| Double Take |

Clean Homes, Clean Hearts

By Rochel Samet | August 19, 2020

The summer vacationers snatched away our serenity and cleaning help

Daniella: Why can’t you accept that everything’s more expensive during the summer?

Minna: How can you enjoy a vacation at the expense of the local residents?

Daniella

The bungalow was a mess. Shani’s pajamas, Bini’s blankie, Yoni’s socks from the past week. Paper cups, leftover cereal bowls, Daniel’s Clics. Food wrappers and an overflowing garbage bag (we needed to buy a garbage can already!). Four books, three sandals in different sizes, a few pages torn out of some magazine, a melting Popsicle, a trail of broken potato chips.

I took one breath, then another. Four minutes until I had to leave for camp. Four minutes to change into a wig, put on some eyeliner and lipstick, grab some lunch (forget about breakfast). How could four minutes stretch to putting this place into some semblance of order? But what were my options? Leave it for when the kids came back? Try to cook supper surrounded by cranky children and sticky breakfast remains? I needed to do laundry.

But laundry, apparently, was not fated to happen. Like it didn’t happen yesterday. Or the day before.

I thought wistfully of Claudia, my dependable cleaning lady back home. She came every day, knew her routine, was on top of the laundry and the straightening up and the deep cleaning and the linen. I needed Claudia. I needed help. I was working full days as a day camp director, had six kids with me in the country, and my husband tended to turn up in the last few minutes before candle-lighting on Erev Shabbos.

I dashed on some lipstick, realizing too late it was the deep plum color I usually kept for Shabbos. My eyeliner smudged, no time to deal with it, forget it.

I jammed on my fall, a band, and slammed the door shut on the mess. For the next few hours, I had enough to focus on. And tonight, I’d figure something out about the cleaning situation. One thing was clear: It couldn’t continue this way.

I was flipping burgers on the grill when I noticed a short woman in overalls leaving the bungalow next door. For a moment, I just stared. A cleaning lady: It was like some sort of mirage in the desert. Now how could I get her number?

When the kids were in bed, I turned off my phone because it just wouldn’t stop ringing, and knocked on the neighbours’ bungalow. I knew the woman vaguely, her name was Chumy something, she sent her kids to my camp. Arons, maybe?

She greeted me brightly. She was an old-timer in this part of the mountains, I was new this summer, but most people knew me as the day camp’s new director. I’d run camp programs for years, but this was the biggest one, and the most work. I was still getting to know the staff and the kids, not to mention the campgrounds, and I was on my feet from beginning to end of the day. Some of my kids were in my camp, the boys went off on the bus to their own day camp each morning, and I had a mother’s helper for Bini. But we all arrived back home around the same time, and by the time we were done with supper, showers, and bedtime — I was beyond drained. And of course, that’s when my phone went into frantic mode.

I needed a cleaning lady. I needed a cleaning lady. We were talking sanity here.

Excerpted from Mishpacha Magazine. To view full version, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE or LOG IN.

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Comments (5)

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Mordecai Terebelo
5 years ago
Reply

Thank you for the Double Take story about the cleaning help. If I could tell Minna and Daniella one thing it would be:
There is a section of Shulchan Aruch called Choshen Mishpat that deals with the halachos of luring workers away from an employer. Ask your rav under what guidelines it is permitted. Do not let your personal feelings dictate what is permitted or forbidden. If you are not allowed, bask in the happiness that you are being moser nefesh to do the Will of Hashem.
Thank you for your thought provoking articles.
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A Reader
5 years ago
Reply

Thanks for a great magazine. Regarding the Double Take story about the cleaning ladies, I’d add that it’s extremely arrogant, narrow-minded, and a huge chillul Hashem to act as if we are “entitled” to cleaning help.
I too, am dependent on and can’t really function without my cleaning help, and fully acknowledge its role in creating a peaceful, happy home, so I fully empathize and understand where the story’s protagonists were coming from.
But just because we are blessed with demanding and time-consuming jobs and struggle to feed our own families, and are dependent on a modicum of cleanliness for basic functioning, does not “entitle” us to cleaning help.
Let’s keep in mind that the only reason the whole arrangement works is because the salaries these ladies are getting are very paltry, and nowhere near a livable wage. I certainly can’t afford to pay more. But if someone can, there is no reason a struggling cleaning woman looking to eke out a living should not take it.
As rachmanim bnei rachmanim, it’s time to look outside our own privileged world —even with all the challenges, we are extremely blessed — and realize that just because we want cleaning help, and need it, does not entitle us to demand or expect that people who work for us should take a lower wage when they can earn more. If your hardworking cleaning lady who is struggling to feed her children has the opportunity to earn more, that is her blessing and your nisayon.
May we all be blessed with paranassah tovah, and make a kiddush Hashem both amongst ourselves and the outside world, and figure out a way to keep our homes clean and functional.
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D.B.
5 years ago
Reply

