Don’t be afraid to ask questions about how their personnel is compensated when evaluating maid services.  In fact you may want to even have them put it in writing.

Here are the answers you don’t want – if you get them move on:

• We pay by performance – What?  Their maids are paid by how you rate their performance which translates to:
  • They aren’t paid hourly but by piece rate (see below)
  • The odds are you will be pressured to give them good feedback or they either won’t get paid or make less than minimum wage
  • It’s a scam
• We pay by the job so everybody wins – The only winners are the cleaning company that gigs the maids to wave wage / labor laws.  This translates as:
  • Wage / labor laws are skirted and it’s not uncommon for the really good maids to wind up making less per hour since they are paid the same no matter how long they clean
  • In most cases your hired maids will bug out faster than they should since they don’t get paid more for staying longer to do a good job

The other answer that should give you pause is we pay minimum wage.  While they are actually following the labor laws unlike piece rate they are paying way to little.