Domestic Labour and the Rise of Household Cleaning Companies

This project investigates the marketisation of household cleaning through private agencies Australia and the United Kingdom, examining how domestic labour is reorganised, standardised, and transformed into a profit-oriented service sector. Once performed unpaid within families or informally between individuals, cleaning is increasingly delivered through businesses that hire workers, set standards, and sell these services for profit. The research asks how agency-mediated cleaning reshapes labour relations and what the consequences are for workers. By focusing on agency-mediated cleaning, this project opens a new research field: it reveals how domestic labour is being formalised into a distinct industry, with its own managerial logics, contractual practices, and profit-making strategies. Studying it matters because it shows how an essential form of everyday work is being transformed into a commercial industry. Contemporary evidence will be interpreted alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources in the UK, such as diaries, autobiographies, and household manuals. This allows for a dual comparison: (1) historically, by tracing continuities and ruptures in UK domestic labour from the servant model to modern agency-mediated work; and (2) geographically, by analysing patterns in UK cleaning alongside contemporary Australian practices, identifying shared and divergent organisational logics and labour experiences.