> The problem is not with what the yuppie pays, but with what the service
> worker gets. The yuppie may pay around $20/hr (not a bad wage), but the
> worker who delivers the service will get $6.75/hr.
This is also IMHO the main problem with Ehrenreich's argument: it's unrepresentative. In her original article in Harper's she stated that 1 in 7 cleaning personnel in America worked for such services. For the other 6 out of 7, the service worker gets all of the $20, including often the part that would normally have been deducted for taxes. And if by young urban professionals we mean people who live in cities, the ratio would even higher; in cities domestic cleaning services have a vanishingly small part of the market.
This also alters many other things. The thing that Ehrenreich hated most about her experience was the close supervision. That's something I deeply sympathize with. I can't even type when someone stands behind me to watch. But the vast majority of people I know give their cleaning person keys to their house and leave the money on the table since they won't be there when it happens. In no job do you have a less closely supervised environment than that.
Lastly there's the autonomy to take care of child care emergencies. There are downsides to this job like every one, but flextime is not not one of them. My housekeeper has often called the same day to cancel. It's fine with me, and why shouldn't it be? It's a once every two week thing. But it's an option most working women don't have. She's used this as a job to raise her daughter for 18 years. (19 years ago she arrived from Brazil 8 months pregnant, and a year later she still had the daughter but no longer the husband.) She says she's was always able to arrange her hours to be home when she should, like to take her to school and pick her up when she was young. And when her daughter suddenly gets sick, or when Norma wants to see her perform in the school play, she has less trouble dealing with it than most of her employers.
BTW, most people here in New York pay more than 20 bucks an hour for housekeeping, just like we pay more for everything else. My housekeeper makes as much an hour as I do as a wordprocessor, and she's worth every bit of it, because she literally accomplishes more in 2 hours than I'd accomplish in 2 days and is happier doing it. She likes making things neat. I feel that way when it comes to formatting documents. We've both got our niche.
IMHO, the solution to Ehrenreich's problem with housekeepers is simple: don't use a service (which the overwhelming majority of people already don't) and pay a decent wage (which most people I know do because the market doesn't bear less.) I fail to see how that makes the universe a worse place.
I thought E's piece on waitressing was a piece of genius, though.
Michael