Feminist Self-Flagellation Hits The Cleaning Supplies Cupboard
"Is it ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner?" asks ridiculous Sally Howard in The Guardian.
Heh. Of course not, dear. (Dxxr?) Instead, tell those looking for work as cleaners that they should go out and get jobs as CEOs. That will for sure pay their rent and feed their children.
Howard writes:
The day my cleaner used to visit, I would return home in the evening to the smell of Dettol mixed with Tania's sweat, to a clean kitchen and bathroom and a drenching sense of guilt. It was the same unease that greeted me when I collected my son Leo from his nursery - a national chain disproportionately staffed by women of colour - or bought clothes from a mainstream clothing outlet that relies, as many do, on female garment workers in the global south. My book, The Home Stretch, is a result of the question that bubbled up from this sense of discomfort: can I hire a cleaner with a (clean) feminist conscience?...I ask: is it morally and economically reprehensible to contract out our domestic labour? And if this act is dubious from the point of view of many or most feminists, can we correct for this ethical quandary by contracting, say, a male cleaner, or paying our cleaner the hourly rate we earn? Many of the Britons I surveyed for the book who pay a domestic cleaner made an argument for such practices on the basis of job creation: "If you can afford it, it makes total sense to pay someone to do this. It attributes value to domestic labour."
...The average cleaner in London, however, earns just £8.89 an hour. Today, as part of International Women's Strike (coinciding with International Women's Day), cleaners, teachers and careworkers are marching, in London, Argentina and Madrid, to demand recognition of the social value of their work'.
For two months, I tried the fair pay option, contracting Jurate, a non-agency cleaner, and paying her, to her delight, £40 for a two-hour session. In the end, I couldn't square this approach with my new knowledge about the relationship between paying a woman to clean my home and the structural devaluation of women's work. The clincher, in the end, was my three-year-old son, who quizzically followed Jurate around the house as she squeezed her mop and brandished her ever-present Viakal. I did not want him to see the labour of some women as less worthwhile than the labour and leisure of other women and men. Middle-class women's emancipation from housework has come at the cost of reinscribing poor women's ties to it.
Did I find I could hire a cleaner with a clean conscience? No, but I found I could ease my feminist conscience by scrubbing my own toilet.
Does she also lament that some dude gets all greasy and sweaty fixing her car? Does she buy wrenches and take auto repair courses?
What a misguided, self-flagellating nitwit.
On a related note, great John Tierney column in The New York Times from 2006 challenges assumptions about foreign sweatshop labor:
Has any organization in the world lifted more people out of poverty than Wal-Mart?...Making toys or shoes for Wal-Mart in a Chinese or Latin American factory may sound like hell to American college students -- and some factories should treat their workers much better, as Strong readily concedes. But there are good reasons that villagers will move hundreds of miles for a job.
...Most "sweatshop" jobs -- even ones paying just $2 per day -- provide enough to lift a worker above the poverty level, and often far above it, according to a study of 10 Asian and Latin American countries by Benjamin Powell and David Skarbek. In Honduras, the economists note, the average apparel worker makes $13 a day, while nearly half the population makes less than $2 a day.
And about the Guardian piece, Amy Bee suggests treating the cleaners like people -- asking them what works for them:
I truly appreciate how throughout this entire experience she never thinks to ask the cleaning ladies "would you prefer to have people hire you, or not hire you?"
— Amy Bee 🐝 (@aeb082917) March 9, 2020
She just assumes she knows what's best... seems rather patriarchal to me
What I get out of this is a strong sense of snobbishness masquerading as virtue. She doesn't want someone from the lower economic classes in her house. All the rest is just rationalization.
Cousin Dave at March 9, 2020 6:52 AM
On the Chinese labor issue, as long as people get a choice then that may be the best option available to them. Using labor like that is moral. After all the alternatives are worse. But slave labor is never moral. The companies who are using enslaved Uighur workers (and others) are fully responsible for using slave labor and all the ills that come with it. Claims that they don't know are false. There is no way they can push the evil they are supporting off onto someone else.
