Cleaning Out One’s Conscience

Thank you for your column on housekeepers (“Close Encounters With Ambivalence--and the Servants Who Inspire It,” by James Ricci, June 18). We feel comfortable in our home while our cleaning lady is here, as we pay good wages. Our social conscience is as clean as our apartment because we treat her with respect and frequently express our appreciation for her and the great job she does. We’re relieved from the burden of this--quite frankly--crummy, dirty job, which seems all the more reason to compensate well for this type of work.

Barbara L. Saevig

Los Angeles

Instead of stewing in liberal guilt over hiring a housekeeper, Ricci might consider the real costs of his decision to employ a foreigner. He gains immediately by getting a presentable apartment and clean socks for not much dough. But he pays a high price in other ways.

He is complicit in fueling California’s skyrocketing population growth. In the near future, overpopulation will strain the basic ways that society operates, creating dysfunction with electricity brownouts, water shortages and increased traffic. Ricci should exchange his useless pangs of guilt for environmental responsibility.

Brenda Walker

Berkeley

*

Either give the Guatemalan cleaning woman a $10 raise or clean up your own filthy mess and stop whining!

Alice Haney

Rialto

*

It was obvious from Ricci’s feelings that he came from a family where in-home help was not the norm. In my family, going back at least four generations, there has always been in-home help. And we’ve never thought of these folks as “servants.” Rather, they’re considered valued members of the family. Women and men who clean for a living are to be respected and praised; there is nothing demeaning or servile in domestic work.

Kate Reeves

Mountain Center

*

Ricci should get to know his housekeeper, talk with her about her family situation, meet her kids, if she has any, and visit the public schools they attend. He might be pleasantly surprised.

Sara Fields

Culver City