According to the flyer in yesterday’s mail, “Life’s too short to clean your own home.”

Naturally, for the people who work for The Cleaning Authority, life is not to short to clean someone else’s home — and love it, as this woman on the inside flap apparently does:

Maybe she’s happy because she has a job she likes — even though she would be miserable cleaning her own home.

The sociological truth is that it is different to clean someone else’s home. Today’s corporate cleaners are different from an informal cleaning relationship.  Corporatizing housework changes its social nature.  That doesn’t mean it’s not unpleasant work. But cleaning the toilet of an anonymous person may be less degrading than cleaning the toilet of someone you have a personal (subordinate) relationship with. On the other hand, maybe people love cleaning toilets for people they really love.

The rationality of market dynamics ideally also makes gender irrelevant.  In that ideal, not real, marketized world, then, maybe there is no such thing as housework — just work and workers. Would that be better?