Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (9 page)

As it turns out, the mere fact of having a unit to myself makes me an aristocrat within the Blue Haven community. The other long-term residents, whom I encounter at the communal laundry shed, are blue-collar people with uniforms and overalls to wash, and generally quiet at night. Mostly they are couples with children, much like the white working-class people occasionally glimpsed on sitcoms, only, unlike their TV counterparts, my neighbors are crowded three or four into an efficiency, or at most a one-bedroom, apartment. One young guy asks which unit I'm in and then tells me he used to live in that very same one himself—along with two friends. A middle-aged woman with a three-year-old granddaughter in tow tells me, in a comforting tone, that it is always hard at the beginning, living in a motel, especially if you're used to a house, but you adjust after a while, you put it out of your mind. She, for example, has been at the Blue Haven for eleven years now.

I am rested and ready for anything when I arrive at The Maids' office suite
Monday at 7:30 A.M. I know nothing about cleaning services like this one, which,
according to the brochure I am given, has over three hundred franchises nationwide,
and most of what I know about domestics in general comes from nineteenth-century
British novels and Upstairs, Downstairs.
[11]
Prophetically enough, I caught a rerun of that very show on PBS over the weekend
and was struck by how terribly correct the servants looked in their black-and-white
uniforms and how much wiser they were than their callow, egotistical masters.
We too have uniforms, though they are more oafish than dignified—ill-fitting
and in an overloud combination of kelly-green pants and a blinding sunflower-yellow
polo shirt. And, as is explained in writing and over the next day and a half
of training, we too have a special code of decorum. No smoking anywhere, or
at least not within fifteen minutes of arrival at a house. No drinking, eating,
or gum chewing in a house. No cursing in a house, even if the owner is not present,
and—perhaps to keep us in practice—no obscenities even in the office. So this
is Downstairs, is my chirpy first thought. But I have no idea, of course, just
how far down these stairs will take me.

Forty minutes go by before anyone acknowledges my presence with more than a
harried nod. During this time the other employees arrive, about twenty of them,
already glowing in their uniforms, and breakfast on the free coffee, bagels,
and doughnuts The Maids kindly provides for us. All but one of the others are
female, with an average age I would guess in the late twenties, though the range
seems to go from prom-fresh to well into the Medicare years. There is a pleasant
sort of bustle as people get their breakfasts and fill plastic buckets with
rags and bottles of cleaning fluids, but surprisingly little conversation outside
of a few references to what people ate (pizza) and drank (Jell-O shots are mentioned)
over the weekend. Since the room in which we gather contains only two folding
chairs, both of them occupied, the other new girl and I sit cross-legged on
the floor, silent and alert, while the regulars get sorted into teams of three
or four and dispatched to the day's list of houses. One of the women explains
to me that teams do not necessarily return to the same houses week after week,
nor do you have any guarantee of being on the same team from one day to the
next. This, I suppose, is one of the advantages of a corporate cleaning service
to its customers: there are no sticky and possibly guilt-ridden relationships
involved, because the customers communicate almost entirely with Tammy, the
office manager, or with Ted, the franchise owner and our boss.
[12]
The advantage to the cleaning person is harder to determine, since the pay compares
so poorly to what an independent cleaner is likely to earn—up to $15 an hour,
I've heard. While I wait in the inner room, where the phone is and Tammy has
her desk, to be issued a uniform, I hear her tell a potential customer on the
phone that The Maids charges $25 per person-hour. The company gets $25 and we
get $6.65 for each hour we work? I think I must have misheard, but a few minutes
later I hear her say the same thing to another inquirer. So the only advantage
of working here as opposed to freelancing is that you don't need a clientele
or even a car. You can arrive straight from welfare or, in my case, the bus
station—fresh off the boat.
[13]

At last, after all the other employees have sped off in the company's eye-catching green-and-yellow cars, I am led into a tiny closet-sized room off the inner office to learn my trade via videotape. The manager at another maid service where I'd applied had told me she didn't like to hire people who had done cleaning before because they were resistant to learning the company's system, so I prepare to empty my mind of all prior housecleaning experience. There are four tapes—dusting, bathrooms, kitchen, and vacuuming—each starring an attractive, possibly Hispanic young woman who moves about serenely in obedience to the male voiceover: For vacuuming, begin in the master bedroom; when dusting, begin with the room directly off the kitchen. When you enter a room, mentally divide it into sections no wider than your reach. Begin in the section to your left and, within each section, move from left to right and top to bottom. This way nothing is ever overlooked.

