Companies offering housekeeping services will start signing up casual contract workers as full-time employees starting next month.

The change in the status of employees, from ad hoc housekeepers into staff members with formal contracts and more rights and responsibilities, was introduced by the government in an attempt to both regulate the industry and protect the workers.

"We will hold a public bidding process to find some housekeeping companies that can sign labor contracts with their housekeepers very soon and give them some subsidies to promote the change," said Wang Qining, director of the migrant workers work department at the Beijing Bureau of Human Resource and Social Security.

Wang said the move is aimed at changing the status of thousands of housekeepers into employees during 2010.

A pilot project was launched in April but it is not yet known how many housekeepers - who were previously technically self-employed - have been reclassified as employees.

The most significant impact from the change is likely to be the fact that housekeeping companies, which had previously acted as agents that introduced housekeepers to householders, will in future need to spend extra money on purchasing insurance to protect their workers, he said.

"The government will give the companies some subsidies to cover the additional cost, but some companies will also transfer the cost to clients" Wang told to METRO.

He cited the example of Beijing Verymaids Inc, a company that targets the high-end market in the capital and which charges more than the average level in the housekeeping market.

It was part of the pilot program launched in April.

"The company can afford the cost of contracts and insurance because it can get more from its clients, but such clients are still few in the city," Wang said.

Yin Jianfeng, general manager with Beijing Verymaids Inc, said his company has already signed contracts with more than 40 housekeepers and has bought insurance for them.

"That number is about 50 percent of the total number of housekeepers in the company and we will raise the percentage to 80 percent in the future," Yin said.

He said his company is the only one in the city so far that has bought insurance for its employees and made them into staff members instead of unprotected freelancers.

Yin said he investigated the local market for six months before his company opened in March and found that there was about 200,000 families in the city that could afford the high-end service they provide.

"We only want 1 percent of them to become our clients and they can support our business," Yin said.

Chen Guilan, a housekeeper from Anhui province who has worked in Beijing for two years, said she has not yet signed a labor contract with a housekeeping company.

She said, under the old system, companies only take the responsibility to introduce housekeepers to families for a commission fee and do not care about whether the housekeepers or the families are satisfied with each other.

"It would be pretty good and more steady for us to be employees of housekeeping companies and get a regular salary from them every month," Chen said.