Thanks for a brilliant comment. I basically agree. I don’t think there’s anything at all degrading about domestic work, apologies if that seemed to be implied. I mean, childcare? That’s pretty damn important. I think it should be much much better paid.

And my discomfort is just that, it’s not a condemnation or an attack. Rosie Cox nails it for me: “employing domestic help is… an individual solution to a social problem.” I should have said explicitly but to me the ‘social problem’ is as you say a) the social and cultural expectation that women will still do the bulk of domestic work, which leads to employment practices which fail to adequately support working parents and b) the low status of what is perceived to be ‘women’s work’. And possibly even c) long working hours culture.

It’s not my business to tell people how they react to said problem. I wouldn’t feel comfortable paying a regular cleaner, but I definitely would feel comfortable paying a gardener or a nanny. *Shrugs* People have their lives to live, I don’t think it does any harm (and as you say, it does create jobs) but I don’t think it helps tackle the problem either.

What does do harm is the lack of legal protections and fair wages for domestic workers, especially migrant workers, and that is something I do condemn.

I think I’m going to have to disagree with you on this one. I’ve re-written this response about six times, so let’s hope seventh time’s the charm!

1) On the film. Having watched it, I agree that it was about a white woman swooping to the rescue. It was also about how the underprivileged require someone with privilege to act as a megaphone. I find that pretty problematic as a statement, but not if we confine it specifically to the publishing industry. It’s interesting that both the writer and the publisher are female – men feature only tangentially in the film – and so are the readers. To put it another way, it is a book about women’s work, written by a woman for women readers. Yes, I thought it was massively exploitative. Yes, I thought the implication that all these women needed was Skeeter to save them was stomach-turning. Yes, it missed the point quite a bit, quite a lot of the time.

BUT – is domestic work is somehow inherently degrading? No.

2) Let’s own up – I have a cleaner. She works for a cleaning agency, and comes in twice a month. I have chosen to have a cleaner, because after doing X hours of staring at a computer monitor, or coming in off a 3am flight, I don’t want to them have to scrub the bath.

But, then – I also don’t want to have to move my own furniture, so I hire a removals firm. If I want a coffee, I often buy it. If our garden was any bigger than a postage stamp, yes we would consider a gardener. And if I had a car, I most certainly would go to a car-wash to get it cleaned. Of all of these things, in a hosuehold of two women, it is the cleaning that gets singled out as problematic.

Additionally, while my employment of a cleaner is the cause of some consternation in the office, precisely no one has any problems with my male colleague having a cleaner. Incidentally, he has the same cleaner. But that’s ok. Because he’s a bloke. (I live in a household of two women. Surely in between overseas trips, the annual accounts and security training involving forest chases with men in balaclavas, one of us should have done the dusting?)

More to the point, why is cleaning – or cooking, or child-rearing – something that women should be ashamed to pay for? Is it really the case where we get to get up early, go to work, come back home, cook dinner, feed the baby, and clean the house, because relinquishing a part of that to a professional is somehow a betrayal of – what?

Moreover, we’re not demanding that business stop employing cleaners, and that all staff do their own cleaning. It’s just in the domestic sphere. Just in the household, in the area that affects women. (Arguably, if an office stops having the cleaners come in so often there would be a marked increase in the number of women doing the washing up, but that’s just based on personal experience.) I’m not seeing any demands or comments on how exploitative it is to have a handyman, or a plumber, and why don’t middle class men wash their own bloody cars. But plumbing is a dark art, and surely cleaning is ‘just’… straightforward? Obvious? Dull? (Tell that to any data entry clerk or call-centre worker.) No: it’s menial. You call in a plumber, and you listen to them tut, and charge you a ludicrous amount for tightening a bolt. You call in a gardener who uses special green fingers to stop your roses from committing mass suicide. You take your car to the car-wash, and there is no way you could achieve that finish with a bucket of soapy water.

And then you call in a cleaner. And you think, “oh, I could have totally managed that myself, only I don’t have to.”

The problem with domestic work is 4-fold:
1) it is valued too meanly. The cost-per-hour is too low. It implies it is low-value work, rather than the work being underpaid.
2) women would otherwise be pressured to do the work themselves. Not instead of doing some other chore – no, in addition to feeding the baby and preparing the financial report and dealing with the removals men.
3) it is viewed as an optional luxury, much like some people view childcare, rather than a key activity that needs to be accomplished, and it is well and good that we remunerate well for it.
4) it is viewed as such low-level work, so ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’, that those who perform it are treated incredibly poorly. So you have the trafficking and abuse problem.

I don’t see the solution for this as yelling at middle class women (I don’t qualify; I’m foreign) to stop hiring cleaners and do their own hoovering. No one is requiring middle class men to wash their own cars, and being outraged if they go to a car-wash instead. No one views working at a car-wash, or a valet service, as somehow incredibly degrading, risky and not-quite-right.

More to the point, there is also sexual trafficking to feed the sex industry. Quite apart from the question of whether one is anti-porn or sex-positive (or whatever variant one favours), NO ONE is saying that the onus is therefore on women to provide ‘their’ men with sex so that there isn’t a demand for a sex industry and therefore sexual exploitation.

Fundamentally, while I agree that the sector is riddled with abuse, and that migrant women are incredibly vulnerable, speaking as one of those migrant women – and the daughter and niece of those who have cleaned, and cooked, and stacked shelves, and all those ‘degrading’ positions we tut over – NO.

The solution is not to simply take away some more jobs, and tell women to be more efficient at running their houses, that this is their responsibility and this work can’t be ‘farmed out’. It is to recognise the value added by the domestic service industry, to ensure that the work is adequately remunerated, and that if someone chooses NOT to employ a cleaner, then it is not ipso facto additional work for the woman. Most importantly, I’d say dissolving the link between ‘cleaning’ = ‘degrading work’ would be a good start.

*waves the Totally Yes Write On It sign* – I’m pleased we’re talking more about these intersections on here.

Yes, there’s the whole Titanic anniversary too, with the nostalgic romanticism of social stratification, and of course the bizarro-world rhetoric around workfare and ‘job snobs’… Workfare actually seems like a very obvious intersection of class, race, and gender. I should probably write on this seperately and not derail the post though.

Yes- I read recently that Upstairs Downstairs is back for another revived season… I’ve not seen it so I’m not sure what it’s like (or whether it engages with class issues rather than just …portraying a situation?) but it seemed worth mentioning.

“But there is definitely something that makes me feel uncomfortable about the numbers of usually migrant women cleaning the houses of middle class women throughout the UK.”

Mm-hmm. It also seems to be dovetailing with the whole pushing of – for want of a better term – Downton Abbey chic, in a way that makes me twitchy.