Barbara Ehrenreich on the new politics of dirt

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4709415,00.html

As class polarisation grows, the classic posture of submission makes a stealthy comeback. "We scrub your floors the old-fashioned way," boasts the brochure from Merry Maids, the largest of the residential cleaning services that have sprung up across the US in the past two decades, "on our hands and knees." This is not a posture that independent "cleaning ladies" willingly assume - preferring, like most people who clean their own homes, the sponge mop wielded from a standing position. But employees of Merry Maids, The Maids International and other new corporate-run cleaning services spend hours every day down there, with or without kneepads, wiping up the drippings of the affluent.

(This teaser doesn't do justice... Read on! It's long but worth it!)

Barbara Ehrenreich on the new politics of dirt

Saturday July 12, 2003
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4709415,00.html

As class polarisation grows, the classic posture of submission makes a stealthy comeback. "We scrub your floors the old-fashioned way," boasts the brochure from Merry Maids, the largest of the residential cleaning services that have sprung up across the US in the past two decades, "on our hands and knees." This is not a posture that independent "cleaning ladies" willingly assume - preferring, like most people who clean their own homes, the sponge mop wielded from a standing position. But employees of Merry Maids, The Maids International and other new corporate-run cleaning services spend hours every day down there, with or without kneepads, wiping up the drippings of the affluent.

I spent three weeks in September 1999 as an employee of The Maids International in a New England city, cleaning, along with my fellow team members, approximately 60 houses containing a total of about 250 scrubbable floors - bathrooms, kitchens and halls requiring the hands-and-knees treatment. It's a different world below knee level, one that few adults enter voluntarily. Here, you find elaborate dust structures held together by a scaffolding of dog hairs; dried bits of pasta glued to the floor; the congealed remains of gravies, jellies, contraceptive creams, vomit and urine. Sometimes, too, you encounter some fragment of a human being: the expensively-shod feet of the female homeowner, for instance. Look up and you may find this person staring at you, arms folded, in anticipation of an overlooked stain. In rare instances, she may try to help in some vague, symbolic way, by moving the cockatoo's cage, for example, or apologising for the leaves shed by a miniature indoor tree. Mostly, though, she will not see you at all.

Housework, as you may recall from the feminist theories of the 1960s and 1970s, was supposed to be the great equaliser of women. Whatever else women did - jobs, school, childcare - we also did housework. All women were workers, and the home was our workplace - unpaid and unsupervised to be sure, but a workplace no less than the offices and factories men repaired to every morning. If men thought of the home as a site of leisure and recreation - a "haven in a heartless world" - this was to ignore the invisible female proletariat that kept it cosy and humming. We were on the march then, or so we imagined, united against a society that devalued our labour even as it waxed mawkish over "the family" and "the home".

In the most eye-catching elaboration of the home-as-workplace theme, in 1972 Marxist feminists Maria-rosa Dalla Costa and Selma James proposed that the home was, in fact, an economically productive and significant workplace, an extension of the actual factory, since housework served to "reproduce the labour power" of others, particularly men. The male worker would hardly be in shape to punch in for his shift, after all, if some woman had not fed him, laundered his clothes and cared for the children who were his contribution to the next generation of workers. If the home was a quasi-industrial workplace staffed by women for the ultimate benefit of the capitalists, then "wages for housework" - a campaign led by James in the UK in the 1970s - was the obvious demand.

But when most American feminists, Marxist or otherwise, asked the Marxist question, "Cui bono?" (who benefits?) they tended to come up with a far simpler answer: men. If women were the domestic proletariat, then men made up the class of domestic exploiters, free to lounge while their mates scrubbed. In consciousness-raising groups, we railed over husbands and boyfriends who were unaware of housework - unless, of course, it hadn't been done. The "dropped socks" left by a man for a woman to gather up and launder joined lipstick and spiked heels as emblems of gender oppression. When, somewhere, a man dropped a sock with the calm expectation that his wife would retrieve it, it was a sock heard around the world. Wherever second-wave feminism took root, battles broke out between lovers or spouses over sticky worktops, piled-up laundry and whose turn it was to do the dishes.

The radical new idea was that housework was not only a relationship between a woman and a duster or an unmade bed; it also defined a relationship between human beings, typically husbands and wives. This marked a departure from the more conservative views of Betty Friedan who, in The Feminine Mystique, never thought to enter men into the equation. She raged against a society that consigned its educated women to what she saw as essentially janitorial chores, but men are virtually exempt from housework in her book - why drag them down, too? At one point, Friedan even disparaged a "Mrs G", who "somehow couldn't get her housework done before her husband came home at night and was so tired then that he had to do it". Educated women would just have to become more efficient, so that housework could no longer "expand to fill the time available".

