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, isn't 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 sort of holiday pay or sickness pay. I mean, should you wish to be a liberal but you hate washing up, you can't get much more copper-bottomed than that.  However, here the bonds between Marxist theory and socially responsible practice really break in decline: if you are so squeamish about the relations of power and dependence that you'll only employ people in or above your own class, that, to the untrained eye, will look a lot like open snobbery. 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 a result isn't extremely demanding intellectually, physically and emotionally simply hasn't done enough of it. '" 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. Someone else she worked for left her Filofax on the side one day: "And I thought, 'I wonder what section she's put me in?' Am I under H, for my name, or am I under C for cleaner? And I was under C for 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. 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. Or it might be a coincidence. I tell her, 'I just want to call you a friend. But changing the word is insufficient. 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. People think of cash-in-hand work as getting one over on the tax man; domestic labour is an illustration of the fact that, when you are employed outside the legitimate tax system, the overwhelming likelihood is that someone else is getting one over on you. You're outside minimum-wage legislation, you have 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 sort of thing. Lutz wonders whether this amounts to a "refeudalization". In short, the first step is to break the embarrassment of domestic help falling 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. 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 isn't the taint of shame. 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. 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. 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. I was so offended. 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. A cleaner conscience: the politics of domestic labour Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 12/03/2012