AIBU to think women escaped domesticity by hiring other women to do it?

Ok

I have never had a cleaner.

Surely lots of people do work that they perhaps don’t fancy doing but have to / choose to for whatever reason? Whether that’s a man or a woman? Whether that’s window cleaning or cleaning?

No you're not.

In every thread where a women chooses to stay at home she is told that getting work is a priority because heaven forbid she be beholden to a man for her bread and butter. But now we're being told it's only certain types of work that it's ok for women to do and for other women to pay them for. Nails, hair and fillers -good. Cleaning or caring - bad.

Well we stopped child labour in cotton mills by exporting the work to India, who used child labour. We reduced our carbon footprint by exporting our dirty manufacturing to China, so it just follows.

When you say gets “holiday pay” is this meaning you pay her when you go away on holiday?

or you pay her for when she goes away on holiday?

It is an interesting point.

We aren't super well off but I do have a cleaner once a fortnight, she has her own business to work around her daughter and employs another woman who has young kids, and it works round their school hours. I don't think they are being exploited or anything like that. Just fellow mums doing me a great service and helping their own families as well as mine. Maybe I am being naive.

An expert?

not remotely

I’m not really sure OP, because outsourcing domestic tasks does at least provide employment, although I agree it’s morally wrong to employ someone on shitty terms or pay a company to do so.

I think having a cleaner, or whatever you need, and paying them decent money, is absolutely fine all round.

Mind you, over on another thread atm there’s an awful lot of I-clean-my-own-house-what’s-your-excuse competitive backbiting going on between working women, so who can say…🤷‍♀️

You’re an expert on this are you? Work for the HMRC or a government policy think tank with data on this particular sector of the economy?

The cleaners round my way can and do earn a good income. Mine drives a lovely car, and [gasp] has a joint mortgage with her fiancé too. Shocking, I know. She even has money for lip filler and highlights.

Why would it matter of it was cash? The cleaner is self-employed so ensuring they are paying the appropriate taxes is on them, not the customer.

most cleaners aren’t earning £35k a year for a 30 hour week

“Hoping”?

quite the opposite

You’re completely right, and it’s the elephant in the room that there are huge safeguarding risks in sending men in to do care work, to which those who are argue for it in the name of equality appear to be blind.

I don’t know what the answer is. We must urgently as a society recognise that traditional caring roles have value and ensure those who spend their time doing them are appropriately paid.

So, you were hoping imply that - if I replied ‘cash in hand’ [and am assuming that is what you are implying about other PPs here] that it was an illegal, tax avoiding scheme where recipient is exploited and/or working illegally?

Whereas most of these people are legally, gainfully employed and declaring their income through all the proper channels?

Hope you can see how despicable the undercurrent to that line of questioning is.

Why?

you have just answered the question

you don’t think relevant if you’d responded “cash in hand”?

Why? Her clients pay her direct by bank transfer per her invoices which are generated on one of those apps. She is self employed so will complete a self assessment form with the annual data her app produces. I understand from conversation that she pays voluntary NI contributions, in case that is what you are trying to get at?

How does she get paid? @CautiousLurker01 ?

I think people just want women “back in their place”.

Which is why such a big deal is made of traditionally female role’s being outsourced but nothing else.

Exactly
I pay my cleaner £17 an hour and I provide all the cleaning equipment . I also pay her holiday and sick pay

Exactly. We outsource EVERYTHING. Food and goods production, manufacturing, services. Some of that labour is valued higher by society. It would be disingenuous to say that sexism wasn't present within the creation of the hierarchy of these jobs but it recent times there has been movement towards fairer pay for services regardless of the sex of those who traditionally carried out the roles. Hence our Local Authorities finding themselves in the shit. Unless we are willing to grow our own food, make our clothes, generate our own energy, and give up our careers and live in isolation, we are ALL availing of services that we just don't want to or can't do ourselves. The key is to increase the status and pay of these roles. Not shame people for availing of them.

We've all collectively outsourced most factory work, agricultural work, mining - either to poorer countries or poorer immigrants.
Women outsourcing their domestic labour is a very minor issue in comparison.

And it’s a whole-society issue to solve, not just the problem of the traditionally-subordinated 50% who had the non-prestigious cleaning and caring tasks allocated to them.

I was reminded of this thread thinking about utopian fiction of various kinds. In Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, women in the post-collapse future have voluntarily given up the power to give birth (how is not explained), all babies are born from central labs, and you ‘volunteer’ to ‘mother, each child has three parents, who can be either sex, at least two of whom breastfeed (men can also BF), but the baby continues to live in a central baby/child house. Every adult has their own separate living space. Cooking is done centrally too. Everyone has to contribute to raising food.

In Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers novels (cosy sci-fi), most of the humans in the galaxy live in a fleet of giant spaceships in an essentially communitarian society. Everyone gets access to free food and accommodation, and jobs aren’t paid. You train for and work in a particular field because you want to and it’s needed. And the unpopular tasks (litter-picking, cleaning out sanitation tanks, washing out the recycling etc) are done by lottery by everyone, from the admiral of the fleet to schoolkids.

The problem of who should do the menial, low-paid, unpleasant, undesirable jobs is a difficult one to solve.
We could do it by paying high enough wages to attract people to the roles (there may be arguments against that & it might not work).
What seems to happen is that certain groups become subordinated and then forced into doing the shit work that no one else wants to do

I think you’ve made an amazing point that I’d never thought of before. Every now and then someone says something in my life that really changes how I think about things. It’s gets rarer as I get older. This post is one of those moments. I genuinely had never considered this before and instantly after reading it I’m seeing things through a different lens. This is the very best of what Mumsnet is for me, why I’m still here. What an eye opener for me.
ps… I’m pretty poor and my wee mum was a cleaner.