Barbara Ehrenreich, Enemy of Labor
Judith ShulevitzPosted Wednesday, March 29, 2000, at 11:25 AM ETCulturebox 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.
Reader Response from The Fray:
Ehrenreich has become increasingly annoying. In all her recent writings, she seems to argue that middle-class comfort, style, and pleasure inherently hurt working women. It's this puritanism that drives middle-class women to ignore Ehrenreich and the serious issue she raises regarding the possibility of solidarity among women.
One caveat. Contrary to Culturebox's assertion, large corporate employers are not necessarily easier to unionize than small independent contractors. Historically, the larger the firm, the more resources that that company can bring to bear in resisting organizing drives. Meanwhile contractors sometimes embrace unions seeking help in setting wages and prices. In fact, the Service Employees International Union began as the Chicago Flat Janitors Union, an organization composed of scattered building superintendents.
--Andrew W. Cohen
(To reply, click
here.)
There is, of course, another point of view--the older aristocratic belief that hiring maids is the ethical obligation of the wealthy. By taking on hired help, we employ otherwise unskilled workers, and we have the opportunity to set good examples of taste, graciousness, and concern for the community.
--Bertie
(To reply, click
here.)
I sure hope Ms Ehrenreich has never hired a painter or window-washer, after all, with a little training we could all do that ourselves, couldn't we? Or better yet, what about the movers that pack and unpack your personal belongings in your very home?
--Concerned
(To reply, click
here.)
It is amazing how arrogant we can be. We assume that everyone wants to do what we do and we feel sorry for them because they can't. What total nonsense. It's really sad that there are people who not only belittle what maids want to do but are so arrogant as to believe they are the ones to save them. People who think this way are not saviors or crusaders. They're arrogant, insignificant people who try to raise their own self-worth by looking down on other people with pity.
--Fray Reader
(To reply, click
here.)
[There was an unusual near-unanimity in The Fray on the subject: almost everyone supported Culturebox and disagreed with Ehrenreich. But we kept looking, and found some dissenters:]
Economists spout endlessly about the "efficiency" of the division of labor, how it is more efficient for, say, a doctor to attend to more patients rather than attending to dusting his house, when there are other people who are unable to be physicians and are probably more efficient at dusting. This is true, but unfortunately, the division of labor that efficiency requires has a pervasive tendency to make people unhappy. Division of labor isolates people from the results, benefits, and consequences of their work and makes them feel useless. While I don't advocate going back to a single-craftsman model for everything - we would all be thrown into poverty if we did - you have to draw the line somewhere. It is possible to compromise. For example, at the economic level, the shift from Taylorist manufacturing models to team-oriented, just-in-time models has had a positive effect on human happiness, even though there is still a lot of efficiency. On a personal level, people who don't clean up their own messes end up unhappy, because they become detached from the meaning of what they do in their personal life. It's bad enough when this happens in the work world; to have the same thing invade the personal sphere is tragic.
Spare time is not intended to be "efficient", it's intended to be an escape from the grind of economic life. An important part of that is a kind of holism in personal activities; you see something through from beginning to end, and that provides spiritual solace. Activities like doing your own laundry, while tedious and not always pleasant, are critical to avoiding the existential angst that comes along with the travails of modern society. It is the relentless pursuit of pleasure and stimulation that, IMHO, is responsible for much of the depression and anxiety that pervade the richest societies in the world. A sense of purpose in life, brought about through an integrated, "inefficient" approach to living, goes a long way towards personal satisfaction and mental health.
--Anthony Berno
(To reply, click
here.)
Just because one can afford something doesn't mean that the something is morally defensible. Many people can afford to purchase large swaths of old-growth forest, clear cut it, strip mine it, and bury nuclear waste in the ruins. Does that mean it's okay to do so? Many people can afford to buy child pornography. Okay to do so? The moral dimensions of an act are not limited to the parameters of the marketplace.
--Robert Killheffer
(To reply, click
here.)
(3/29)
Culturebox and the vast majority of the responses to it seem to be written entirely from the vantage point of people who can afford to hire maids, who probably do occasionally hire maids, and who apparently feel personally aggrieved by her critical article. Respondents ignore her points about the "Brazilianization" of the economy, and class lines that are emerging from this disparity. One even goes so far as to decry Ehrenreich's "arrogance," and to claim that maids choose their work because they find it personally satisfying. That is a cruel farce. As Ehrenreich explains in her article, industrial maid work cannot easily be done for more than several months to a year because of the enormous toll it takes on the body. Full-time cleaning is painful, disgusting, and unremunerative. To ignore the poor conditions and pay of cleaning jobs, to call Ehrenreich "annoying" for drawing attention to them, to declaim the right to employ maids and work them at the pay levels now current thanks to the laws of supply & demand just because one can afford to do so, is not only socially irresponsible but also morally ugly. Maids and their employers belong to the same communities. Unfortunately the choices available to both groups are not the same. Why is this no longer disturbing for the vast majority of respondents?
