:-)
Ok, so basically you're saying you have no basis for making this statement (shrouded as a question, but still):
>> If you were going to spend the money to have someone
>> clean your house, wouldn't you want to make sure that
>> person, rather than a corporation, got as much of your
>> money as you could afford --with all due qualifications
>> on the word "afford" -- to pay them?
because you also say you don't know what you'd look for in hiring a cleaning service or an individual cleaner. Right? Ok, forget "cleaning service" and "individual cleaner" and substitute "fairly low wage manual labor task" and continue through.
You're saying that one should try to find the supplier with as low of an overhead (difference between what you pay and what they get) as you can find; the "best" in this calculus would be a sole-proprietor, who gets 100% of your cash (instead of "a corporation"). Maybe that's what you'd do (and who knows, since you've never done it?). But for me, I'd often rather deal with a service than an individual for lower-skilled labor tasks, since I think there's a lot more to it than just the labor itself. Wojtek wants to know what those things are, so I'll start by saying that I want to have it be easy to find someone responsible (advertising, business license, "office expense"), potentially insure and bond the workers, hopefully treat them well enough that they don't feel compelled to abuse the trust of being in someone else's house.
[ An example that came to me a few years ago was "roofer" -- I had my roof replaced, and I hired a service to get it done. The crew that worked on it worked hard and long hours, but I'm really glad I had "a corporation" sell me the roof. http://infothecary.org/jordan/pix/roof/2001071705.jpg ]
If you don't think your house cleaner makes enough of the spread, you could start by paying them extra in the form of a tip like you do for waitpeople and hairdressers -- and then maybe negotiate with your service provider, if you don't think you want to pay their overhead. And of course you have a choice of providers. It's not like if you ask someone who is working for you what they are getting of the gross cost they won't tell you.
(Here's a CraigsList posting looking to pay $13 or 14/hr with no benefits for part-time cleaning work in San Francisco:
http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/etc/14771581.html
YMMV ...)
> and as for airline pilots and flight attendants, isn't that
> kind of a silly response? sure, of course you WANT extend
> that to your flight attendant ...
Not me. I'd rather buy a ticket from an airline that provides all the service of getting from A to B without me having to worry about whether me asking for another bag of peanuts is going to make someone in a uniform (who is on his way in a few hours to a weekend off at some foreign beach getting there for free) throw a fit.
And yes, I believe there's something bigger than the sum of the labor input to my flight; *gasp* I think it might even involve capital, which as Doug will tell you, could never be productive, though it seems to do a pretty good job of keeping my butt in seat 22D for the 2500 mile flight to JFK.
/jordan