Or they could hire other women to do it - an option approved by Friedan, as by the National Organisation for Women (Now), which she helped launch. At the 1973 congressional hearings on whether to extend the Fair Labour Standards Act to household workers, Now testified to the affirmative, arguing that improved wages and working conditions would attract more women to the field. One young Now member added, on a personal note, "Like many young women today, I am in school in order to develop a rewarding career for myself. I also have a home to run and can fully conceive of the need for household help as my free time at home becomes more and more restricted. Women know housework is dirty, tedious work, and they are willing to pay to have it done." On the aspirations of the women paid to do it, neither Friedan nor these members of Now had, at the time, a word to say.

So the insight that distinguished the more radical, post-Friedan cohort of feminists was that, when we talked about housework, we were really talking, yet again, about power. Housework was not degrading because it was manual labour, as Friedan thought, but because it was embedded in degrading relationships. To make a mess that another person will have to deal with - the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack - is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms. One person's arrogance - or indifference, or hurry - becomes another's occasion for toil. And when the person who is cleaned up after is consistently male, while the person who cleans up is consistently female, you have a formula for reproducing male domination from one generation to the next.

Hence the feminist perception of housework as one more way by which men exploit women. Hiring a cleaner was not an option for second-wave feminists in the 1980s. There already were at least two able-bodied adults in the average home - a man and a woman - and the hope was that, after a few initial skirmishes, they would learn to share the housework graciously.

A couple of decades later, however, the average household still falls far short of that goal. True, women do less housework than they did before the feminist revolution and the rise of the two-income family: down from an average 30 hours per week in 1965 to 17.5 hours in 1995, according to a July 1999 study from the University of Maryland. Some of that decline reflects a relaxation of standards rather than a redistribution of chores; women still do two-thirds of whatever housework gets done (British figures, though imprecise, echo this). The inequity is sharpest for the most despised of household chores: cleaning. Between 1965 and 1995, men increased the time they spent scrubbing, vacuuming and sweeping by 240% - all the way up to 1.7 hours per week - while women decreased their cleaning time by only 7%, to 6.7 hours per week. Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that almost all the increase in male participation took place between the 1970s and the mid-1980s. Fifteen years after the apparent cessation of hostilities, it is probably not too soon to declare a result: in the "chore wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, women gained a little ground, but overall, and after a few strategic concessions, men won.

Enter, then, the cleaning lady as dea ex machina. Marriage counsellors recommend hiring them as an alternative to squabbling, as do many within the residential cleaning industry itself. A Chicago cleaning woman quotes one of her clients as saying that if she were to give up the service, "My husband and I will be divorced in six months." One Merry Maids franchise owner has learned to capitalise directly on housework-related spats: he closes 30-35% of his sales by making follow-up calls on Saturday mornings, the "prime time for arguing over the fact that the house is a mess".

In 1999, somewhere between 14% and 18% of households employed outsiders to do their cleaning, and the numbers have been rising dramatically since. (In the UK, a Work Foundation survey this year concluded that one in 10 working people employs someone to help with housework, while a survey by the electrical retailers Currys, also this year, put the figure at 40%; Datamonitor estimates that an additional 17.9m households across Europe will take advantage of home cleaning and home laundry services by 2006.) Among my middle-class, professional women friends and acquaintances, including some who made important contributions to the early feminist analysis of housework two and a half decades ago, the employment of a cleaning person is now nearly universal. The home - or at least the affluent home - is finally becoming what radical feminists in the 1970s only imagined it was: a "workplace" for women and a tiny, though increasingly visible, part of the capitalist economy. The question is this: as your home becomes a workplace for someone else, is it still a place where you want to live?

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, no one talks about the "politics of housework" any more. The demand for "wages for housework" no longer has the power to polarise feminist conferences; it has sunk to the status of a curio, along with the consciousness-raising groups in which women once rallied support in their struggles with messy men. In the academy, according to the feminist sociologists I interviewed, housework has lost much of its former cachet - in part, I suspect, because fewer sociologists actually do it. Even the number of paid household workers is hard to pin down. The Census Bureau reports that there were 549,000 domestic workers in the US in 1998, up 9% since 1996, but this may be a considerable underestimate, since so much of the servant economy is still underground.

