Do you have/have you had a MAID?

Growing up in El Paso, almost every middle-class family had a low-paid Mexican maid.

It wasn't til I moved elsewhere that I realized that this is atypical in most parts of the country.

Do you have/have you had a MAID?

All the choices can include maid services (to the best of your knowledge).

and we paid them well.

maid, cook, gardener, and part time maids as well. and a nanny.

for the family to do around the house with all of that help.

I once babysat for a Nigerian woman who was born into a wealthy family. She said that they had someone whose job it was to just sit outside in a car in case the family wanted to go somewhere! She also told me about not even having to draw her own bath when she visiting her parents.

there was still stuff to do

such as Merry Maid, etc... so I voted 'Other'.

So I think either of the first two choices would be okay, depending on how often you used the services.

regarding her experiences working for Merry Maids. Pretty horrendous if you ask me. They are told not to drink water on the job because are not to touch anything in a customer's house. Their breaks are the time spent driving from one customer's house to another.

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1799_300/ai_61291582/pg_4


At Merry Maids, I was promised $200 for a forty-hour week, the manager hastening to add that "you can't calculate it in dollars per hour" since the forty hours include all the time spent traveling from house to house--up to five houses a day--which is unpaid. The Maids International, with its straightforward starting rate of $6.63 an hour, seemed preferable, though this rate was conditional on perfect attendance. Miss one day and your wage dropped to $6 an hour for two weeks, a rule that weighed particularly heavily on those who had young children. In addition, I soon learned that management had ways of shaving off nearly an hour's worth of wages a day. We were told to arrive at 7:30 in the morning, but our billable hours began only after we had been teamed up, given our list of houses for the day, and packed off in the company car at about 8:00 A.M. At the end of the day, we were no longer paid from the moment we left the car, though as much as fifteen minutes of work -- refilling cleaning-fluid bottles, etc.--remained to be done. So for a standard nine-hour day, the actual pay amounted to about $6.10 an hour, unless you were still being punished for an absence, in which case it came out to $5.50 an hour.


snip

Within a customer's house, nothing was to touch our lips at all, not even water--a rule that, on hot days, I sometimes broke by drinking from a bathroom faucet. TVs and radios were off-limits, and we were never, ever, to curse out loud, even in an ostensibly deserted house. There might be a homeowner secreted in some locked room, we were told, ear pressed to the door, or, more likely, a tape recorder or video camera running. At the time, I dismissed this as a scare story, but I have since come across ads for devices like the Tech-7 "incredible coin-sized camera" designed to "get a visual record of your babysitter's actions" and "watch employees to prevent theft." It was the threat or rumor of hidden recording devices that provided the final capitalist-industrial touch--supervision.

snip

In The Maids' "healthy touch" system, which is similar to what I saw of the Merry Maids' system on the training tape I was shown during my interview, all cleaning is divided into four task areas--dusting, vacuuming, kitchens, and bathrooms--which are in turn divided among the team members. For each task area other than vacuuming, there is a bucket containing rags and the appropriate cleaning fluids, so the biggest decision an employee has to make is which fluid and scrubbing instrument to deploy on which kind of surface; almost everything else has been choreographed in advance. When vacuuming, you begin with the master bedroom; when dusting, with the first room off of the kitchen; then you move through the rooms going left to right. When entering each room, you proceed from left to right and top to bottom, and the same with each surface--top to bottom, left to right. Deviations are subject to rebuke, as I discovered when a team leader caught me moving my arm from right to left, then left to right, while wiping Windex over a French door.

Saturday and pay him $50 for 3 hours.

I don't have a maid.

we keep things fairly clean

Betty Bowers has a maid...


...and that her maid will go to a tacky fake-plastic-gilt, Virgin Mary-filled hell for being a CATHOLIC!

can't keep him off the computer though :evilgrin:

I grew up in El Paso too, and the only folks I knew who had Mexican maids were wealthy (well, substantially wealthier than my family, anyhow).

Guess it depends on what you consider middle class. :-)

And 40k goes a lot farther in El Paso than elsewhere. My mom paid our maid about $70/week to come in 3 times a week (8 hour days). Almost every kid I knew had at least a part-time maid.

The really rich kids lived further up the mountain near Coronado Country Club. I knew one family up there that had a maid, a cook, and their own security guard!

I would never pay less than min. wage, and if I could afford it, I'd pay a good living wage with benefits. (not that I have, or can afford a maid now. We can't even afford a sitter.)

My mom is a repuke.

(and to be fair to her, that was the the going rate at the time - there were so many illegals willing to work for peanuts...)

:) No offense to you of course.

for a while. Basically had to stop because I started freelancing and couldn't handle the weekly interruption. Better to live in my own squalor. :)

we didn't have a maid. I don't remember anyone else having one either, although I guess some neighbors might have.

