The cost of a clean conscience.

I was reading an interesting article from 2018 and I wish to share the below with you. Let me know what you think:

" Pay your cleaner what you earn, or clean up yourself!

If people outsource cleaning chiefly to save themselves time, they should presumably pay the cleaner for the cost of that time. That would seem to be a fair exchange. Let’s see how that would look in practice. An average UK employee earns £518 each week for working an average of 37 hours. Accounting for lunch breaks and statutory paid leave—to which a cleaner is generally not entitled—this means that an average person earns £18.14 per actual working hour. Adding in £3 for a return bus fare, a cleaner should therefore be paid £21.14 to clean for an hour, or £39.28 for a two-hour session (and more for those based in London). To tackle a couple of obvious objections: while your commute might not be paid for, consider that you’d expect it to be if you needed to travel around from job-to-job all day long in order to make a living; and while a cleaner might avoid tax if paid cash-in-hand, they then lose out on certain benefits (a state pension or maternity allowance), so it’s swings and roundabouts.

But the average household cleaner in London earns just £8.89 per hour, less than half of the figure just calculated. You might argue that the difference in earnings accounts for the debt and non-earnings of those who have spent years studying (yet note that migrant workers are often themselves well-educated), or that cleaners’ employers are more highly-skilled (again, debateable). Surely such people deserve to earn more than their cleaners? Yet those who study do so for the sake of education, or to access a rewarding job. It is not obvious at all that their time should subsequently be worth more than that of others. Regardless, they always have the option of quitting their job and having an “easy ride” as a cleaner. They also have the option of cleaning up after themselves.

In short, if somebody saves you time by doing your cleaning, and you don’t pay that person what your time is worth, it must be concluded that you value your time above theirs. In that case, outsourced cleaning is a moral problem because it is a nod to a system in which some people’s labour is worth less than other people’s leisure, and that’s a recipe for all manner of inequalities. While this disparity is true of many jobs, the difference is that you aren’t employing those people; your cleaner is your employee employee, and you have a chance to do things differently."

You can read the full article at the below link:

https://mediadiversified.org/2018/09/07/pay-your-cleaner-what-you-earn-or-clean-up-yourself/