Fitted Sheets and Full Toilets

I am very much unlike Maggie, the maid from Newfoundland with whom Jan Wong is partnered in her series on working as a maid in Toronto. Maggie seems to enjoy cleaning: she’ll remove hair from a hairbrush, pluck dead petals from flowers in vases, and she actually knows how to “fold a fitted sheet into a neat square” (I didn’t think that was physically possible). I may get the urge to clean my apartment thoroughly maybe once a quarter – a frequency that is slightly unhygienic and certainly slovenly.

However, cleaning my home does occur more often than four times a year (I’m not a total slob). But it is usually rushed, with several areas ignored, and usually happens when there are people coming over, which is why there was a while when I considered having some sort of cleaning service. But I couldn’t get over the middle class guilt of someone else cleaning up my soap scum and sucking up my dust and dead skin cells. And Jan Wong’s piece has made me realize why I have this guilt.

Ms. Wong is quick to point out that there is a difference between house cleaning companies where the employees tend to be Canadian-born women with little education, and entrepreneurial individuals who tend to be highly-educated immigrants. When you pay an entrepreneur $80 to clean your house, they get the whole fee. When you pay a cleaning company, the maid sees very little of that. And so, people who don't have the means to work for themselves, remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and class oppression.

What disturbed me most, though, was the treatment received by the maids at the hands of the clients. They were supposed to be invisible, some ugly necessity that was tolerated to get a nasty job done. They weren’t allowed to talk, or use the clients’ bathrooms. Their presence was basically ignored, unless there was some sort of foul job to be done: there is a rule that maids do not have to touch undergarments, however Ms. Wong was faced with a toilet full of urine and feces to clean, and in one case, a client left dog poo on the floor for two days because they knew the maids were coming. What is the criteria for these invisible lines of acceptability?

I think (I hope?) the individual stories that Jan Wong relates are the worst of the bunch. I have several friends who employee cleaners (none employed by a cleaning agency), who keep their houses in neat order and would never leave animal or human waste for someone else to clean up. And if you have the money, but not the time, it is a personal choice to pay someone to clean your house.

But there is a line of acceptability, which is drawn at different points for different people, as to what is appropriate for a “domestic” to do. Folding sheets neatly into a square? No problem. Cleaning an unflushed toilet? Dodgy. Picking up pet shit? Crossing the line.