Firstly, you're arguing with an article's claims about what Ehrenreich said, not what Ehrenreich actually says. She doesn't blame feminism for the rise in the use of domestic labor. Rather, her co-author is Arlie Hochschild (Global Woman), and they are saying that men's contributions to housework flattened out at the same time that the use of domestic labor increased. This is borne out in the literature. I've noted before that I presided over a conference session on work/family and one of the presenters covered that lit, and added it to it, by showing how there was an increase in CPI (IIRC) goods such as convenience foods, etc. at the time this flattening out of what was once a rising trend among men to contribute more to domestic duties.
So, do yourselves a favor and read the book, then argue with it. Yoshie, you're quite intelligent and I, for one, would appreciate your comments on both Nickle and Dimed and Global Woman. I don't think I agree with Ehrenreich re: her prescriptions, and I don't think she's moralizing--not in the book. She has some interesting insights about domestic workers that ought to be considered rather than dismissed out of hand because of what one reads in an article _about_ the book ferchrisakes.
Secondly, what Ehrenreich offers (and especially the monographs in Global Woman) is that domestic labor is different. It's different, mainly, because it can't be socialized in the same way that food production is socialized. Domestic work doesn't lend itself to economies of scale. I do an hour of vacuuming, dusting, sweeping, and mopping. the person I hire would do the same hour and get the same amount of work done, for the most part. You can't really make it go quicker and benefit from mass production the way you can with other services. This puts people who hire domestics in the position of a small time capitalist. In order to make it worth one's while to hire a domestic, one can only hire a domestic by paying them less than you make. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth it.
--this is why you have the fascinating tendency for people who hire domestics to say things like "I pay my maid well" or "I pay my nanny really well". When you press them on it, you find out that they are often paying "well" at $10-25 an hour, which is generally 1/2 to 1/4 of what the person paying their domestic help is making. That's for your socially conscious folks. For those like my boss, he pays $5/hr under the table, which means his maid gets no social security, no worker's comp, no coverage for disability, no protection under FLSA. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
If you are at all concerned about the way social relations of production shape consciousness, then this should give us pause. In very few other situations where we consume services are we an employer with a _stake_ in exploiting labor. In other situations where we consume services, the division of labor sufficiently distances us from the entire process that we don't think, "boy, this waitresses at Olive Garden are paid well, so I'm going to make them work their asses off for their wage."
Thirdly, and I can't believe I have to remind anyone of this, domestics are often super exploited in so far as they are paid under the table and, thus, not counted by the DOL. So, this call for data is totally ludicrous.
From an earlier post:
At 01:05 PM 7/16/03 -0400, jbujes at covad.net wrote:
>I
>now pay a woman $20/hour to come and clean house twice a month. I also
>give her paid
>vacation once a year and a $100 bonus for xmas. She takes 100% of the
>money herself
>and it's tax free, cause she doesn't work for an agency.
You know, this is actually an interesting response because I think it's getting at what Ehrenreich was pointing to, but never articulated particularly well. I was thinking this while getting my hair done. Let me point out, though, Joanna, that I don't think anyone is a bad person for hiring a maid. I don't think one is a bad feminist, either. E's discussion is simply interesting and worth discussing.
The reason why E worries about feminists taking on the employer role here is exemplified by your post. I think she's saying that the nature of the work takes on the worst characteristics of the employer/employee relation. If you think relations of production matter--that they shape consciousness--then this is damaging to feminist solidarity. (Personally, I think there are worse things to worry about... but nonetheless)
As you are probably aware, contractors frequently argue that they must earn at least double what a salaried FT equivalent makes in order to clear the same wages/benefits. A techwriter who contracts asks for $20/hr and this appears to be ~40k/yr. Not really, says the contractor, because I have to pay taxes, provide my own unemployment and disability insurance, buy my own health insurance and save for retirement. And, because it is contract work, I take greater risks, have higher overhead costs, and more administrative costs than an FTE.
Same thing for a maid. She must also pad herself for short time between jobs or spend time always making sure she has new clients lined up (and this extends her working day). Otherwise, there is dead time when she's not working.
Similarly, it takes time to move from client to client each day; that $20/ is stretched over dead time. I don't think that the 5, 10, 30 minutes driving to the next job is accurately called a "break" any more than I think that kindergarten teachers pay is justified b/c they love the work so much that the job is reward in and of itself)
She also has administrative costs in time: taking calls for new clients, interviewing with them, taking calls if a client is unhappy.
If you add all of this up, one shouldn't assume that she's making $20/hr 2040 hrs/yr. It is more like $12.00 and that's not a living wage in your neck o' the woods. (Again, I'm not blaming you b/c most of us don't think this through. It's to our advantage not to do so.)
Paternalism came in the form of thinking a maid should be grateful for the "extras" an employer gave a maid. I don't think any employee on the planet should ever, ever be asked to be grateful for gifts of hand me down clothes and cast off household goods. Those things are fine as far as they go, but... Workers are never, ever paid what their labor is worth to begin with: raises, gifts, bonuses are not gifts.
If a CEO told a union organizer to "Go ahead and tell my employees they're being ripped off, we take care of 'em real swell and they _like_ what they're doing because it's better than punching keypads at the Safeway" what would be the typical lefty response? Applause? I think not.
That's where Ehrenreich's argument didn't go far enough, nor any of the chapters in Global Woman that I've read thus far. But those chapters I have read, have explained the employer/employee relationship in a way that might get at what Ehrenreich experienced and why she came away from that experience down on the idea of feminists hiring maids.
Because it is work you could do yourself but choose not to, you must pay less than you earn in order to make it worth your while. A kind of quasi-capitalist orientation: I pull in this much money, I have this much free time. In order to buy more free time and keep as much of my earnings as possible so I can buy other things, I need to pay a maid less per hour than I make. Very few people are willing to pay as much or more as they earn because it isn't worth it. Some may, but the majority do not. Since it hasn't yet (and probably won't be) understood as work that takes a special talent, there is very little bargaining power. I am not surprised that we end up justifying our decision to do so, by claiming that a maid is happier in her work than she would be were she, say, a manicurist, a cashier, or a barmaid.
As for paternalism. What I was getting at was something that came up while you were gone. I said to Woj at the time that his claims that Whole Foods workers shouldn't fuss so about the anti-unionism of owners because it was better than that they'd face in other industries with a different, less progressive employer. It reminded me of the men in Arlie Hochschild's _Second Shift_ who point to the beer guzzling, wife beater tee shirt wearing, belching guys in the next neighborhood and say, "Hey, I don't do half of the housework, but at least I'm not like HIM." as if you're supposed to be grateful for less than what you deserve.
If feminists are going to concern themselves with the way men try to negotiate more free time to themselves by not picking up their share of the housework, then I can't see why Ehrenreich is so horribly out of line when she points out that feminists who hire maids are doing the same. Again, I'm not saying you should stop hiring a maid.
Just questions I'm curious about: I'm not sure we want to say that someone should make what they make because the cost of reproducing their labor is less than someone else's do we? That is, if a maid doesn't have children, lives by herself, does it follow that she should make less because she doesn't spend as much time cooking and cleaning?
Also, we've been talking about beauty standards so I wonder: How could we mediate the politics involved here under a socialist economy? To say that, fr'instance, pedicures are a kind of obligation to others aesthetic pleasure is a political claim now. It takes on a different, no less political contour in a socialist economy, no?
Kelley