The great majority - although, again, no one knows the exact numbers - of paid cleaners are freelancers, or "independents", who find their clients through agencies or networks of already employed friends and relatives. To my acquaintances in the employing class, the freelance housekeeper seems to be a fairly privileged and prosperous type of worker, usually said to be viewed as a friend or even as "one of the family". But the shifting ethnic composition of the workforce tells another story: many women have been trapped in this kind of work, whether by racism, imperfect English skills, immigration status or lack of education. (In the UK, and specifically the London area, according to Bridget Anderson, an academic and an expert in the field, a high proportion of domestic workers are immigrants: for example, a woman she interviewed who advertised for a housekeeper this year had 30 applicants, only one of whom was British-born.)

Few happily choose to enter domestic service. Even when the pay is deemed acceptable, the hours may be long and unpredictable; there is no job security; and if the employer has failed to pay social security taxes or national insurance (in some cases because the employee herself prefers to be paid off the books), there are no retirement benefits. And the pay is often far from acceptable.

Mostly, however, independent maids and their employers complain about the peculiar intimacy of the employer-employee relationship. Some employers seek friendship, though they are usually quick to redraw the lines once the maid is perceived as overstepping. Others demand deference bordering on servility, while an increasing portion of the nouveau riche is simply out of control. To verbal abuse add published reports of sexual and physical assaults - the teenage son of an employer, for example, kicking a live-in nanny for refusing to make sandwiches for him and his friends after school.

For better or worse, capitalist rationality is finally making some headway into this preindustrial backwater. Nationwide and even international cleaning services such as Merry Maids, Molly Maid and The Maids International, all of which have arisen since the 1970s, now control 20-25% of the US house-cleaning business (Molly Maid in the UK estimates that it has about 4% of the business). The customer hires the service, not the maid, who has been replaced anyway by a team of two to four people, only one of whom, the team leader, is usually authorised to speak to the customer about the work at hand. The maids' wages, their social security, backaches and childcare problems are the sole concern of the company; the customer and the actual workers need never interact. Cleaning services are the ideal solution for anyone still sensitive enough to find the traditional employer-maid relationship morally vexing.

Among the women I worked with at The Maids, only one said she had previously worked as an independent, and she professed to be pleased with her new status as a cleaning-service employee. She no longer needed a car to get her from house to house, and she could take a day off - unpaid, of course - to stay home with a sick child without risking the loss of a customer. I myself could see the advantage of not having to deal directly with the customers, who were sometimes at home while we worked and eager to make use of their supervisory skills. Criticisms of our methods, as well as demands that we perform unscheduled tasks, could simply be referred to the team leader or to the franchise owner.

But workers inevitably face losses when an industry moves from the entrepreneurial to the industrial phase - most strikingly, in this case, in the matter of pay. At Merry Maids, I was promised $200 for a 40-hour week, with the manager hastening to add that "you can't calculate it in dollars per hour", since the 40 hours includes all the time spent travelling from house to house - up to five houses a day - which is unpaid. The Maids International, with its straightforward starting rate of $6.63 an hour, seemed preferable, although this rate was conditional on perfect attendance. Miss one day and your wage dropped to $6 an hour for two weeks, a rule that weighed particularly heavily on those who had young children. (In the UK, a company such as HomeMaids, which operates more like an employment agency than the US-style franchises, placing a particular cleaner with a particular householder, charges employers in London between £8.75 and £9.25 an hour, and pays employees around £6 an hour. Molly Maid charges per job - on average £45 for a two person crew cleaning a three-bedroomed semi throughout; it pays the cleaners a percentage of that, but will not reveal what that percentage is - "commercially sensitive" information - while stressing that rates are well above the current minimum wage of £4.20 an hour, particularly for the head maid.)

The most interesting feature of the cleaning-service chains, at least from an abstract, historical perspective, is that they are finally transforming the home into a fully capitalist-style workplace, and in ways that the old wages-for-housework advocates could never have imagined. A house is an innately difficult workplace to control, especially a house with 10 or more rooms, like so many we cleaned; workers may remain out of one another's sight for an hour or so. For independents, the ungovernable nature of the home workplace means a certain amount of autonomy. They can take breaks (though this is probably ill-advised if the homeowner is on the premises); they can ease the monotony by listening to the radio while they work. But cleaning services lay down rules meant to enforce a factory-like - or even convent-like - discipline on their far-flung employees.

