Cleaners - are they worth it?

Ask a cleaner if they want to be paid cash in hand, or if they want to hand over a portion of their hard earned cash to the Government.

There are many reasons cleaners want to be paid cash in hand (apart from the obvious one of more money). These may include not wishing to declare extra income to social welfare etc...

What 'additional entitlements' exactly would cleaners get anyway? A free teeth clean once a year, as long as the paperwork is in order?

Capitalism is all about 'rich taking advantage of the poor'.

Always remembered and reverted to an interview with a Peter Hamill (reformed US alcoholic author, son of Irish immigrant) on Kenny Live some years back.

When suggested to him that America was such a great place that a poor unskilled immigrant could aspire to become college educated, he replied:

"probably not, but through their unskilled labours their children sure can".

umop3p!sdn said:

Ask a cleaner if they want to be paid cash in hand, or if they want to hand over a portion of their hard earned cash to the Government.

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Why not turn the question around - and tell the client they need to up the payment to cover the tax & PRSI?

Or go a step forward and presume that your cleaner is paying their tax and PRSI.

Apart from MissRibena, no one else on this thread has stated the presumption that they are not.

umop3p!sdn said:

What 'additional entitlements' exactly would cleaners get anyway? A free teeth clean once a year, as long as the paperwork is in order?

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It's no just PRSI, although when you are on a low income small things like dental cover do matter. There are holiday entitlements, parental leave, force majeure (sp?) etc. Most important is the protection of legislation with regard to health and safety, equality, redundancy, unfair dismissal etc. It's very difficult to claim your employer has treated you unfairly when you are afraid of incurring the wrath of the revenue.

Capitalism might be about the rich taking advantage of the poor but it's supposed to be within the boundaries of the law which attempts to redress the balance for the disadvantaged.

If the cleaner or their employer don't want to hand over their "hard earned cash" in taxes, why should anyone?

Rebecca

SineWave said:

Or go a step forward and presume that your cleaner is paying their tax and PRSI.

Apart from MissRibena, no one else on this thread has stated the presumption that they are not.

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Indeed. I suspect that nobody reading or involved in this thread, including SineWave, believes that many, if any, domestic cleaners declare their meagre earnings.

Are we asking a little too much to expect someone earning little more than minimum wage for cleaning to declare this income to the Revenue? A little hard to swallow when you consider the millionaires that paid no tax/ very little tax last year?

Is that a wind-up Carpenter?

Carpenter said:

I suppose it can be all too easy to be self righteous about whether you have a cleaner or not, I think it's perfectly valid for people to employ help if they need it. BUT there is a growing number of people who rely on this help for reasons other than need, perhaps its laziness or greed ("I can earn more (thus) consume more if I pay someone else to do stuff I don't want to do").

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There is a very good book I have read on just this subject. It's called "Global Woman" and is edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. It deals with women from less priviliged socioeconomic backgrounds who leave their countries for the "first world" and take up jobs as cleaners and nannies. It looks at how "we" are only too eager to pay them minimal amounts of money to mind our children and clean our mess. "We" salve our consciences by believing that in doing so "we" are helping them, after all the money we give them is still better than what they would get at home etc.....

I would recommend the book to anyone .... it's quite a wake up call.