Maids

I was 28 when I first got a maid. She wasn’t even my maid. My partner and I spent a year renting a flat in Mexico City from friends-of-friends, a well-to-do family who were abroad, and who paid their maid to keep coming while we stayed at their place. So she was taking care of their home as much as she was taking care of us. Young, childless, unbothered by moderate levels of messiness, I wasn’t that comfortable with someone so intimately handling my stuff.

My partner, being from an elegant part of Buenos Aires (I’m from an ugly part of London), found my attitude to our maid baffling, even bothersome, my naivety, my lack of understanding that one person dedicating their work hours to cleaning up after another person was really quite normal. There is a saying in Mexico that the maid is la felicidad de la casa, the happiness of the house. A professor we met there told us that she had wanted to dedicate her PhD to her two (two!) nannies, without whom her distinguished academic career would not have been possible.

Youth is wasted on the young; in my case, domestic service too. Now, 17 years later, drowning daily in childcare, cooking, washing, shopping, driving back and forth to ballet, art, swimming, I can say the taste for it is well and truly acquired.

But here in the UK, the economics just don’t add up. Another academic Mexican friend (in a private university) told me his salary and that of his maid a few years ago; paying her full time cost about 20 percent of his take-home pay. (Remarkably, while his income didn’t quite get him to the top 1 percent, this small fraction he paid her still meant she was better paid than nearly 90 percent of Mexican workers. That’s what high inequality looks like.) For me in the UK, with a comparable job to him, I would have had to pay double the share, a little over 40 percent of my salary. La felicidad in the UK would cost me a lot more. Poor me, and my wife, and our children who have to put up with overwrought and distracted parents.

That felicidad, of course, is pretty one-sided. It doesn’t take much digging to find out how domestic workers themselves view all of this.

Judith Rollins’s classic study of domestic work in the USA describes the mistress–servant relationship as ‘an extreme and “pure” example of a relationship of domination in close quarters’ and reports that ‘all domestics concurred that employers appreciated some forms of deference and outward signs of subservience’. In Mexico I’ve heard examples of maids being subjected to physical abuse, to daily humiliations, and to threats that if they didn’t vote for right-wing parties then they would lose their jobs.

Three films document this relationship in highly unequal Latin American countries – the Chilean La Nana (2009), the Brazilian Que Horas Ela Volta? (2015) and the Mexican Roma (2018). All portray the lives of a live-in nanny/maid in the home of an elite household – these days not the most common form of domestic service even in these countries, but probably the most extreme. All three portray the intensive affective relationships between the domestic worker and the children of the family, and the neglect of the worker’s own needs and desires. In the case of Que Horas Ela Volta? the domestic worker has left her own daughter to care for the son of her employers, and the affective bond between her and the boy is stronger than that between him and his own mother, and between the nanny and her own daughter. In La Nana the maid has internalised her employers’ desires to the point of abnegating her own needs. In all three the bland indifference of the employer to the well-being of their employee demonstrate extreme cases of what philosopher Elizabeth Anderson describes as “a profound asymmetry in whose interests count”.

So is domestic service wrong? The US political activist Barbara Ehrenreich remarked that she found the idea of employing a cleaner ‘repugnant’ because ‘this is not the kind of relationship that I want to have with another human being’. Other feminist writers have pointed out that there are circumstances under which the job is no worse than other waged employment, and sometimes better. I’m more inclined to the latter view, and in particular that it depends a lot on the degree of economic inequality. (But I tend to think most things depend on the degree of inequality.)

This is a big discussion. But here’s an interesting new datum that my colleague Marion Lieutaud and I recently found: of the (not many) countries where we have the data, the one with the highest share of households who pay for some form of domestic work is not Latin American, and it doesn’t have a high level of inequality. It’s Belgium. In Belgium, 22 percent of households, ranging across the entire income distribution – including around one tenth of the poorest 10 percent of households – pay for some domestic work. This is not full time work for a single household, of course. The average is no more than a few hours per week.

It turns out that part of the explanation is that the Belgian government pays a very substantial subsidy for domestic service, meaning the employer pays a lot less than what the employee receives. So could this be what a social democratic, moderately-egalitarian domestic service industry looks like? An essential service, particularly useful to women (given our regrettably-resilient gender norms), paid fairly, fragmented enough not to produce special affective burdens, and subsidized by the government.

Can that felicidad, the relief of outsourcing some of your social reproduction labour to a professional, be egalitarian?