Yeah, well I'll probably stay away from the judgmental fuckers on this list now, after all. Stay away from my feet, Joanna and Hilary!
I dunno, I had the impression that the complaints were more about people who are slobs or don't dress well when they can actually afford not to be and really have no excuse. Alan Greenspam, for instance. Not that he's a slob, but rilly he has access to all kinds of advice that would help him pick out a better suit. (Honestly, what's wrong with Andrea anyway?)
At 06:15 PM 7/15/03 -0400, Hilary Russ wrote:
>Yes, the pedicurist = rickshaw driver equation. The guilt factor. It has
>gone away pretty quickly for me. Pedicures take a half an hour.
i'm incompetent at it then! :)
>In my
>neighborhood they cost $12, which comes to $24 an hour, plus tip. That's
>more than I make, so it don't bother me none no more.
it's not entirely $24/hr straight, is it? If you're independent, you have to pay for overhead/supplies. If you work in an established salon, then you pay a fee to the salon owner for the space, advertising, and customer base.
I do think it's interesting (I'm not blaming) that we pay so little for something we think is such a great pleasure. We do so because it is women's work and it is a form of women's work that hasn't been appropriated by men and then monopolized in a way so as to command more $. (e.g., cook/chef: part of the process of monopolization involves glorifying the work as craft requiring innate talent so that only men are thought capable of the work.
>Plus I very often do my own pedicures, which saves money and is pretty easy.
A few years ago, my step mother wanted to treat me. The whole time she raved about how great it was, my feet were looking for places to curl up and hide. no one touches my paddies, or important parts of your anatomy get hurt!
I was getting my hair cut Sunday, so I read _Global Woman_ (Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, eds). I'd read Ehrenreich's work on maids in _Nickle and Dimed_ and elsewhere. This anthology is a collection of more academic essays and research monographs on domestic labor.
In her work on maids, I think E presented a very persuasive argument as to why hiring maids isn't such a great thing to do if you're a feminist. The issue, for E, was that housework was the one common bond all women shared and that, by hiring maids, many hetfeminists were letting men off the hook in the gender wars at home.
It is really hard to get around the basic issue here: There are some services that we are buying that provide us more leisure, but no matter how well we pay the "help", we probably can't pay enough. We can buy leisure by replacing our labor, our maids cannot. This doesn't apply to pedicures and take out food. The difference is that housework doesn't lend itself to the efficiencies of scale and efficiencies of rationalization that make the other services affordable even for those who make fairly low wages. They might not have take out every night, but they can have it every so often.
If I pay a maid or maid service $25/hr or whatever (and most people I know are paying less than that around here), there is no way that she can regularly afford her own maid. It doesn't matter whether she's got her own business or is wage labor for a cleaning service. As an entrepreneur, there's overhead. As wage labor, she's probably getting 6-9/hr. while the service scoops up $25/hr or more.
Sunday, I revisited these arguments while reading Global Woman. In it, one researcher highlights the paternalism involved in the employer-employee relationship. Because the work is devalued as unimportant work to be sloughed off on the unskilled, then it is difficult for employers to imagine paying a good deal for maids. "I could do it myself." In addition, with no efficiencies of scale/rationalization, the purchase of household help is bought hour for hour. You buy and hour of someone's time in order get an hour for yourself. If I buy fast food meal at $5.00, I've just bought about an hour of leisure time (shopping, cooking, cleaning up) for something that took the burger flipper about 10 minutes.
since the work is devalued and since it isn't a product that can be easily mass produced, then employers too easily imagine they are paying "well" when they pay someone anything above minimum wage. This is just fucked.
Sure, but you probably don't pay them what you make. And therein lies the structural contradiction inherent in capitalism.
There is a demand on the part of employers to be seen as generous for paying more than nothing. They make it worse, from the maid's POV, by giving her their cast offs or by giving her a room that they have _anyway_. Sure, the beat up coffee maker is nice and the useless housewarming gift you pawned off on me are great, but how's a bout a little cash which is what i actually _need_? For the maid, all she's gotten is something that was worthless to the employer anyway. somehow maids are supposed to be grateful for the pay and for the castoffs.
Bah.
Kelley