Too posh to dust? Why getting a cleaner still sparks a class war

Why does outsourcing housework still sit so uncomfortably with some of us? Oliver Keens breaks down his own misgivings and explains why he’ll never be paying anyone else to scrub his toilet

To clean or not to clean: Does farming out domestic work make you posh? (Getty)

I like my house to be clean at all times, just in case anyone comes round. This includes if a cleaner comes round – which pretty much answers the question of why I’ve never had one. Yet I didn’t realise there was more going on behind a lifetime of unease around the notion of hired help until I was on a date recently. She asked if I had a cleaner, the clear implication being: “I’m not going anywhere near your bed if you don’t regularly have it professionally cleaned.” Something I had always considered to be a luxury was suddenly being presented as mandatory. I replied with my honest answer: “A cleaner? That’s a bit… posh, isn’t it?” It was an instinctive judgement that I couldn’t justify at the time. After weeks of lying on my spotless yet empty bed, I slowly started unpicking why I’d used that specific word: “posh”.

The last major discussion around the status of cleaners in British life came in May 2020, during the Covid pandemic, when the Tories let them return to work while close family members were still shut out. It led many to decry the priorities of a government that seemed so at ease with domestic servitude that it prioritised “the staff” over basic family bonds. Guardian columnist Owen Jones sparked a debate about whether employers of cleaners should effectively furlough their staff, which amusingly prodded the sensibilities of the 17 per cent of UK households who use them.

Confusion and anxiety over the subject is a relatively new phenomenon. Bertie Wooster never fretted about Jeeves; Will Smith never felt awkward around his butler, Geoffrey, in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. By contrast, today I don’t know anyone who doesn’t engage in a frenzied bout of “pre-cleaning” before their cleaner arrives. In part, to hide the drug paraphernalia and evidence of a sexual private life. But it’s also due to a latent uneasiness about someone else doing tasks that most able-bodied humans can do themselves.

Where I start to differ from my peers is when the issue of class is mentioned. Many who identify as working class see my uneasiness around the concept of a cleaner as a form of prejudice – indicative of a squeamish middle class who are scared of engaging with a profession that is, of course, completely noble. And yet my middle-class friends who employ cleaners happily see themselves as noble, too – being an ally of the working class by contributing a fair wage to people who might otherwise go without. They frequently bust out unusually folksy idioms such as “An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” when they justify it.

But invoking British concepts of class is, in my opinion, reductive when talking about an industry that on average employs more migrant workers than any other in the UK. In London, the city where I live, well over 50 per cent of cleaners are migrants. As the son of a non-British person, I’ve watched countless Brits haplessly place someone from a different culture into the creaky confines of the British class system. But foreign cleaners don’t suffer from classism – they suffer from being exploited in a system where they can seldom advocate for themselves due to their lack of language skills.

In the words of Maria Gonzalez-Merello, a barrister who has run a free legal advice clinic for cleaners for over a decade: “It is easier to manipulate foreigners. Their expectations of themselves are very low, because they work in isolation. They came to this country with great expectations, and arrive here and see that it is like a jungle.” Evoking a similar image, Ecuadorian cleaner Judit Morales said after winning a pay dispute earlier this year against her employer, a private school in south London, that “it felt like facing a lion”. It makes me wonder: how can anyone be sure they’re not the lion?

The vast majority of UK cleaners are women (Getty)

Every single person I’ve met who employs a cleaner holds the same, mantra-like belief: it’s fine, as long as you pay them well and treat them fairly. But how far do we go as a society to measure those two things? If we employ via an agency, do we do due diligence to make sure our cleaners are actually getting paid? Even the most naive of us will have a working awareness that the cleaning industry is rife with exploitation, coercion, fraud and illegality – but how many of us turn a blind eye if it means we can come home to clean floors and a freshly scrubbed toilet?

In the more common instance of privately hiring a cleaner one-to-one, the questions get even bigger. You decide their wage, for example. People might espouse “an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work”, but the reality is that the average hourly rate for a UK cleaner is going down, not up. It’s currently £10.21, having dropped 3 per cent from 2020. If you’re earning more than you did in 2020, then why isn’t your cleaner?

If you’re doing your own individual deals with cleaners, you get the chance to buck capitalism and come up with your own, non-market-driven idea of what a cleaner should be worth. You get to go beyond what your local network of fellow cleaner employers say is the “going rate” and decide on a wage you truly feel comfortable with.

Foreign cleaners don’t suffer from classism – they suffer from being exploited in a system where they can seldom advocate for themselves

Jones’s point during the pandemic was that wealthy employers should pay their cleaners to stay at home and not put them at risk of catching a then-virulent disease. This spirit still exists – I know people who will pay their cleaner’s wages for an absent week, if they’re too ill to work, or when they have a family emergency. In short, hiring someone who is self-employed doesn’t mean you have always to be self-interested.

If class is an irrelevant factor, then, in debating the ethics of employing a cleaner, and payment does feel fair, here’s my final point of discomfort: feminism. On the one hand, there’s an argument that outsourcing domestic work can enable women to climb the corporate ladder and achieve more success – particularly if they’re single or in a partnership where their other half doesn’t pull their weight at home (as is the case in the majority of heterosexual pairings. A 2019 study showed that just 7 per cent of couples shared domestic tasks equally). 

On the other, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that 93 per cent of the UK’s cleaners are female; women must employ other women in order to live the feminist dream and escape into a time-poor, money-rich career, far from the drudgery of yore. There still seems to be an ingrained assumption that housework is a “woman’s work”, even when it’s being farmed out for cash. It doesn’t sit quite right with me.

Clearly, not everyone is ripping off their cleaner. Clearly, not every cleaner is being denied agency. But equally clearly, even the faintest suspicion that I might be an exploitative employer is enough to ensure that my own deep-rooted misgivings about the whole thing aren’t going away any time soon. My friends are entitled to think I’m a bit prejudiced. But I’ll still always think it’s a little bit posh – no matter how many dates I might scare off.