A cleaner conscience: the politics of domestic labour

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 don't get any sort of holiday pay or sickness pay. Adam Smith's classic explanation was: how can you respect work that, once it's done, instantly needs doing again? As he put it, "menial tasks and services … generally perish in the instant of their performance and seldom leave any trace or value behind them". But there is not 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 issue 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. Leaving the feminist dimension aside for a second, this presents a problem, doesn't it? When, in the act of employing someone, you erode their standing in the world, that's quite a complicated relationship. I mean, if you want to be a liberal but you hate washing up, you can't get much more copper-bottomed than that. If it's dusting, it's too trivial and evanescent for money; if it's giving birth, it's too important and lasting. 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. 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. The overwhelming downside of all this vexed morality and shame is that the entire business is chased underground and cleaners are treated appallingly. 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. I feel theoretically guilty about having a nanny, but I don't actually feel guilty. This is demonstrably true, and furthermore, anybody who thinks childcare is "menial" and as such isn't extremely demanding intellectually, physically and emotionally simply hasn't done enough of it. Naturally, though, if I didn't have a job I'd just have to get better at it. So there's some exculpatory rhetoric going on there. I tell her, 'I just wish to call you a friend. '" That's a typically nice-person response – she finds the word jarring because of the chasm of status it implies. 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 person doesn't exist. Secondly, when fellow maids held a rally in New York, their stories threw up a snapshot of the contempt in which they are held. 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. A study in 2003 found there are European estimates that one in four domestic workers is employed illegally. People think of cash-in-hand work as getting one over on the tax man; domestic labour is an illustration of the fact that, whenever you are employed outside the legitimate tax system, the overwhelming likelihood is that someone else is getting one over on you. Second, there is this peculiarly low status accorded to household chores. But changing the word is insufficient. My parents worked for a couple who probably would have done their own cleaning, except that they were also fighting South African apartheid. I don't know why, but in the context of how she was treating me overall, it was as though I was less than human. " There's obviously something very difficult about employing another human for work that is private – so employers attempt either to play declining the employment, a la McCartney, or play down the human. A cleaner conscience: the politics of domestic labour Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 11/03/2012