At the Gender, Work and Organization conference GWO2014, I presented a paper based on my early findings. Later, a researcher questioned my choice of White British cleaning service-providers as a basis for theorising paid domestic work.

Introduction

Romero's (2002) excellent delineation of the structuring of unpaid and paid housework showed how outsourced housework was being transformed by modern live-out Chicana cleaners from servitude into a service occupation in the US. In this, she argued that stay-at-home employers’ close supervision of cleaners simply manifested their class privilege, as they overlooked the cleaners’ housekeeping knowledge, whose paid work experience ranged from five months to 30 years. New workers, however, often underwent induction into the work. So were they all efficient cleaners? Did they all work the same? I started my research with the assumption that all the cleaning service-providers I interviewed were good cleaners. But as I heard the service-users’ comments about their service-providers’ work, and, more importantly, the service-providers’ own descriptions of their work, the following questions arose:

• • Are some people better at doing housework than others?

• • Do (female) domestic workers inherently ‘know’ what to do, because they do housework at home?

• • How do we know when housework is well done or not well done?

Crucially, I would not have thought of these issues had I ignored the work experiences of the White British cleaners. In the process of addressing them, my argument began to develop: that cleaning can be done as work or as labour.

The words ‘work’ and ‘labour’ are used variously in literature and beyond. In Marxism, labour is understood as the human capacity to do work that produces a product, with work being the activity performed by that labour (Weeks, 2011). Hence, the oft-used term in Marxist feminist literature on domestic work is ‘paid domestic labour’. Arendt (1958, cited in Weeks, 2011:14–15, 88) used the terms to distinguish between tasks based on their social valuation and what they entail: reproductive activities are ‘labour’ and productive activities are ‘work’, linked by common political activity, ‘action’. Weeks (2011) rejected such categorisations, since they essentialise or valorise work or labour, taking it for granted. She uses the terms interchangeably in her argument that the key to social progress lies in doing less work.