I met Doreen, a single, middle-aged White British healthcare worker from a working-class background, on my way to interview a service-provider. We talked about my research, and I asked her what she thought about outsourcing cleaning, expecting her to say she had never done it. Instead, she looked at me thoughtfully and said she was not a great cleaner. Some years ago, at her sister's suggestion, she had outsourced cleaning, first to a friend and then to a migrant service-provider. When the service-provider left due to a family emergency, Doreen found out she had been an undocumented worker. This made Doreen reluctant to outsource again. Around this time, her sister became terminally ill. Her sister's husband was working long hours to keep the household going, so they outsourced their housecleaning. When Doreen's sister died, he continued outsourcing cleaning as he juggled childcare with a full-time job. Doreen's elderly parents were helping, but Doreen's mother's eyesight was deteriorating and their own house was showing signs of neglect. Doreen's parents were proud of their working-class roots and, therefore, she said they would not think of outsourcing cleaning. Based on her own experience, Doreen could clearly see a need for it; however, she did not dare to suggest it to her parents.

Introduction

A few years ago, Bowman and Cole noted that it was time for researchers to move on from ‘being less concerned with the class status and alleged needs of customers’ to how its commodification was being structured (2014:199). However, as Doreen's story illustrates, demand or need for outsourcing is not circumscribed to a homogeneous, ahistorical social group. Demand might also shape work conditions, and, hence, requires continual evaluation of how and why people outsource. This chapter presents new perspectives on prevailing understandings of outsourced housecleaning, which then feed into the discussion of the conditions of work in subsequent chapters.

My analysis draws on Ray and Qayum (2009/2010) and Pollert's (1996) theoretical frameworks, both of which slot in with Douglas's (1986/1987) cross-cultural argument that the way people think is constrained by socially created and ‘naturalised’ institutionalised thinking styles. Ray and Qayum located the labour relations of paid domestic work in Kolkata, India, in the interstices between feudalistic and capitalist work structures.