100%. I wouldn't want to use a service with a rotating group of new people touching my stuff every week. This woman is very concerned with doing things right and she's completely reliable. It's worth every penny to come home to a clean house. I can't imagine having to worry about considering what the cleaning person did "this time."
As I said above, my parents provided paid vacation to our 9 hr/wk maid in Geneva. And what's this about maids bringing their own supplies? I've never heard of that, though that might be in part because it would be somewhat of a pain on a rush hour bus - maids in Geneva did not drive to work.
maids in Geneva did not drive to work
Maids with their own chauffeurs?! Those are some pretty kept freakin' maids.
366: I was surprised when she said she brings her own supplies too. She even brings her own vacuum because she said it's better on hardwood floors than mine. Works for me!
Here's a fun twist: neighbors of mine had a housecleaner who turned out to have OCD. They hired her for a couple of hours a week, but if she had no other clients to get to, which seemed to be the case most of the time, she would just stay and clean, clean, clean for a couple more hours. They weren't sure what to do about it, but the situation was apparently resolved somehow, since she doesn't come around anymore.
She even brings her own vacuum because she said it's better on hardwood floors than mine. Works for me!
I had somebody come in to stretch one of the carpets to fill a gap, and brought his own vacuum. When I offered mine he said that he preferred to use his own just in case he sucked up a nail with it he didn't have to worry about whether he'd damaged the client's vacuum. That sounded like the voice of experience to me.
So this is interesting:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/02/mongolia-far-right