A laundress is a woman who is in charge of doing the laundry. Although often categorized under laundry services, a laundress specifically speaks to the female gender, who more or less performs the same function as the male. In the US, they make an impressive average salary. Read on to find out more.
What are the specific roles of a laundress?
Although not well known, being a laundress is a good career that many earn a living from. More often than not, the career takes into consideration your hands-on skill, instead of some sort of educational qualification, although having an education is always a plus. The job of a laundress requires that you perform laundry services including washing, drying, and overall caring for clothes and linens. However, just like every other job, your responsibilities could vary depending on your employer.
Going a bit further, a laundress is in charge of cleaning, steaming, ironing, and folding clothes and related items. For those that work in a hotel, their job might be more of supervision, depending on your level of expertise. Also, some laundress job roles also require that you carry out some housekeeping tasks. It all boils down to agreement.
How to become a laundress?
First, the job role of a laundress requires that you be of legal age, which is 18 or more. Aside from this, most employers expect you to have a clean criminal background record, with zero time behind bars for security’s sake. Now, moving on to the major points to consider, you are expected to be able to perform the physical tasks required for the job, with a good amount of experience doing it. Also, understanding industrial laundry equipment and having experience using them with various fabrics would be a huge plus.
Your prior laundry experience is the most important qualification for you. However, it would help to have experience working with deadlines, and excellent time management abilities. Previous experience as a customer care agent would be a good plus too.
Where can a laundress work?
A laundress can pretty much work anywhere that shuffles a lot of clothes every day. This includes homes, hospitals, hotels, stand-alone businesses, factories, and more. However, what is more, common is working with a laundry agency, for a home, or as a stand-alone business. Laundry agencies would have several clients, including homes, hospitals, hotels, and factories, to which they provide laundry services. They then employ agents who actually do the work, and pay them.
Laundresses are mostly found working for homes, where they occasionally come to tidy clothes in the home on certain days and get paid.
What is the average salary of a laundress in the US and the UK?
The exact salary for laundresses varies from one person to another. This is because the major consideration that is taken is the amount of experience such a person has. Someone with over 20 years of experience and technical expertise in handling industrial laundry machines is surely going to cost more than a domestic washing machine expert.
On average, the national average salary for a laundress is £32,059 per year in the UK. In the US, the average laundress salary is a bit more, at around $47,936 per year, which is about $23.05 per hour.