> one things folks are forgetting is that everyone based their reasoning
> that maids are getting paid minimum wage at merry maids when the service
> was actually charging $25/hr to the consumer. They charged $25/hr to the
> consumer b/c they provided _four_ maids and their own equipment for each
> hour.
Kelley, I looked up the original Harper's article online:
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1799_300/61291582/p1/article.jhtml
and it seems like Wojtek is right and it's you who are misremembering Ehrenreich. She says:
The customers of cleaning services are probably no
stingier than the employers of independents; they just don't know
their cleaning people and probably wouldn't even recognize them on
the street. Plus, customers probably assume that the fee they pay
the service--$25 per person-hour in the case of The Maids
franchise I worked for--goes largely to the workers who do the
actual cleaning.
To repeat: that's $25 a person-hour. Or $100 for 4. Of which she as a worker got $6.63.
So this paragraph implies exactly what Wojtek said: that $25 an hour is the average going rate to pay a person for cleaning, whether you are using a service or employing them directly (since she says neither class of employers is stingier than the other); and that if you hire the person directly, they get all that money, whereas if you hire them through a service, it skims off 3/4s of it.
While it's true travel time has to be counted, that doesn't seem to go very far towards mitigating a four-fold difference in wages. In addition, Ehrenreich describes different kinds of unpaid time that you only get in a service (including having to be there at 7:30am when pay starts at 8, and being required to do unpaid prep work when the paying day is over). Ehrenreich herself reckoned that the $6.63/hr she earned during her three weeks working The Maids International became $6.10/hr when you counted in unpaid time -- and $5.50/hr if you were getting a punishment wage for being late. (If you missed one day for any reason, your pay was lowered from $6.63 to $6 for two weeks -- a rule she notes was particularly difficult for mothers of young children). Lastly, a four person team has to travel a lot more than a single contractor, since a house that would occupy them for one hour would occupy a single person for four. The benefit of travel pay has to be discounted accordingly. If houses take four hours to clean, an independent contractor would be having having one unpaid travel trip between her two houses in a hypothetical full day. In that case, the unpaid time factor would end up a a wash and the contractor would simply be getting paid 4 times as much per hour as her counterpart at the service. (The benefits derived from paying taxes or unemployment are largely things that have to be deducted from the value of $6.63, not added onto it.)
So it's not a matter of you getting Ehrenreich right and everyone else getting her wrong. Rather it seems you've made up an entirely different argument (including the claim that one class of employers *is* enormously stingier than the other) which you think is better than the one Ehrenreich makes.
On this empirical point about how much people pay The International Maids per person hour you seem to be wrong. On the larger empirical point about the lower average wages of off-the-books employees, you could conceivably be right (and Ehrenreich wrong). But I personally can't understand how these companies can be expanding their market share if they charge so much more -- up to 5 times more, on your figures -- as the independent contractors they're competing with. That seems to violate the laws of economics.
Michael