I like Dusting best, for its undeniable logic and a certain kind of austere beauty. When you enter a house, you spray a white rag with Windex and place it in the left pocket of your green apron. Another rag, sprayed with disinfectant, goes into the middle pocket, and a yellow rag bearing wood polish in the right-hand pocket. A dry rag, for buffing surfaces, occupies the right-hand pocket of your slacks. Shiny surfaces get Windexed, wood gets wood polish, and everything else is wiped dust-free with disinfectant. Every now and then Ted pops in to watch with me, pausing the video to underscore a particularly dramatic moment: “See how she's working around the vase? That's an accident waiting to happen.” If Ted himself were in a video, it would have to be a cartoon, because' the only features sketched onto his pudgy face are brown buttonlike eyes and a tiny pug nose; his belly, encased in a polo shirt, overhangs the waistline of his shorts. “You know, all this was figured out with a stopwatch,” he tells me with something like pride. When the video warns against oversoaking our rags with cleaning fluids, he pauses it to tell me there's a danger in undersoaking too, especially if it's going to slow me down. “Cleaning fluids are less expensive than your time.” It's good to know that something is cheaper than my time, or that in the hierarchy of the company's values I rank above Windex.

Vacuuming is the most disturbing video, actually a double feature beginning with an introduction to the special backpack vacuum we are to use. Yes, the vacuum cleaner actually straps onto your back, a chubby fellow who introduces himself as its inventor explains. He suits up, pulling the straps tight across and under his chest and then says proudly into the camera: “See, I am the vacuum cleaner.” It weighs only ten pounds, he claims, although, as I soon find out, with the attachments dangling from the strap around your waist, the total is probably more like fourteen. What about my petulant and much-pampered lower back? The inventor returns to the theme of human/machine merger: when properly strapped in, we too will be vacuum cleaners, constrained only by the cord that attaches us to an electrical outlet, and vacuum cleaners don't have backaches. Somehow all this information exhausts me, and I watch the second video, which explains the actual procedures for vacuuming, with the detached interest of a cineast. Could the model maid be an actual maid and the model home someone's actual dwelling? And who are these people whose idea of decorating is matched pictures of mallard ducks in flight and whose house is perfectly characterless and pristine even before the model maid sets to work?

