To be confused as to why hiring a cleaner is seen as an indulgence?

[Gahr]

This is something that I see time and again on this site, and it is SO WEIRD. People seem to think that it is the height of luxury to have a housecleaner, and also seem to be strangely apologetic about it, offering disclaimers as to why they need one. Also, I've noticed that on threads when someone has a problem with their cleaning service, they will get several posts telling them to 'clean their own house'. Nobody would tell someone to 'service their own boiler' or 'fix their own toilet'! I don't understand it at all. I have a cleaner and I wouldn't be without her.

I do hope you are gas safe registered if you service your own boiler, if not, what you are doing is not only dangerous but illegal.

I’m interested in what you see as the alternative to this issue within the current wider economic system?

If I, along with my cleaner’s other clients, all stop using her services, we end up with less time for other aspects of our lives, or being unable to clean our homes. She ends up without the flexible self-employment that she chose because it fits with her circumstances. What does that mean for her, in your view?

The truth is that removing cleaning work generally means that the person then either takes a job that is less suitable for them, or they become benefit reliant. Is that more ethical?

I know you can't really elaborate on behalf of someone else but does this mean that female nurses, for instance, don't have the luxury of being able to debate whether men in dresses can use their changing rooms? Or does it mean that high earning woman run in priviledged circles that pretend that Crispin is neither male nor female?

Women who hire cleaners are more likely to support gender ideology?

I didn’t vote. NBU to have a cleaner, but VU to not see why other ls would consider it a luxury. It’s an inessential service (ie you found it yourself), which is one of the definitions of luxury.

I’m not sure this bears scrutiny - ’and utilizes the labour of women who are less well-qualified for the job market than the woman who uses their services’

I’d hazard a guess that many women (by no means all) are paying their cleaner with their husband’s money, not theirs, so that tells you nothing of their suitability for the job market. And surely anyone working in any job has demonstrated that they are qualified for the job market - they have a job!

Maybe. But generally speaking childminding and childcare are less well-paid than say teaching or some types of office work and w/c women are more likely to be in the lower paid jobs and less likely to be using a dogwalker (v. m/c). They will used a childminder or nursery hours if in p/t or f/t work like m/c women. But they are liable to be in lower paid jobs overall and more likely to be doing the childminding than higher paid work. They are also more likely to be in the gig economy and part of the precariat (though some precariat jobs - e.g. exam marking - are colonised by lower m/c women, who are more likely to be teachers, which is a lower m/c job when in the state system).

Both DH and I work FT, we have two children in primary school and we are time poor. We have a weekly cleaner as we like our house neat and tidy. It is a 5 bed house so would definitely take me at-least 4 hours to clean. I cook all our meals from scratch and do all the grocery shopping, laundry, school admin, holiday booking, ironing kids uniform etc. I also need time to exercise and do things for myself. Outsourcing the cleaning is one way of getting some time to myself. It is really worth it! I pay my cleaner 15PH and often treat her to chocolates, food and presents each time we go abroad on holiday and very generous Christmas presents etc. She has been with us for 4 years and we have a lovely relationship. She also helps me with unloading the dishwasher, changing the bedding, putting out fresh bath mats, changing towels etc. I wouldn’t be able to manage without her.

Yes, it’s a luxury to afford a regular cleaner.

The only friends I know who have a cleaner both live alone, have disabilities and can’t manage the cleaning themselves, so they have little choice in the matter.

No-one else I know could afford to pay anyone to clean their house for them. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Obviously do what is best for you, but it’s interesting that you mentioned ‘we like a tidy house’ but that doing it would take YOU four hours.

The thing is, I, too, am a 'leftie'. But I am not an MC, Guardian reading, handwriting leftie, I am a WC old Labour leftie. I've spent most of my working life on minimum wage doing work others didn't want to do but was, nevertheless, necessary.

I don't think people shouldn't do those jobs. I've cleaned. My mum was a cleaner. I think the snobbery around such work is a big problem, personally. In today's society, where you only have 'value' if you earn big money at something supposedly more 'clever'.

I've fought all my life against the view that people in honest, unskilled employment should be regarded as 'less than'. And I'm afraid that, despite your claim that you don't look down on the actual cleaners, I think you do.

What would you rather we did, us workers that do things that aren't cultural or aesthetically pleasing to you? I'd rather we were treated with respect and dignity. I'd rather we had all the rights of any other employees, whatever their professions, and I'm pleased to say that it is largely due to past Labour governments that we do have better rights and conditions.