I grew up in the military part of the city, though. That might have made a difference.

but we always considered the Fort Bliss area, and most of the East Side to be "working class", the southside & Lower Valley were poor, the westside was middle class, with the really rich folks up on the mountain, or in the spacious spreads in the Upper Valley.

El Paso is a really poor city, though. I think the median income is still around $20K there. Luckily, the cost of living is one of the lowest in the US.

from both sides of the spectrum

:-)

with the 3 car garages, BMWs, central vacuum systems, 6,000 ft. houses described themselves as "middle class" or "comfortable".

Of course they were wealthy. I don't like it when rich people call themselves middle class. It's like a way to rationalize their aversion to paying any damn taxes.

that was considered "upper middle class", and I remember being surprised even to hear that term. I don't even know what term my parents used. Professionals, maybe?

I think people who aren't millionaires+ figure that the millionaires+ are the wealthy ones. People who had three vacation homes and a yacht.

The civic center!



I used to think it was a roller coaster like Space Mountain. Wish it had been...

but I can't afford one, so I'm forced to leave my house a mess.

Edit: I wouldn't mind getting a maid that looks like this!!!!:


:evilgrin:

All black. Grew up in Birmingham in the 40s & 50s.
I think they came 3 days a week. Worked for someone else the other 3 days.
I remember "Miz Smith, if you know anybody needs a maid, my Tuesday-Thursday lady done died."
Sunday was for church!

I doubt if we paid the minimum wage and I know we didn't withhold for S/S.
I think this was at their request. They needed all the cash they could get, up front. There was a big scandal about it later, and everyone started doing it.

We also paid carfare and they had "totin' privileges", i.e. they could take leftover food home.

I was too young to remember Teena. Dorothy had a terrific sense of humor. God knows why. It wasn't an easy life.

Betty Jean came to us at age 15 or 16. After school 3 days a week and all day Saturday. She was very proud when she got her high school degree. Brought it to show us. When she was in her mid 20s, she told my mother she wanted to be a nurse. Mom was a businesswoman and knew damn near all the movers and shakers in town. She called her friend who was dean (or whatever) of the nursing school. There were no black students, up until then. Mom got her in. She worked part-time for us until she graduated.
We stayed in touch until I left B'ham. Mom is where I got my librulness.

who knew? I don't even know anyone that can afford to have someone else clean for them.

I wouldn't mind having someone pick up the squalor, but I think I'd be kind of embarrassed if anyone actually saw how I really live. I'd probably be one of those people that feels the need to clean the house before the maid comes over.

We have a cleaning lady who comes once a week and I pick up all the clutter in my room and bathroom up before she comes..if I don't have time, then I usually just close those two rooms and tell her she doesn't have to clean them. Sometimes, I close those two rooms off and she cleans them anyways which is embarrassing.

My dad is the one who hired the cleaning lady..I'd just as soon be messy and clean it up when it gets unbearable. :)

A nice young woman cleaned our house every two weeks. I made sure I left the house because I couldn't stand the thought of watching her clean my house. I'm the antithesis of my mother; she cleaned our house thoroughly every day, whereas I could literally go MONTHS without touching a vacuum cleaner, etc. It makes it difficult when you have two cats shedding all over the place! Thank God for Swiffer!

I'm the low-paid Mexican maid around here.

It's great, they pay their people over minimum wage and I tip. I couldn't survive without them. I love these women. Although, sometimes there is a guy. There is rarely a new face, and they do good work. And, I have to pick up once a week, so that's good too. Actually, I'm a clean housekeeper, but I get really bitchy if I have to do everything myself. Kids are happy, I'm happy, hubby is happy, house is kept clean. And actually the kids and hubby are tidy people.

But I still clean stuff. Sometimes the young girls are puzzled about why they are here.

Housekeeping is an honorable profession. A great aunt of mine was head housekeeper in a very big home on the east coast. She had her own apartment in the house.

Put myself through college with a variety of job, one of which was scrubbing toilets at the local Holiday Inn.

I always leave the maid a tip when I stay at a hotel and I hope all of you do to...it's very hard work.

During high school I worked in the hotel that my father was a chef in, and I also did "freelance" housecleaning. What did it teach me? That there actually are people in this world who expect that money, and not a great amount of money mind you, would be enough inducement for me to pick up their strewn underwear. No, that is not in *any* maid's job description, and if you ask your maid to do that, stop it.

Cleans the downstairs one time, the upstairs the next. Takes her about 2-21/2 hours, and we pay her $75.

BTW, the first few times she came she asked for cash, in lieu of a check. When we finally asked why, it turns out that several of her customers had stiffed her with bad checks. She's "the cleaning lady" - who cares. Unbelieveable...

She has told us we are her favorite client, and I honestly think it is because we see her as just another human being - not a "cleaning lady." We'll chat about what is going on with her kids, I convinced her to fly on an airplane for the first time in her life (she almost didn't take a vacation because she was afraid to fly!), etc. She's had a very hard life - she doesn't need to be looked down on.

His name is Mac. He does great work. Cheap, too.