This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.
But presumably would not be for four hours a week, since they would do more maintenance-like cleaning. Once a month, yeah, it’s going to take that long.
Why wouldn’t it take that long? When you hire people to do housekeeping they don’t just come for the exact amount of time you need them on an infrequent, case by case basis. You generally have to agree to a standard number of hours and days or a flat rate per day. They’re trying to make a living. If you can’t give them consistency and a meaningful amount of hours, they won’t work for you (or only will temporarily). They will find someone else who can provide more stability.
All that being said, what do you think this will cost? Several of you are scoffing at my numbers but I am very curious what you think they will leave their house for on a daily basis and how many days a month they would be coming by. Plus all the taxes and such that come with doing it legally.
If we’re trying to compare this to some sort of robot that does all your chores, then we have to at least start at 3 days a week. I’d compromise at 2 I guess but 8 days a month doesn’t seem like a fair comparison to a full-time robot chore handler.
If you clean a house once a month, it will take longer than doing the same thing once a week. You will end up spending more hours total, but it won't be four hours per visit, more like one or two. You spread the tasks out. Clean kitchen and den one visit. Clean bedrooms one visit. Clean bathrooms one visit. Or whatever.
The total cleaning time (and thus price) goes up, but it's not 4x what you're getting now, which a whole-house cleaning once a month would be.
Once a month and it’s a different task each time for an hour or two? No one does that - a monthly or bi-monthly cleaning service is $200-$400 and they generally do the whole place in one fell swoop and they’re definitely not going to agree to cutting their pay since you don’t want your full house serviced after taking the time to prep, come out, and maybe say no to another job. I don’t know if you have freelanced before, but this is how you think when you engage in contract work. “Time is money” applies 10x compared to a salaried job. All of this is to say 3-4hrs is very typical. You seem to be coming up with the single thinnest definition of what constitutes hiring for housework and it just doesn’t reflect 99% of how these hires go.
Also, we are comparing to a robot that does all your chores any day. Once a month is not a fair comparison to begin with. This is carrots to oranges.
Let’s be super generous here. $100/day twice a week for a basic pass at your house. Dishes, laundry, some wipe downs, put things way, standard chores. $800/mo, $9600/yr. Plus payroll service/taxes/etc. Hell do $100 once a week, which you’d be lucky to get. This is a $5-6k a year investment for the bare minimum and you’re still doing 80% of the chores annually. If you’ve got kids this person is barely making a dent.
Hiring people is expensive. If it isn’t, you’re not treating them with basic dignity.
