| A cleaner conscience: the politics of domestic labour
This was a conversation about how to get women into boardrooms, but there's an inevitable follow-up question, is not there? What about the domestic help? Do they do well? A spokesperson from Unison told me: "Look, people who do these jobs often do not have a choice, their job prospects are zero, they've got no rights, they've got no protection, most of them do not get any type of holiday pay or sickness pay. guardian. uk © Guardian News and Media 2012. The chasm still exists; when someone at the Groucho asks her housekeeper what she does for a living, she's not going to reply: "I'm Stella McCartney's friend. There are less nice people who deal with this discomfort by simply pretending the individual doesn't exist. You're outside minimum-wage legislation, you've no job security, you have no holiday or sick pay; someone I knew whose cleaner came on a Monday used to discharge her without payment on bank holidays. Helma Lutz pans out to form a fascinating historical trajectory of domestic service – from a serf class three centuries ago, through the "professionalisation" of service two centuries ago when unions introduced some basic rights, contracts, days off, that kind of thing. Lutz wonders whether this amounts to a "refeudalization". In short, the initial step is to break the embarrassment of domestic help going down into its constituent parts: it is one thing having a cleaner and feeling embarrassed about it, because you should be doing it yourself; it is another thing having a cleaner and feeling ashamed because you offer no job security and no holiday pay and no contractual equity of any sort. One woman remembered a hotel guest who'd put the "make up my room" sign up, but was sitting naked on a chair when she walked in. Cleaners are a bit different – the "service provider" case is hard to make, since even if you are useless at it, you are presumably good enough to uphold your own standards. Many of us have commissioned out the conflict to someone in a (possibly metaphorical) sky-blue tabard. The overwhelming downside of all this vexed morality and shame is that the entire business is chased underground and cleaners are treated appallingly. Secondly, when fellow maids held a rally in New York, their stories threw up a snapshot of the contempt in which they are held. Two of the most lingering details of the rape accusation made against Dominique Strauss Kahn in New York last year were these: firstly, while the case collapsed for a number of reasons, the fact the alleged victim didn't have proper residency especially harmed her credibility, certainly in the trial-by-media; uncertain immigration status redounds unimaginably badly upon your rights as an employee, and as a human being. And this has wider ramifications than just many individuals having to do a lot of mopping; cleaning and childcare have very low status in this society and, I'm sure, many others. Catherine Spencer is 41, has a degree, and used to manage 200 people. They think, 'Poor her, she's just a stupid girl. "They see me in my little sky-blue tabard and they there and then think of me as an entire idiot. " Elodie Guttierez, 38, is a nanny – she is actually my nanny, and we'll come to this later – and she concurs: "If you have got a group of people talking about what they do, any time you say you are a nanny, nobody asks you anything. It amuses me, but I can see that someone else would be deeply offended. "There's a governors' meeting – they were coming in as I was leaving this evening," she says. This is not just about women having higher standards, in other words (I know I don't); it is about a resolute failure to import principles of equality into the home. But the feminist case is even stronger here. But married and cohabiting women do 12 hours a week, and men suddenly do 40 minutes. The British Household Panel Survey looked at 5,000 families over 15 years and found that single men do four hours of housework a week, while single women do seven hours. Considering the huge advances made by women in the workplace, perhaps not with boardroom representation, but certainly with equal pay, it is astonishing that so little progress has been made domestically. And it is boring; you can't pretend to think someone else is feeling fulfilled by it. But there isn't the taint of shame. The novelist and poet Kate Clanchy wrote a book, Antigona and Me, about her Kosovan cleaner, and someone (a childless person; I think this is relevant) said to her: "I would never have a cleaner. Personally, I think the problem is a background belief that household work is women's work – it's shameful because we're outsourcing not just our laundry, but the building blocks of our femininity. Or it might be a coincidence. But there's also a feminist point – I don't see why it should be me outsourcing my maternal duties. This is demonstrably true, and furthermore, anybody who thinks childcare is "menial" and therefore is not extremely demanding intellectually, physically and emotionally simply hasn't done enough of it. So there's some exculpatory rhetoric going on there. A study in 2003 found there are European estimates that one in four domestic workers is employed illegally. I feel theoretically guilty about having a nanny, but I do not actually feel guilty. Naturally, though, if I didn't have a job I'd just have to get better at it. It might be a systematic attempt, since the dawn of money as the unit of exchange, to keep women from having any independent agency in the market. If it's dusting, it's too trivial and evanescent for money; if it's giving birth, it's too important and lasting. |
Sunday 11 March 2012
A cleaner conscience: the politics of domestic labour