I enjoyed reading last week’s Double Take, which eloquently made the cases for and against gentrification. However, in the course of contrasting the perspectives of wealthy vacationer Daniella and local resident Minna, the welfare of an important third party was omitted: that of Joanna the cleaning lady.
In all likelihood, she is worse off economically than either Daniella or Minna (who, at the very least, are able to afford cleaning help) and, along with her cleaning colleagues, would be the most negatively affected were the plan to fix cleaning wages at $15 to be implemented. Perhaps, were Joanna given the space to make her case, it would go something like this:
“I don’t enjoy switching clients and schedules every summer. Minna’s family is so friendly, and she treats me well; working for her year-round would be great. However, paying for basic necessities like rent, food, and childcare is always a challenge, and on top of that I have a special-needs child. The extra $15 an hour I make during the summer months allows me to catch up on all of our overdue bills, with a little left over to tide us over until the next emergency inevitably arises.
“I wasn’t actually planning on raising my rate to $20 an hour at the end of the summer, but lately I’ve been getting calls offering that much — from both Jews and non-Jews — and I need the pay raise just to make ends meet from month to month. It’s a free market, and nobody else expects to be paid less than what they’re worth. Why should I?
“If I could tell Daniella and Minna one thing it would be: I’d love to help both of you keep your houses in order, but I have basic needs too and won’t work for less than I’m worth. Please come to an equitable agreement between yourselves, but not one that leaves me out in the cold.”
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Tense in the Catskills
5 years ago
Reply

I am a year-round resident of the Catskills, responding to the Double Take story about the cleaning help. Let me say off the bat that it is shameful that our community degrades menial labor to the point that not one teenager in our community will clean a house, even for 30 dollars an hour, and even if their family’s survival depends on it.
I have heard stories of out-of-towners living elsewhere in America who bring back suitcases of frozen kosher meat after every plane ride to visit family, whose mikvaos use “buddy systems” for lack of paid staff, who have to negotiate Shabbos and Yom Tov with bosses who have never heard of those things and whose kids have never tasted kosher pizza.
We have it good up here in the Catskills. Where else can you live a bucolic, small-town lifestyle with a rock-bottom cost of living while enjoying cathedral-like shuls and palatial mikvaos, paid for by occasional vacationers? I noticed that Minna’s husband works at a day camp when he is not learning. I don’t think that it is the year-round community that is fully supporting the kollel’s overhead or providing for an abundance of camp jobs.
That said, I feel like Minna has expressed some subliminal feelings too many of us can relate to. The feelings of flailing around, trying to get an authoritative voice to take a stand on an important issue, of being individually responsible for maintaining a frum lifestyle amid the challenges of galus. The costs and pressures of an observant lifestyle, combined with a leadership vacuum, is creating bitter competitiveness and class tensions among us that are too real to ignore for much longer.
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Tamar Fischer
5 years ago
Reply

I usually enjoy your Double Take features, because they underscore that there is more than one perspective to most situations. However, I really could not see how anyone would defend the women who were blatantly stealing other people’s cleaning help, just because they were able to pay more. The lame excuse that “in the summer everything costs more” just does not wash.
Any person who is offering a cleaning lady double the wages her original employer is paying is creating one of two scenarios. One, the original employer is not able to match the new wage, and the cleaner comes to work for the higher bidder. Two, the original employer sees no option but to match the new wage and keeps her cleaner — now facing the possibility of having to permanently pay more. In the first instance the higher bidder has hurt the other family and helped herself. In the second, she has hurt the other and helped no one.
The callousness depicted in the story reminded me of nothing as much as of the mashal the prophet described to Dovid Hamelech after the cheit with Batsheva. There was once a rich man who had cattle and sheep in great quantity… but when he was in need of some food for a guest, he took the poor man’s one little sheep, the only thing he had, which meant everything to him.