But if it were up to the MC left-wing handwringers, we'd all be sat on our arses on benefits or doing degrees that we have no interest in that have increasingly less value because, at the root of it is the very Conservative idea that we should be doing 'better', rather than valuing what we actually do on a societal level.

I don't need somebody else to decide for me what is and isn't demeaning for me to do as a job. I need not to be demeaned for doing it. I don't need you to demean those who give me employment. I need you to help champion my rights as an employee, so that I am not a slave, but an honest worker, getting paid properly for doing a job that is needed.

The trouble with the modern left wing is that it's led less and less by people like me and more and more by people like you, who aren't interested in what people like me want or need, because you are too busy telling us what we want or need based on your own sensibilities. Which is sadly why so many of my fellow WC have abandoned the left and labour. It doesn't feel like our party, populated and run by us, for us. It feels like a party run by people who don't do what we do and simply think we should be doing what they do.

Which is why, at the last election, I voted for a local social justice party.

WOMEN, thank you, because although men benefit from e.g. the cleaner they do not generally consider the cleaning and domestic job theirs. And society agrees with this, which is why domestic work and childcare are poorly paid and mostly done by WOMEN, either as a low-paid job or by doing it domestically.

You seem a bit obsessed with the middle class 🤔
Funnily enough, working class women work and use childminders. Childminders use cleaners. Cleaners use childminders.

If you take the Darlington Nurses’ case as an example, the nurses were shafted by women and men higher up than them in management who held ‘luxury beliefs’. Management would never have to use the communal changing rooms for work so management could fawn over the man who said he was a woman without it remotely affecting them.

The nurses were affected though. And they won.

Well said! Labour has become the party of the woke-left who are all too keen to tell us what we want but have no idea what our lives are actually like. And are entirely happy to exploit us for their need whenever it suits them. My mum was also a cleaner - she did it so we could stay at school and get jobs which would allow us a few more choices than she and my dad had.
Edited for grammar.

If anyone is interested in going into the subject of cleaners, servants etc etc in more detail, "Servants" by Lucy Lethbridge is a fascinating read.

Do they? No-one I know uses a childminder. They tend to used grandma. But naturally w/c women will use childminders and possibly cleaners if they work f/t. But majoritively it is m/c women using the lower paid work of w/c women.

Surely grandma's at work?
Where do you live that no one is using childcare?

My mum was a cleaner at one point in her life, and we don't let her know we have a cleaner now. She's incredibly snotty about the fact my uncle had a cleaner in their foreign homes.

Thing is... Her home is absolutely filthy and they have massive pensions now they're retired. She has a kind of reverse snobbery about the people they know with cleaners.

It was only clean when we were kids because it was our job to clean, and they never got in the habit of cleaning it.

But their house is becoming utterly grim. My sister and I used to try and fix it up a bit when we visited, but we now have kids to care for when we're there. So the dirt is getting steadily more engrained. And they still do the bare minimum.

(For those who might ask about my dad - nope, he doesn't clean either, but he doesn't bash having a cleaner!)

Some people buy several bottles of wine a month or have a couple of takeaways, or cigarettes/vapes. It’s no more a luxury than those. Everything is a luxury if you can’t afford it.

I have a cleaner. I’m on a state pension. In my case she is an absolute essential. I’m a wheelchair user, whilst I can manage a couple of things, I can’t clean loose, sinks, back of worksurfaces . I can’t take my rubbish out nor can I change my bedding. I use my Pip for this.

Like I am a client of social services? No, I am employing/buying the child-minder's skill set, I am not her client in any sense (either the Roman or the modern).

Would you prefer the term customer?
You're definitely not employing someone who runs their own business on their own terms - you pay for a service.

Because she can’t administer her own Botox, or highlight her own hair, but any old thicko can scrub their bath.

I think for many people, they are happy to pay for services they can’t do themselves, I.e wallpapering, laying a patio, cleaning the gutters, servicing their car, but can’t see the logic in paying for something so basic.

No, I don't feel superior to cleaners and childminders. My mother was a cleaner. DiL has been a carer. I have been a childminder and I am most definitely working class - father was a semi-skilled worker and mother was a char lady and much of my childhood was spent living in one or two rented rooms and at last in a 2 bed maisonette over a shop; my parents never managed to buy a house.
You are reading something into what I said that isn't there. I am pointing out that these service providers are part of the precariat and also are the low paid foundation of neo-liberal capitalism, which does not value their work, nor the labour that women in general put in for free to keep the economy running.
It's a mildly Marxist analysis, I suppose (and Marx was an example of the people who take advantage of the w/c, hypocrite).