Fun, Green and Fair - Fair trade in your living room and bathroom

Fair trade in your living room and bathroom

Tuesday, 22 January 2008

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:

Meanwhile, Mr. Filth and his paramour are necking on the dusty couch. She's in his lap, giggling. He's feeling her up. My middle-aged partner has a clear view from the galley kitchen, which opens onto the living room. I see them every time I step into the hall for more paper towels.

...

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.

...

[The owner of the maid company ] would pay me $9 an hour until I gained experience. After a few weeks, he would put me on salary — $600 every two weeks. To earn that, I would have to work Saturdays, but I would get one weekday off every other week.

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:

A living wage for an urban family of three, according to Statistics Canada, is $31,126 per year or $16.00 an hour. So the minimum wage for the workers at Fair Trade Cleaning is $16.00 per hour. We want our clients to know that if they have a single mother cleaning their house for them, her kids aren’t going hungry and neither is she.

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:

No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

For statistics enthusiasts, here is the Low Income Cut-Off information from Statistics Canada .

And just because he is Woody Guthrie. We present Woody Guthrie's, Union Maid - thanks to woodyguthrie.org

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come 'round
She always stood her ground.

Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.

This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,
She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.
She always got her way when she struck for better pay.
She'd show her card to the National Guard
And this is what she'd say

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

fair trade

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