Does your cleaner clean your loo?

[clara10]

Hooray. We are going to hire a cleaner for 1 hour a week.

Can I ask - does your cleaner clean your loo? It's bad enough cleaning your own loo let alone someone elses.

Am I being silly, will she expect to include the inside of the loo with the bathroom? Or, as I am a little uncomfortable with it shall I do the inside of the loo myself?

alice there are plenty of low paid jobs that are the preserve of men: portering, pot washing, refuse collection, driving, labouring etc. So I'm not sure what your point is (and I am genuinely not being facetious).

Cleaning actually pays pretty well on the scale.

Yes, lots of working class men do fairly low paid jobs too. I pay my cleaner £10 an hour so she doesn't do badly!
In terms of childcare, I wanted to be the one who stayed at home then worked p/t and dh was happy for me to do this. However, he never expected me to and if my salary was closer to his we would certainly have discussed him doing it instead! By the way, we both have good qualifications but he chose law and I chose education. I don't see it as a 'female' choice as plenty of men teach and I earn the same as them. The women dh works with earn in line with him too and his boss is a woman but I guess you're talking more about what you see as working class barriers. Just to add, it has always been turn taking with nappy changes when he's been home. This is the same with most couples we know. ....maybe 40yrs ago...

When I worked FT we had a cleaner. I treated her like royalty. I picked her up and took her home after as she didn't have transport. I paid her £10 per hour for 3 hours a week to clean a 3 bed semi that 2 adults lived in for a few hours a week when they weren't at work (I did 70 hr weeks in those days and dh did even more than that). I always had a bit of a clean and tidy, emptied bins etc before she arrived. I let her bring her son with her during school holidays. I bought her birthday and Christmas presents and an ocassional bottle of wine or bunch of flowers.

In return she cleaned my house beautifully. Cleaned out cupboards, washed windows, dusted skirting boards, washed down paintwork. Tbh I think she struggled to fill the time. We didn't need her for 3 hours a week or even every week, but I knew her situation and that she relied on that money.

She did clean the loos, but being the clean freak I am I'd usually done them myself before I went to pick her up. I think people cleaning before the cleaner arrives is quite widespread.

Hi Alice

"...cleaning loos is an activity reserved for working class women in general..."

I'm glad (in a non huffy way, honest,) you said in general. I got into cleaning after accepting redundancy from my clearly sinking company and discovering that getting a equivalent job without more travelling then I was willing to do was impossible.

I tried working in an office in a role way below my previous one as it was the only way I could get part time hours. I stuck it for two and a half weeks and I am not usually a quitter ( 5.5yrs in one job, 12.5in the next). If the owner of the business had behaved the way he behaved in my old department I'd have fired him.

I'd done cleaning self employed before this job and went back to it after, as a good cleaner I got decent money, bosses who were willing to be flexible during school holdidays and respect for doing well what my employers didn't want to/didn't have time to do.

This includes toilets, sometimes stinky, teenagers of the family toilets, inside and out.

So, I come from working class parents, wasn't especially achademic but have degree level vocational quailifications, hired people, fired people, told them that they smell in managerial and HR positions and then taught others to do the same (manufacturing industry) and for four years or so did cleaning including toilets.

I think my question is less what class am I now, but more that I am confused about where class comes into this at all?

My cleaner cleans the loo but it mainly involves giving it a wipe around and pouring some bleach down it.

As we are grown ups we clean off any obvious shit as and when we 'leave a tattoo' as my lovely friend calls it! But a rub with a loo brush once or twice a week isn't the same as cleaning it, just as wiping up obvious spills on the kitchen floor isn't the same as getting the mop out and giving it a once over.

I see it as two different jobs