Three Worlds of Cleaning: Women's Experiences of Precarious Labor in the Public Sector, Cleaning Companies and Private Households of West Germany, 1973-1998

Should the low-pay and low-skill sector of the labor market be expanded through political intervention? This question is hotly debated in present-day Germany. In the cleaning trade, precarious employment is especially widespread, with precariousness defined as the undermining of material and legal standards as well as the exclusion from the solidarity of colleagues and from institutional forms of articulating interest in works council and trade union. This article discusses the transfer of cleaners' jobs from the public sector to cleaning companies and private households since 1973. Drawing upon rare and scattered evidence contained in official statistics as well as upon journals of employers' associations and of trade unions, the author argues that cleaners experienced increasing precariousness in each of these organizational arrangements, but especially when affected by the process of "double privatization." For those who discuss future labor market strategies, the history of professional cleaning is of interest because it is paradigmatic for the whole low-skill service sector in many respects.