£22 per hour for cleaning - REALLY?!

[DorotheaShottery]

I was thinking the other day "Dot - you've had enough of this cleaning lark - get yourself a cleaner!"

I put some feelers out on FB and it appears the going rate is £20-£22 per hour!!

Is that normal in the not-SE-not-Cheshire parts of the UK? AIBU to think it's ridiculous?

'Crazily high minimum wage'? 😂

Have you ever had to live on it??

It's the maximum I've ever lived on. And I was working pre minimum wage as well

I have a perfectly good life

I am self employed and charge a lot more an hour than I pay my cleaner so it makes financial sense for me

An 20 something Australian colleague was saying the other day that the crazy thing in the UK is that people in their 40s and 50s expect to be able to do 40 hour low skilled low paid jobs and support a family off that, but that's not how it works in Australia or other countries

Ah just what the UK needs! A 20 year old Aussie telling us where we're going wrong 😂

But also there's the aspect of basic economics of supply and demand. Where people "have" money, then you get "demand pull" inflation. So if people have more money in their pockets, businesses know that they can get away with increasing prices. We saw similar with Gordon Brown's tax credits which was partly responsible for high increases in home rentals as landlords could increase rents as they knew that the target tenants could pay more. It becomes a vicious spiral - higher wages leads to more money in pockets, leads to higher prices, leads to need for higher wages. Of course, at the same time, higher wages mean businesses need to increase prices to cover, so then you have basic economics of supply-push inflation too!

Compared to the UK, the Australian economy has generally been more successful for most of the last few decades. So, it's actually quite reasonable for Aussies of any age, to think the way they do things down under is better than the way we do things.

There are several ways in which the UK is copying/emulating the Australian economy, such as how we're finally copying them in terms of pensions etc. Our government also looks to "copy" Aus in other areas too such as laws/regulations.

Sorry for confusion. I'm not the cleaner. That's what I pay. That is the going rate in my area though. Just booked a new cleaner for my MIlL as she's recovering from surgery and it was £17 also. Different company.