[lbo-talk] on the books and off

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Aug 25 23:34:23 PDT 2003



> The time has come for some research. My impression is that Ehrenreich's
> figures on the industry are very untrustworthy.

And preliminary results seem to bear that out. Most of these companies (including the one she worked for) are private and don't disclose anything. Merry Maid, however, the largest of these companies, is a subsidary of ServiceMaster, which is a public company. I looked at their lastest 10-K on Edgar:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1052045/000105204503000071/0001052045-03-000071.txt

And it says that last year Merry Maid had 278,000 residential customers in the US.

According to the Census bureau

http://factfinder.census.gov/bf/_lang=en_vt_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_DP4_geo_id=01000US.html

As of 2000, there were 69,865,957 single unit detached homes in the United States.

So on a rough initial reckoning, less than 0.4% of all homes in America used Merry Maid last year -- the big fish in the field. And if we include all the other people who live in apartments like me (and why not? Every household has housework), we're talking 0.2% of all households in America who employed these people.

It seems like even when we add in all the others, this is going to end up an extremely marginal phenomenon. And this is after 20 years of development.

And if, as I suspect, it does turn out to be overwhelmingly a matter of one-shot cleaning, a kind of day-spa service for houses, these services won't have much if any effect on the everyday housework choices of even the teeny percentage of Americans who use them.

In short, franchised home-cleaning services couldn't be more irrelevant to a discussion of the politics of housework. Ehrenreich's description of the lived experience of working for one is well done. But the framework in which she thought she was inserting it turns out to be a complete illusion. Accordingly, her experience provides no relevant evidence for the debate she was interested in settling. Any person who hires an independent housekeeper has more. Although of course by no means enough.

So if we still want to discuss those larger issues, we'll have to go back and start from scratch. And the first thing we'd need would be some solid data on independent housekeepers -- which is still the only game in town besides your own efforts.

Michael



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