What's the difference between a janitor and a maid?

Let's say you wanted to hire someone to clean your house, so you decide that you're going to hire a maid (used to mean young girl, and there's all the tradition of women cleaning and that sort of thing associated with it too). If this is someone who's independent, she'll probably go for about $20/hr.

What if you have a firm and you need to hire someone to clean your office building, probably about 10 people. You could hire 10 maids (each at $20/hr), and they'd be independent contractors. Or on the other hand, you could purchase some captial stock, like cleaning fluids, vacuum cleaners, those floor buffer things that aren't quite zambonis, squeegies, power washers, etc which will last for a good while and then hire people who can clean stuff using your stuff. This will cost you about $12/hr for these workers, and that's a bit on the high end, like if they're unionized. Naturally, you'd rather go with these, and they'd be called janitors, which is from the Latin for doorkeeper.

What these two have in common is that they both are involved in hygenic maitenence; you might call them cleaning people. This entire post, I'm poking fun at Russell Roberts, because for being politically correct and calling maids "cleaning people," he confused someone who thought he meant janitors, and got labeled "Hack of the Day." Too bad, but remember this lesson: political correctness isn't free.

But don't get me wrong, I like Russ. In fact, you should all go buy this book if you haven't already read it. Don't ask to borrow my copy; it's upside down.