Everyday tasks create a new frontier in service jobs

You can hire Sara Fisher to straighten up your room. You can hire Amber Leigh Salisbury to straighten out your love life.

And why stop there? You can call Deneane Maldonado when your child needs minding and Dennis Freeman when you want to improve your child's mind.

Of course, you could also do all those things yourself. But if you hire someone, you can save time, avoid stress, make your life less cluttered -- and maybe even better.

By the way, you'll also be fanning a series of small, glowing embers amid the ashes of the job market. American families are increasingly hiring people and companies to do what they can't do -- or don't want to.

"I am sure that the market is growing," said Freeman, owner of In-Home Tutors Atlanta, which sends tutors to client homes. "On a good week, I pay about 100 tutors, who are working with maybe 150 students. People have a lot on their plates."

The trend accelerated after the recession, starting in late 2007, cast millions of workers into unemployment. The lackluster recovery beginning in 2009 has not created enough jobs to pull all those people back onto payrolls.

The result has been a huge supply of potential entrepreneurs. Sue Cleere, for example, started She's Wired LLC after being laid off by WebMD in late 2008, just as the economy was falling off a cliff. She installs technology, fixes problems and teaches her clients how to get the most out of their devices.

Right now, Cleere said, she has enough business to consider taking on an employee or even franchising what she does in different cities. Many of her clients are themselves entrepreneurs who are running small businesses.

The trend extends through all sorts of personal needs, according to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of a new book, "The Outsourced Self."

"Every stage of life has its corresponding market service," she wrote. "I interviewed love coaches and wedding planners, birth surrogates and parenting counselors, paid friends and mourners-for-hire."

Hochschild discounts narrow economic explanations. The trend, she argued in a recent e-mail, has been caused by a conjunction of factors: growth in the two-job family, decline of community services and rising demand as more for-profit businesses get contracts to run public institutions like prisons, schools and parks.