--FR
(To reply, click
here.)
(4/3)
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Reader Response from The Fray:
Ehrenreich has become increasingly annoying. In all her recent writings, she seems to argue that middle-class comfort, style, and pleasure inherently hurt working women. It's this puritanism that drives middle-class women to ignore Ehrenreich and the serious issue she raises regarding the possibility of solidarity among women.
One caveat. Contrary to Culturebox's assertion, large corporate employers are not necessarily easier to unionize than small independent contractors. Historically, the larger the firm, the more resources that that company can bring to bear in resisting organizing drives. Meanwhile contractors sometimes embrace unions seeking help in setting wages and prices. In fact, the Service Employees International Union began as the Chicago Flat Janitors Union, an organization composed of scattered building superintendents.
--Andrew W. Cohen
(To reply, click here.)
There is, of course, another point of view--the older aristocratic belief that hiring maids is the ethical obligation of the wealthy. By taking on hired help, we employ otherwise unskilled workers, and we have the opportunity to set good examples of taste, graciousness, and concern for the community.
--Bertie
(To reply, click here.)
I sure hope Ms Ehrenreich has never hired a painter or window-washer, after all, with a little training we could all do that ourselves, couldn't we? Or better yet, what about the movers that pack and unpack your personal belongings in your very home?
--Concerned
(To reply, click here.)
It is amazing how arrogant we can be. We assume that everyone wants to do what we do and we feel sorry for them because they can't. What total nonsense. It's really sad that there are people who not only belittle what maids want to do but are so arrogant as to believe they are the ones to save them. People who think this way are not saviors or crusaders. They're arrogant, insignificant people who try to raise their own self-worth by looking down on other people with pity.
--Fray Reader
(To reply, click here.)
[There was an unusual near-unanimity in The Fray on the subject: almost everyone supported Culturebox and disagreed with Ehrenreich. But we kept looking, and found some dissenters:]
Economists spout endlessly about the "efficiency" of the division of labor, how it is more efficient for, say, a doctor to attend to more patients rather than attending to dusting his house, when there are other people who are unable to be physicians and are probably more efficient at dusting. This is true, but unfortunately, the division of labor that efficiency requires has a pervasive tendency to make people unhappy. Division of labor isolates people from the results, benefits, and consequences of their work and makes them feel useless. While I don't advocate going back to a single-craftsman model for everything - we would all be thrown into poverty if we did - you have to draw the line somewhere. It is possible to compromise. For example, at the economic level, the shift from Taylorist manufacturing models to team-oriented, just-in-time models has had a positive effect on human happiness, even though there is still a lot of efficiency. On a personal level, people who don't clean up their own messes end up unhappy, because they become detached from the meaning of what they do in their personal life. It's bad enough when this happens in the work world; to have the same thing invade the personal sphere is tragic.
Spare time is not intended to be "efficient", it's intended to be an escape from the grind of economic life. An important part of that is a kind of holism in personal activities; you see something through from beginning to end, and that provides spiritual solace. Activities like doing your own laundry, while tedious and not always pleasant, are critical to avoiding the existential angst that comes along with the travails of modern society. It is the relentless pursuit of pleasure and stimulation that, IMHO, is responsible for much of the depression and anxiety that pervade the richest societies in the world. A sense of purpose in life, brought about through an integrated, "inefficient" approach to living, goes a long way towards personal satisfaction and mental health.
--Anthony Berno
(To reply, click here.)
Just because one can afford something doesn't mean that the something is morally defensible. Many people can afford to purchase large swaths of old-growth forest, clear cut it, strip mine it, and bury nuclear waste in the ruins. Does that mean it's okay to do so? Many people can afford to buy child pornography. Okay to do so? The moral dimensions of an act are not limited to the parameters of the marketplace.
--Robert Killheffer
(To reply, click here.)
(3/29)
Culturebox and the vast majority of the responses to it seem to be written entirely from the vantage point of people who can afford to hire maids, who probably do occasionally hire maids, and who apparently feel personally aggrieved by her critical article. Respondents ignore her points about the "Brazilianization" of the economy, and class lines that are emerging from this disparity. One even goes so far as to decry Ehrenreich's "arrogance," and to claim that maids choose their work because they find it personally satisfying. That is a cruel farce. As Ehrenreich explains in her article, industrial maid work cannot easily be done for more than several months to a year because of the enormous toll it takes on the body. Full-time cleaning is painful, disgusting, and unremunerative. To ignore the poor conditions and pay of cleaning jobs, to call Ehrenreich "annoying" for drawing attention to them, to declaim the right to employ maids and work them at the pay levels now current thanks to the laws of supply & demand just because one can afford to do so, is not only socially irresponsible but also morally ugly. Maids and their employers belong to the same communities. Unfortunately the choices available to both groups are not the same. Why is this no longer disturbing for the vast majority of respondents?
--FR
(To reply, click here.)
(4/3)