They charged $25/hr to the consumer b/c they provided _four_ maids and their own equipment for each hour. Remember, if you'd read the book, you had to wonder why four women are riding around in a car together. At least they got paid for their 15, 20, 30 minutes traveling between jobs, which our independent contractor doesn't get paid for.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/2001/oes_8280.htm#b37-0000
For the greater Tampa area, an employed maid (on the books) earns 7.51/hr median hourly wage. My boss, two co-workers, the apt complex manager where i used to live, two of my new neighbors, and one of my son's friend's pay $5/hr. My boss pays $8/ for heavy duty cleaning. Actually, a lot of folks charge by the job, but the $8 bucks is what it averages out to be after I spoke with her about how much time things take.
When I was moving, the apt complex told me that I could hire the maid that cleans the offices and does the clean up work for move outs. She earns $10/hr for ordinary cleaning, $13/hr for heavy duty work: scrubbing ovens, using chemicals, moving appliances.
When I talked with her, she told me that most people who work for individuals earn less than minimum wage since most of them are illegal immigrants or are otherwise in trouble with the law/or want to work off the books for legal, er, reasons.
My son's friend's mother works as a maid and she earns $5/light cleaning, $7.50 for heavy cleaning.
In other words, here people earn less when hired by individuals than they probably do when hired by a service.
I stopped by Merry Maids yesterday, since it's right on the major cross section that leads to my current residence. When I asked about work, they told me the pay was $7.50hr.
In Syracuse, maids earn $6.91/hr on the books, compared to the "off the books" wage of $5/hr (less than minimum wage) that people were paying immigrants. And we're not even talking about the live ins that get paid far less than $5/hr. E.g., years ago I was briefly a live in, 24/7 with 8 hrs off on Sunday, for the mother of the local head of the mafia. I was $75/week plus room and board. Granted, that was many years ago and there were literally no jobs in that town, but... If you do the math, i was making considerably less than minimum wage.
My experience isn't all that different from the pay of the women in _Global Woman_, a collection of research monographs on the lives of domestics. I'm sorry, but I can't see how it's fair to expect someone to sleep with your children--where here time is not here own time--and pay her what amounts to $2/ or $3/hr. as if the fact that she doesn't have to pay room and board somehow makes up for it. It doesn't.
In NYC, http://www.bls.gov/oes/2001/oes_5600.htm#b37-0000, it's $13.75/hr on the books. As I've repeatedly pointed out, it's just wrong to assume someone is always making $20/hr since you're not accounting for the travel time between jobs, the fact that employers will cancel when their finances can no longer afford the service (and thus, you're now down 2 or more hours of work that week), and it doesn't account for the fact that you must pay transportation costs that FTEs don't have or that you must budget some of your work time toward hustling for more work the way a FTE doesn't have to.
It's the same things with word processors who contract their labor: they ask for higher wages than an FTE and they _should_ because the extra hourly rate covers them for bad market, disability/infirmity, etc. things an FTE doesn't save as much for since they receive unemployment and disability insurance. So, basically, what I'm saying is that, for $20/hr, you're not really paying your maid that much more than what she's paid through the service. Not when you figure employment taxes, social security benefits, unemployment insurance, overtime, etc.
Also, Yoshie mentioned the servant culture of 150-100 years ago. It was almost a good point except that the two historical periods should be _contrasted_ as well as compared. Even so, one thing to point out is that there was a shortage of domestics--the crisis of good help that Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote about in _More Work for Mother_--for a reason. Women preferred to work in factories than work as domestics. Go figure.
kelley