At first I find the videos on kitchens and bathrooms baffling, and it takes
me several minutes to realize why: there is no water, or almost no water, involved.
I was taught to clean by my mother, a compulsive housekeeper who employed water
so hot you needed rubber gloves to get into it and in such Niagaralike quantities
that most microbes were probably crushed by the force of it before the soap
suds had a chance to rupture their cell walls. But germs are never mentioned
in the videos provided by The Maids. Our antagonists exist entirely in the visible
world—soap scum, dust, counter crud, dog hair, stains, and smears—and are
to be attacked by damp rag or, in hardcore cases, by Dobie (the brand of plastic
scouring pad we use). We scrub only to remove impurities that might be detectable
to a customer by hand or by eye; otherwise our only job is to wipe. Nothing
is said about the possibility of transporting bacteria, by rag or by hand, from
bathroom to kitchen or even from one house to the next. It is the “cosmetic
touches” that the videos emphasize and that Ted, when he wanders back into the
room, continually directs my eye to. Fluff up all throw pillows and arrange
them symmetrically. Brighten up stainless steel sinks with baby oil. Leave all
spice jars, shampoos, etc., with their labels facing outward. Comb out the fringes
of Persian carpets with a pick. Use the vacuum cleaner to create a special,
fernlike pattern in the carpets. The loose ends of toilet paper and paper towel
rolls have to be given a special fold (the same one you'll find in hotel bathrooms).
“Messes” of loose paper, clothing, or toys are to be stacked into “neat messes.”
Finally, the house is to be sprayed with the cleaning service's signature floral-scented
air freshener, which will signal to the owners, the moment they return home,
that, yes, their house has been “cleaned.”
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After a day's training I am judged fit to go out with a team, where I soon discover that life is nothing like the movies, at least not if the movie is Dusting. For one thing, compared with our actual pace, the training videos were all in slow motion. We do not walk to the cars with our buckets full of cleaning fluids and utensils in the morning, we run, and when we pull up to a house, we run with our buckets to the door. Liza, a good-natured woman in her thirties who is my first team leader, explains that we are given only so many minutes per house, ranging from under sixty for a 1 ½-bathroom apartment to two hundred or more for a multibathroom “first timer.” I'd like to know why anybody worries about Ted's time limits if we're being paid by the hour but hesitate to display anything that might be interpreted as attitude. As we get to each house, Liza assigns our tasks, and I cross my fingers to ward off bathrooms and vacuuming. Even dusting, though, gets aerobic under pressure, and after about an hour of it—reaching to get door tops, crawling along floors to wipe baseboards, standing on my bucket to attack the higher shelves—I wouldn't mind sitting down with a tall glass of water. But as soon as you complete your assigned task, you report to the team leader to be assigned to help someone else. Once or twice, when the normal process of evaporation is deemed too slow, I am assigned to dry a scrubbed floor by putting rags under my feet and skating around on it. Usually, by the time I get out to the car and am dumping the dirty water used on floors and wringing out rags, the rest of the team is already in the car with the motor running. Liza assures me that they've never left anyone behind at a house, not even, presumably, a very new person whom nobody knows.

In my interview, I had been promised a thirty-minute lunch break, but this turns out to be a five-minute pit stop at a convenience store, if that. I bring my own sandwich—the same turkey breast and cheese every day—as do a couple of the others; the rest eat convenience store fare, a bagel or doughnut salvaged from our free breakfast, or nothing at all. The two older married women I'm teamed up with eat best—sandwiches and fruit. Among the younger women, lunch consists of a slice of pizza, a “pizza pocket” (a roll of dough surrounding some pizza sauce), or a small bag of chips. Bear in mind we are not office workers, sitting around idling at the basal metabolic rate. A poster on the wall in the office cheerily displays the number of calories burned per minute at our various tasks, ranging from about 3.5 for dusting to 7 for vacuuming. If you assume an average of 5 calories per minute in a seven-hour day (eight hours minus time for travel between houses), you need to be taking in 2,100 calories in addition to the resting minimum of, say, 900 or so. I get pushy with Rosalie, who is new like me and fresh from high school in a rural northern part of the state, about the meagerness of her lunches, which consist solely of Doritos—a half bag from the day before or a freshly purchased small-sized bag. She just didn't have anything in the house, she says (though she lives with her boyfriend and his mother), and she certainly doesn't have any money to buy lunch, as I find out when I offer to fetch her a soda from a Quik Mart and she has to admit she doesn't have eighty-nine cents. I treat her to the soda, wishing I could force her, mommylike, to take milk instead. So how does she hold up for an eight- or even nine-hour day? “Well,” she concedes, “I get dizzy sometimes.”

How poor are they, my coworkers? The fact that anyone is working this job at
all can be taken as prima facie evidence of some kind of desperation or at least
a history of mistakes and disappointments, but it's not for me to ask. In the
prison movies that provide me with a mental guide to comportment, the new guy
doesn't go around shaking hands and asking, “Hi there, what are you in for?”
So I listen, in the cars and when we're assembled in the office, and learn,
first, that no one seems to be homeless. Almost everyone is embedded in extended
families or families artificially extended with housemates. People talk about
visiting grandparents in the hospital or sending birthday cards to a niece's
husband; single mothers live with their own mothers or share apartments with
a coworker or boyfriend. Pauline, the oldest of us, owns her own home, but she
sleeps on the living room sofa, while her four grown children and three grandchildren
fill up the bedrooms.
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