I'd imagine that 99.99% of the subscribers to LBO-talk have neither hired a cleaning service (provided by an independent contractor or a corporation) in the past nor will do so in the future, so discussion of whether to hire individual cleaners or cleaning companies ends up "theoretical" in a pejorative sense of the word.
That said, Mary Romero's _Maid in the U.S.A._ (NY: Routledge, 1992) offers the following conclusion:
***** Faced with limited job opportunities, Chicanas turn to domestic service and restructure the occupation to resemble a businesslike arrangement. Similarly to the union members in [Soraya Moore] Coley's study ["'And Still I Rise':An Exploratory Study of Contemporary Black Private Household Workers," Ph.D. Diss, Bryn Mawr College, 1981], the Chicana household workers I interviewed define themselves as professional cleaners hired to do general housework. They urge their employers to turn over the planning along with the execution of the work. They consider themselves skilled laborers who are well able to schedule tasks, determine cleaning techniques, select the appropriate work materials, and set the work pace. Verbal agreements specifying tasks minimize supervision and increase the degree of autonomy. Eliminating the employer from a supervisory role also removes the worker from a subordinate position. Like the household worker's collective that [Leslie] Salzinger studied in the Bay area [in "A Maid by Any Other Name: The Transformation of 'Dirty Work' by Central American Immigrants," _Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis_, ed. Michael Buraway, et al., Berkeley: U of CA P, 1991], Chicanas are "redefining domestic work as skilled labor, and on that basis struggling for increased pay and security and for autonomy and control over their work," and "they are in fact engaged in what in other contexts has been called a 'professionalization project.'" Domestics' ability to select and change employers is the critical locus of autonomy and control in what would otherwise be a powerless, subservient position. Working for a different employer -- and in many cases two to three employers -- places Chicanas in a strong negotiating position.
Like other full-time domestics, Chicanas employed as day workers in private households are moving away from "wage work" and from selling their "labor time" toward a "flat rate" in which a "job" is exchanged for a specified amount of money. In this situation, any efficiency realized by the worker saves her time and can sometimes be converted into profit that will accrue to her. Chicanas are attempting to transform domestic work in the direction of the petit-bourgeois relation of customer-vendor rather than the preindustrial relation of mistress-servant or even the wage worker-employer relation of capitalism. This arrangement is most successful with employed housewives who readily accept the skills of domestics. The strategy to transform domestic service by selling labor services rather than labor power is also useful in eliminating potentially exploitative aspects of the domestic-mistress relationship. Strategies described by Chicanas in the study are consistent with the emergence of cleaning agencies that advertise expert and skilled labor.
Although there is a long history of attempts to organize maid's unions, most private household workers are isolated from each other and struggle for better working conditions on an individual basis. Nevertheless, the goals of individual struggle have similarities with issues of collective action: raising wages, providing benefits such as paid vacations, holidays, sick leave, and workers' unemployment compensation; changing attitudes toward the occupation; and creating public awareness about the value of labor. (pp. 160-161) *****
Professionalization on the petit-bourgeois model of vendors selling services [products rather than labor power] to customers, in the face of the emergence of cleaning agencies, may or may not succeed, but it is understandable that at least those who currently work as independent domestics (and who are married to employed men, thus in double-income households), like the Chicana domestics whom Romero interviewed, may prefer this model. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>