>On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
> > The problem is not with what the yuppie pays, but with what the
> service
> > worker gets. The yuppie may pay around $20/hr (not a bad wage),
> but the
> > worker who delivers the service will get $6.75/hr.
>
>This is also IMHO the main problem with Ehrenreich's argument: it's
>unrepresentative.
how could you possibly know? it's one of the most difficult occupations to study because much of it is done on the gray market.
aside from that, your response illustrates exactly Ehrenreich's point as to why _feminists_ shouldn't hire domestics. You've taken on the position of "benevolent boss". That isn't exactly the best position to be in if you want to foster feminist solidarity. brad's response, likewise. the point is, don't mask your decision with some notion that your giving them some sort of "gift" by employing them. excuse me? brad delong's consistent statements are that capitalism is a kind of "gift" to developing countries. his arguments are consistent. for the rest, who denounce such claims, ask yourself how you would feel if your employer went to the pay negotiation table believing that you should be grateful to have a job at all, rather than realizing he _needs_ you.
if it really would take you two days what it takes her to do in 2 hours, then I'd say that you got your labor at an incredibly cheap price. if your labor is also worth 20/hr, then let's say it would take you two, 6 hr days. That's $240 worth of your labor for which you paid her $40. Not bad, not bad at all. This is akin to a kind leisure capitalism, no?
If it really is an indispensable service--say, like plumbing or electrical work--then why pay her merely what you make? Why not pay her more than what you make which is presumably what you'd do were you to hire a plumber or an electrician. That's what I tell my boss. Say, if no one could do it quite like me, dude, then why not $100/hr? eh?
(this is what will irk any feminist with a familiarity with the housework debates of the 60s and 70s. this is the exact reasoning that is used for relegating "women's work" to women: they have a special niche, we just can't do it as well as y'all can. what can we say? As Chip said once, to paraphrase, "Here's a mop. Stop yapping and learn how to do it." (I don't even want to get into the complexities of what workers tell you to your face and what they think behind your back. But jess because dat maid be whistlin' while she work don't mean that she sho'nuf ain't wishin' she was doin' sumpin' es wid her life. NOTE: please see Global Woman, where the author, a prominent feminist, notes that she believed she was a good employer. Until she found out otherwise from interviews with her maid. She also thought her domestic was happy in her work, until she found out otherwise. As was the case with most of the research in that book.)
second, she probably doesn't make the same benefits that you make, nor does she make the same wages you make. do you pay employment taxes? social security? etc. If she'd rather not get busted, she's a contractor and she's paying that out herself. Now her clearance is more like $12/hr.
further, you get paid for 8 hrs each day. She gets paid by the jobs she can rack up. She can probably cram 7 hours of straight labor into a day, since she has to travel from site to site and doesn't get paid for doing that. which means she's making $140/day, not $160. And it's probably more likely that she's make less than that.
third, when my boss tries to tell me that i should be grateful for the fact that i have flexible hours, that i can skip work for the kid and just make it up when I feel like it, I'm not freakin' amused, especially if he's implying that I don't deserve a raise or deserve less than i'm asking for or that i should be willing to suck it up and "give" for the company so i can make out later when we "make it" big.
It irks me to no end that he and other employers do this. No, sorry, allowing me flex time isn't a fucking gift since you still expect me to get the work done at some point. The nature of the work is different from that of a factory line? So the FUCK what. The nature of the employer/employee relationship doesn't change and that is this: you get the same amount of work out of me whether i take time off or not. Same thing with your maid. It's not like you paid her for a sick day in which she gets paid anyway, which would be a _real_ damn benefit, probably one you actually receive.
so, your wages aren't comparable at all.
remember: ehrenreich really doesn't give a bat's eyelash what you and other non-feminist leftists do. she does care about what feminists who spend their lives working on feminist issues do.
kelley
> In her original article in Harper's she stated that 1
>in 7 cleaning personnel in America worked for such services. For the
>other 6 out of 7, the service worker gets all of the $20, including
>often
>the part that would normally have been deducted for taxes. And if by
>young urban professionals we mean people who live in cities, the ratio
>would even higher; in cities domestic cleaning services have a
>vanishingly
>small part of the market.
>
>This also alters many other things. The thing that Ehrenreich hated
>most
>about her experience was the close supervision. That's something I
>deeply
>sympathize with. I can't even type when someone stands behind me to
>watch. But the vast majority of people I know give their cleaning
>person
>keys to their house and leave the money on the table since they won't
>be
>there when it happens. In no job do you have a less closely
>supervised
>environment than that.
>
>Lastly there's the autonomy to take care of child care emergencies.
>There are downsides to this job like every one, but flextime is not
>not
>one of them. My housekeeper has often called the same day to cancel.
>It's fine with me, and why shouldn't it be? It's a once every two
>week
>thing. But it's an option most working women don't have. She's used
>this
>as a job to raise her daughter for 18 years. (19 years ago she
>arrived
>from Brazil 8 months pregnant, and a year later she still had the
>daughter
>but no longer the husband.) She says she's was always able to arrange
>her
>hours to be home when she should, like to take her to school and pick
>her
>up when she was young. And when her daughter suddenly gets sick, or
>when
>Norma wants to see her perform in the school play, she has less
>trouble
>dealing with it than most of her employers.
>
>BTW, most people here in New York pay more than 20 bucks an hour for
>housekeeping, just like we pay more for everything else. My
>housekeeper
>makes as much an hour as I do as a wordprocessor, and she's worth
>every
>bit of it, because she literally accomplishes more in 2 hours than I'd
>accomplish in 2 days and is happier doing it. She likes making things
>neat. I feel that way when it comes to formatting documents. We've
>both
>got our niche.
>
>IMHO, the solution to Ehrenreich's problem with housekeepers is
>simple:
>don't use a service (which the overwhelming majority of people already
>don't) and pay a decent wage (which most people I know do because the
>market doesn't bear less.) I fail to see how that makes the universe a
>worse place.
>
>I thought E's piece on waitressing was a piece of genius, though.
>
>Michael
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