> What also seems odd is that one of the maids who works for Merry Maids
> much prefer working for Merry Maids than working as an independent.
Well, she could also be an outlier. We all have to be wary of drawing a curve through one point. She might have been just starting out and have gotten a nut on her one time out on her own.
BTW, the company Ehrenreich worked for was actually The Maids International, not Merry Maids (who paid even worse). They're easy to confuse. Almost all these companies seem to have Maid in their title, and most of the time Ehrenreich refers the company she worked for for three weeks as simply "The Maids." (And who can blame her? The allusion to Genet is delicious.)
> Well, I'm going to call them tomorrow, cause now you've got me curious.
> I'll also have to call my old boss in Ithaca and ask her how it worked.
I'll be interested myself. One possible solution is that there is a segmented market in maids -- and that services are only competing in the top half.
Another is that one or more of these numbers are wrong.
And a third, which kind of combines the first two, is that the average conceals huge variation.
> and Joanna, do you want to know why my own experience working off the
> books suggests it sucks
I have to say, since I now know your experience from talking on the phone, that drawing an analogy from it might not be entirely apt. This may not be primarily a matter of working on/off the books so much as for/not for a subcontractor.
When I was a word processor working for a service the 1980s, I was paid $18/hr and the company that hired me paid the service thirty. The company then asked me to work directly for them and we split the difference -- they paid me $24/hr. In this case I was on the books in both instances. The difference was simply my getting some of what the service had been taking.
The reason people like me worked for services was because it was almost impossible to find jobs on your own -- you only ever found them working through a service. It might be the same for poor women trying to get jobs in rich neighborhoods. They might also end up cutting similar deals.
I think the issue of paying taxes can be considered separately. I think its quite possible for you and Johanna to both be right: for her to be right that independent contractors make appreciably more per hour than maids who work for services; and for you to still be able to argue that employers of independent contractors ought to pay their maids' taxes for their maids' sake (and not only because it's required by law) because off the books work is much worse for workers' welfare than is commonly appreciated.
Again, that would be a very different argument that Ehrenreich's, but it might also be a better one.
Michael