Fair trade in your living room and bathroom |
| Tuesday, 22 January 2008 | ||||||||
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When we think of fair trade, coffee and chocolate may jump to mind but what about the day-to-day transactions that we carry out in our own homes? Fair Trade Cleaning has come to sweep away the guilt of hiring a cleaner and perhaps help clean-up some worker exploitation. Cleaning, for most of us, is far from fun but it is necessary. In many cases, cleaning jobs are workforce entry points for new Canadians or the vulnerable. Too often, these jobs are exploitive and leave workers with barely/not enough to survive, as illustrated in Jan Wong 's in depth report in the Globe and Mail. When we talk of fair trade coffee, it is easier to imagine a living wage, but what should a living wage look like in a rich, "first world" country?
Jan Wong, writing in 2006 (minimum wage in Ontario has subsequently risen to 8 / hour), found that being a maid made her invisible and ill:
I am working undercover — though I applied for this job using my real name — but this is ridiculous. I'm practically under the covers with them. Then I understand. We are maids, and therefore we are invisible, subhuman, beneath notice. We are the untouchables of the Western world. If all goes well, a maid could earn $300 x 50 weeks = $15,000 a year. This would be less than 1/2 the living wage for a family of three, according to Statistics Canada. Of course, the chemicals, long hours, awkward cleaning positions, toxic messes and shit that cleaners face leads to more injuries than customers would like to hear about. Fair Trade Cleaning's, Matti Sevink, based the company's wages on the Statistics Canada guidelines:
What is to say that $16 / hour is fairer than $17 or $15? There may be no perfect answer but the efforts of companies like Fair Trade Cleaning at least raise the issue. Perhaps, we can leave the discussion with a radical quote, given today's world of Walmarts and McDonald's wages:
For statistics enthusiasts, here is the Low Income Cut-Off information from Statistics Canada .
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