"If I pay a maid or maid service $25/hr or whatever (and most people I know are paying less than that around here), there is no way that she can regularly afford her own maid. It doesn't matter whether she's got her own business or is wage labor for a cleaning service. As an entrepreneur, there's overhead. As wage labor, she's probably getting 6-9/hr. while the service scoops up $25/hr or more."
We've been here before and I still don't get it. When I was in my late teens and twenties, I worked a lot of minimum wage jobs -- some for sweatshops and some for UCLA. At that time, minimum wage was about 2.90/hour and I paid taxes on that too. I now pay a woman $20/hour to come and clean house twice a month. I also give her paid vacation once a year and a $100 bonus for xmas. She takes 100% of the money herself and it's tax free, cause she doesn't work for an agency. The only overhead she's got is paying for transportation to my house. Paternalistic? I really don't know. She is in her early thirties and speaks no English. Do I pay her what I make an hour? No. Would I have been happier having a house-cleaning job when I was young, rather than my minimum wage job? Absolutely. Do I think there's anything inherently demeaning about cleaning house? Absolutely not.
I follow what the academic sociologists say, but it doesn't really compute. I don't see that if I work as a maid, I necessarily want to hire a maid myself. I would have been embarassed to have a maid when I was young. Now I'm almost fifty, raising two kids on my own, and working full time: I can definitely use the help. I'll be happy to give you her phone number. If your Spanish is good enough, you can call her and explain that she's getting a rotten deal.
Joanna