> i'm not convinced that the wealthiest people use a service on a regular
> basis, although they might for a deep clean, or to prep a house
> for/after a party, something like that. that might be enough to keep
> these businesses afloat, though.
That sounds quite plausible, and if true, might resolve all the data problems.
If people are using these services as one-shots, or even as one or twice a year shots, then they aren't competing with regular housekeeping. Rather they are creating a luxury market that didn't exist before -- kind of a day-spa service for houses.
That could conceivably explain why the houses were so filthy (which is precisely what regular cleaning prevents); and why their employees were working for them at such low wages: it was a market the services had created and which they as individuals couldn't tap into.
It would also suggest an explanation of the big difference in wages that Kelley and I have encountered in anecdotal surveys of our neighbors. Professional housecleaners who are heads of households could be overwhelmingly concentrated in cities. Cities might contain the key preconditions of the possibility of their supporting a full household as a housecleaner, namely apartments, which are both cheaper for them to rent, and cheaper to pay to get cleaned at a given pay per hour rate. The difference between $50 bi-weekly and $100 bi-weekly is considerable and greatly changes the size of the market. Cities also have public transit (which greatly lowers the costs to cleaners) and close proximity and between large immigrant and upper middle class populations.
The majority of people who do do independent housekeeping in the suburbs might be people who are not heads of households, i.e., who are attached to a household where the basic nut is taken care of. The minimum wage they would accept would then have a much different floor. A head of household couldn't accept wages that didn't pay the rent -- she'd have to give it up and get a different job.
On this view, Ehrenreich's idea that home cleaning services represent the industrialization of a craft would be completely off the mark. They wouldn't be competing with indepedent cleaners that visited on a bi-weekly basis anymore than day-spas compete with bathing. So there wouldn't be any truth to her idea that there was a meaningful choice between one or the other. They would be serving completely different functions.
Her own experience working for one would also be essentially irrelevant to the morals of housekeeping, which should then be discussed entirely in terms of independent contractors, the only real competition. Hiring a service once every 6 months would be more like patronizing the GAP and buying sweatshop clothing (which she uses as an example of how she knows full well the impossibility of moralizing all our market relations). It would have very little to do with changing the inner or everyday relations of the family.
The time has come for some research. My impression is that Ehrenreich's figures on the industry are very untrustworthy. They are mostly industry derived, and seem like promotional exaggerations told to attract franchisees. Their claims about growth rates sound remiscent of the telecoms and electricity trading industries -- i.e., fraudulent. Any suggestions for getting an anlysis of the industry that is not beholden to it? And any suggestions for who might have done a real investigation of the economic reality of independent housecleaners? That latter is packed with data difficulties that it would seem to require a dedicated monograph to get anywhere.
Thorough studies of the reality of unpaid housecleaning -- i.e., by family members -- would also be useful.
Michael