Thanks Amanda for writing about "Nickled and Dimed," which I last read like more than 10 years ago. I still remember her experience with a "Merry Maids" type cleaning company in Maine. It was striking how the owner of this business was conning the home-owning customers into thinking they were getting a thorough cleaning--they weren't. And also how he just would not pay his all female workforce more than $7.50/hour.

I'm reminded of how Romans and other slave holding societies thought of manual laborers as more or less livestock that had the power of speech.