Ben at March 9, 2020 7:09 AM
Way back when, Dickens wrote about the horrors of London. What he completely missed was that farm life was worse and more dangerous (even if you were self-employed) and people flocked to the cities. The same in China over the past 40 years--the largest mass migration to cities in history. People are always free to make choices. For some people, the best option given their situation might be being a maid. In my town lots of maids are Polish--would that feel better to the writer? Having white maids? Years ago we had a black maid in the South--19 yrs old, not finished high school. She would spend all day at our house once a week. My wife suggested she go back to school and she became a nurse.
cc at March 9, 2020 8:54 AM
I'd say this is a form or virtual shaming. She's trying to up her status because she cares, while her peers do not.
We need plumbers and carpenters, and laborers and several dozen other job descriptions that don't need a college degree to fill. It wasn't that long ago that "computer" was a job description, not a machine.
I R A Darth Aggie at March 9, 2020 9:29 AM
Amy, something else this shows is a profound ignorance of and disrespect for manual labor ("women's work" or not) and those who perform it.
Michael Poccia at March 9, 2020 9:54 AM
The writer missed one key choice. Instead of raising the house keepers salary to match her own. She could demand her salary be lowered to that of the house keeper. I’m sure her employer would be all for that equality.
Joe j at March 9, 2020 11:06 AM
She just assumes she knows what's best... seems rather patriarchal to me.
Seems rather matriarchal to me. Mama's going to do what's best for you. Or maybe she's just a white liberal supremacist.
Ken R at March 9, 2020 11:22 AM
I occasionally hire a woman of color to do some housecleaning. She seems to be rather pleased about it. She charges by the job, not by the hour. She charges $150 to clean my small place, including laundering and folding sheets, blankets and towels and remaking the beds. When she's done the place is clean. Seems like a good deal to me. She knocks it out in three hours while her amazingly well behaved kids play quietly in the yard. I give them ice cream and they say, "Thank you, sir," and smile wonderfully.
One time I thought, "What the hell, I just paid a semi-English-speaking house cleaner $50 an hour!" I could have done it myself, but it would take me 10 hours to do the same work. Instead I took an extra eight-hour shift at work and earned more than four times what I paid her. She's definitely a pro. It's totally beneficial for both of us for me to pay her to do what she's an expert at while I get paid to do what I'm an expert at.
Ken R at March 9, 2020 11:41 AM
That is the amazing thing about specialization Ken. Anyone can do the job. But a specialist will get it done faster and better, and usually for a cheaper price. Applies to robots and machines too.
CC, a lot of places have had laws prohibiting people from moving to cities. China is one of them. I don't know if they still have them (probably do) but at least at one time being a beggar in one of the big cities was more monetarily rewarding and safer than being a peasant farmer. As we both said the key thing is being able to chose for yourself instead of having someone else force you to do what they want.
Ben at March 9, 2020 12:29 PM
Actual experiences, as relayed by a North Carolina woman in 1899:
"We all went to work in the Amazon Cotton Mill and we all worked there all our lives. We were all anxious to go to work because, I don’t know, we didn’t like the farming. It was so hot from sunup to sun down. No, that was not for me. Mill work was better…Once we went to work in the mill after we moved here from the farm, we had more clothes and more kinds of food…And we had a better house."
...and a present-day Chinese woman:
"(Farming) is really had work. Every morning, from 4am to 7am, you have to cut through the bark of 400 rubber trees in total darkness. It has to be done before daybreak, otherwise the sunshine will evaporate the rubber juice. If you were me, would you prefer the factory or the farm?"
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59010.html
david foster at March 9, 2020 4:01 PM
"Feminist" = self-absorbed idiot.
Jay R at March 10, 2020 11:55 AM
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