Economy a mess, but maids are cleaning up
Business is brisk for house cleaners these days — yes, even these days — and it's not just the wealthy paying someone to dust-bust their dust bunnies and mop up the detritus of their lives.
Maids increasingly are a guilty pleasure for many in the middle class, people who willingly spend $50 to $150 a cleaning in exchange for precious free time for children or hobbies.
Anne van Roden has debated whether to stop or reduce her house cleanings since her husband was laid off last spring. But van Roden, a graduate student, is hanging on as long as possible. They're traveling and driving less, eating in more, and she's sewing some of her family's clothes again.
"There's just something about walking in to a clean house," said van Roden, who lives on Queen Anne Hill.
Dual-income families straining to preserve the fragile balance between work and home life say maid service is the glue that holds it all together.
"That would be one of the very last things we'd cut," said Gretchen Benzin of her weekly cleanings.
The Auburn mother of two commutes 90 minutes a day to her job as an executive at Tacoma's Frank Russell Co., and her husband has an equal commute to his job managing a Seattle retail store.
"I just don't want to dedicate weekends to cleaning my house. This is what allows us to have that balance between our careers and our family," she said.
Even some housecleaning services say they expected to be the first thing to go in a sour economy.
As the local economy slowed, Tammy Winslow's family warned her last year to brace herself, but her Neatnics business in Edmonds is still growing.
"It's crossed some kind of line from a luxury to a necessity," said Winslow, who has about 50 clients and gets a couple of calls a day for estimates.
Driving that change is the dramatic rise in the number of working mothers. About two-thirds of mothers of preschool-aged children, and three-quarters of those with older children, work outside the home.
That means more dual-income families have more money than time and priorities that don't include spending Saturday scrubbing grease off the stovetop.
"The housecleaner goes above medical and food, just about," quipped Laurie Bundy, operations manager for the South Snohomish County Chamber of Commerce.
She and her husband have three dogs, two teens, one cat — and no desire to spend free time cleaning. "It was a constant source of stress. It's a lot easier just to make that go away."
She hired a housecleaner for eight years, then tried to give it up last year to save money. It didn't take long for the tension to creep back — or for Bundy to hire a new housecleaner.
The number of cleaning services has kept pace, growing steadily in the past 25 years to an estimated 10,000 nationwide.
That includes more than 110 listed in the Seattle Yellow Pages, everything from franchise outfits such as Merry Maids, which promises to scrub your floors on hands and knees, to independent operators like Rent a Wife Housekeeping, a name that owner Gary Shapiro admits draws flak sometimes, but, as he points out, "it's only a name, for heaven's sake."
Roger Linde, founder of the Washington State Housecleaners Association, estimates there are 50 percent more cleaning companies today than when he started his Mighty Maids company 14 years ago.
Until recently, their biggest chore was finding and keeping good employees. Now, though, some say they no longer advertise openings and still get five or six calls a day from job-seekers for jobs that start between $9 and $12 an hour and go up. One owner has a couple of cleaners with doctorates on her payroll.
Liane Christianson, owner of Maid in the Northwest, has about 500 clients in the Puget Sound region. She's lost a handful who were forced to cut expenses after losing their jobs, but new business has made up the loss. "People find it's very difficult to give it up once they've started." Her cleaners see it all, said Christianson, who charges between $28 and $36 an hour: "Everything from you don't even know why you're there to you have to carry out 60 bags of trash before you can even start. I have pictures of that one."
It is a conflicted relationship we have with housework, and the people we pay to do it.
People may be glad to buy tidiness, but clients still sometimes ask her whether cleaners arrive in a marked car — they don't want their neighbors, husbands or mothers knowing they have "help."
That stigma is fast fading, however. "It used to be if you had a housecleaner, you were rich and stuck up," Christianson said. "Now I think people are jealous if their friends have a housecleaner and they don't."
A survey by Maritz Marketing, a national marketing firm, found 18 percent of Americans had hired someone to clean their homes in the past year, and nearly one-third had done so for the first time.
In addition to legitimate cleaning services, there is a vast "cleaning underground" of illegal immigrants and others who work off the books, dwarfing the 500,000 private household cleaners and servants officially tallied by the federal government in 2000. (Of those official cleaners, 95 percent were women, and 55 percent were Latino or African American.)
If they can't pay someone to do their housework, many middle-income families just ignore the mess. "People are not being as fussy about being able to eat off the floor," said Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute. "Housework is negotiable; children aren't."
Even so, women today spend 15 hours a week on housework, including meal preparation and laundry — down from 27 hours in 1965, according to the Americans' Use of Time Project, an University of Maryland research study. Men spend more time today on housework — 9 ½ hours a week, up from 5 hours.
Interestingly, when people are asked how they feel about the cleanliness of their homes, they say they're satisfied with their own standards — but they think other peoples' homes look pretty messy, said John Robinson, a sociology professor who directs the Use of Time project.
Yet dustballs seem to be more socially acceptable now.
"So your mom can do open-heart surgery on the kitchen floor?" Robinson shrugs. "Does that make your life any better?"
Jolayne Houtz can be reached at 206- 464-3122 or jhoutz@seattletimes.com.