Fw: An Article From Slate

[Mark Rickling]

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http://slate.msn.com/code/Culturebox/Culturebox.asp?Show=3/29/00&idMessage=4
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> CULTUREBOX
> Barbara Ehrenreich, Enemy of Labor
> Judith Shulevitz
> Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2000, at 8:25 a.m. PT
>
>
> Culturebox hates to dis a fellow journalist, but she has to
> say it: Barbara Ehrenreich lacks a sense of worker
> solidarity. How else do you explain the fact that after
> toiling for three weeks as the employee of a cleaning service
> in order to write about the experience for Harper's, she
> issued a call to readers not to hire maids? Having someone
> else clean your house is bad for you and your children, is
> her rationale. As she writes in her piece on the cover of the
> April issue of Harper's:
>
> To be cleaned up after is to achieve a certain magical
> weightlessness and immateriality. Almost everyone complains
> about violent video games, but paid housecleaning has the
> same consequence-abolishing effect. ... A servant economy
> breeds callousness and solipsism in the served, and it does
> so all the more effectively when the service is performed
> close up and routinely in the place where they live and
> reproduce.
>
> It may be true that having servants harms your moral character
> (though it may also not be true--is missing an early meeting
> because you were washing Johnny's breakfast dishes really an
> improving experience? How about skipping June's soccer
> practice because you had to vacuum the living room?). But
> what about the servants who need the work? Does not having it
> do good things for their moral characters? Ehrenreich seems
> to think it does. Working as a maid is worse than not working
> as a maid, she implies, because cleaning other people's
> houses is so gross and demeaning. The insults to human
> dignity range from having to deal with "elaborate dust
> structures held together by a scaffolding of dog hair" and
> vomit and urine to relationships with employers that
> vacillate disturbingly between friendship and exploitation.
> Ehrenreich also deplores the rise of corporate cleaning
> services, with all the alienation of labor that they
> entail--bosses who garnish wages for minor infractions or
> lateness and the routinization or Taylorization of the work
> itself. There's less worker autonomy, fewer breaks, and when
> you work for a company rather than a person, he or she
> doesn't give you tips.
>
> Ehrenreich concedes that there are advantages to signing on
> with a cleaning agency, such as being protected against
> abusive or cheating homeowners. But she appears to miss the
> more important point, which is that there's strength in
> numbers. If you want to correct the evils of paid domestic
> work and of corporate cleaning services, doing away with them
> isn't the answer, since the need to clean is ever with us.
> The solution is unionizing--which is harder when servants are
> independent contractors, easier when they are collected
> together under a single aegis. Under what circumstances do
> organizing drives tend to succeed? When labor is in demand.
> So why is Ehrenreich, a good leftist, trying to depress
> demand?
>
> It's her larger feminist agenda. Or so she would say, even
> though some might construe hers as an anti-feminist agenda.
> Ehrenreich's real complaint is with middle-class feminists
> who she says have abandoned the cause of female servants in
> order to become their employers. So, does she think feminists
> should have been out organizing maids' unions instead of
> pursuing white-collar careers? No, although that would have
> been the logical argument to make. What upsets Ehrenreich is
> that the middle-class feminists have conceded the fight with
> their husbands and male lovers over an equitable division of
> chores. If only they had won, and chores could get done
> without oppression, class difference, and the master-slave
> dialectic!
>
> Impressed as she is by the character-building qualities of
> laundering your own socks, Ehrenreich seems not to realize
> that the reason women quit the battlefield is because, once
> they had greater earning power (of which she surely wouldn't
> want to deprive them) they discovered the war wasn't worth
> waging. Why should anyone have to scrub counters if they
> don't want to and can afford not to? Or cook, for that
> matter? Or fix toilets, build cabinets, mow the lawn, or any
> of the other things we pay people to do in and around our
> homes? Why should we refuse to hire people who need the
> money? For more than 40 years, feminists have been demanding
> that domestic labor be viewed as part of the economy. Now it
> is, and Ehrenreich worries about our souls. The American
> economy, she says, is being "Brazilianized"--stratified into
> "a tiny overclass and a huge underclass." The evidence for
> this? The fact that, "among my middle-class, professional
> women friends and acquaintances, including some who made
> important contributions to the early feminist analysis of
> housework, the employment of a maid is now nearly universal."
> But if the ability to hire a maid is trickling down to the
> lower ranks of the middle class (which is where feminist
> theorists have traditionally resided) then the American
> economy is becoming more democratic and fair, not less.
> Greater numbers of women are getting to do what they want to
> do, and Ehrenreich wants them to give it up and tend to their
> homes. Luckily, there's not a chance in hell they'll listen
> to her.