Within a customer's house, nothing at all was to touch our lips - not even water. On hot days, I sometimes broke that rule by drinking from a bathroom tap. Televisions and radios were off-limits, and we were never, ever to curse out loud, even in an ostensibly deserted house. There might be a homeowner secreted in some locked room, we were told, ear pressed to the door or, more likely, a tape recorder or video camera running. At the time, I dismissed this as a scare story, but I have since come across ads for concealable video cameras designed to "get a visual record of your babysitter's actions" and "watch employees to prevent theft". It was the threat or rumour of hidden recording devices, set up by customers to catch one of us stealing, that provided the final capitalist-industrial touch: supervision.

But what makes the work most factory-like is the precise work pattern imposed by the companies. (Molly Maid in Britain operates in a similar way, providing transport, uniform, and establishing a mode of working.) An independent, or a person cleaning his or her own home, chooses where she will start and, within each room, probably tackles the most egregious dirt first. But with the special "systems" devised by the cleaning services and imparted to employees through training videos, there are no such decisions to make. In The Maids' "healthy-touch" system, all cleaning is divided into four task areas - dusting, vacuuming, kitchens and bathrooms - which are in turn divided among the team members. For each task area other than vacuuming, there is a bucket containing rags and the appropriate cleaning fluids, so the biggest decision an employee has to make is which fluid and scrubbing instrument (rag, brush or plastic scouring pad) to deploy on which kind of surface; almost everything else has been choreographed in advance. When vacuuming, you begin with the master bedroom; when dusting, with the first room off the kitchen, then you move through the rooms going left to right. When entering each room, you proceed from left to right and top to bottom, and the same with each surface - left to right, top to bottom. Deviations are subject to rebuke, as I discovered when a team leader caught me moving my arm from right to left, then left to right, while wiping window polish over a french door.

It's not easy for anyone with extensive cleaning experience - and I include myself in this category - to accept this loss of autonomy. But I came to love the system: first, because if you hadn't always been travelling rigorously from left to right, it would have been easy to lose your way in some of the larger houses and to omit a room. Second, many of our houses were already clean when we started, at least by any normal standards; but the absence of visible dirt did not mean there was less work to do, for no surface could ever be neglected, so it was important to have "the system" to remind you of where you had been and what you had already "cleaned". No doubt the biggest advantage of the system, though, is that it helps you achieve the speed demanded by the company, which allots only so many minutes per domicile (from about 45 for a smallish apartment up to several hours per house).

Even ritual work takes its toll on those assigned to perform it. Turnover is dizzyingly high: cleaning is a physically punishing occupation, something to tide you over for a few months, not year after year. The hands-and-knees posture damages knees; vacuuming strains the back; constant wiping and scrubbing invite repetitive stress injuries. In my three weeks as a maid, I suffered nothing more than a persistent muscle spasm in the right forearm - from scrubbing, I suppose - but the damage would have been far worse if I'd had to go home to my own housework and children, as most of my co-workers did, instead of returning to my motel and indulging in a daily after-work regimen of ice packs and stretches. Chores that seem effortless at home, even almost recreational when undertaken at will for 20 minutes or so at a time, quickly turn nasty when performed hour after hour under relentless time pressure.

So far, the independent, entrepreneurial house cleaner is holding her own, but there are reasons to think that corporate cleaning services will eventually dominate the industry. New users often prefer the impersonal, standardised service offered by the chains, and in a fast-growing industry new users make up a sizeable chunk of the total clientele.

The trend toward outsourcing the work of the home seems, at the moment, unstoppable. Not only have the skilled crafts, such as sewing and cooking from scratch, left the home, but many of the "white-collar" tasks are on their way out, too. For a fee, new firms will pick up dry-cleaning, babysit pets, buy groceries, deliver dinner, even do the Christmas shopping. With other firms and individuals offering to buy your clothes, organise your financial files and wait around in your home for the plumber to show up, why would anyone want to hold on to the toilet cleaning?

One more trend impels people to hire outside help, according to cleaning expert Cheryl Mendelson: fewer of us know how to clean or even to "tidy up". I hear this from professional women defending their decision to hire help: "I'm just not very good at it myself" or, "I wouldn't really know where to begin." Since most of us learn to clean from our parents (usually our mothers), any diminution of cleaning skills is transmitted from one generation to the next.

And if this is a loss, few mention it. Almost everything we buy is the product of some other person's suffering and miserably underpaid labour. I clean my own house, but I can hardly claim purity in any other area of consumption. I buy my jeans at Gap, which is reputed to subcontract to sweatshops. I tend to favour decorative objects no doubt ripped off by their purveyors from scantily paid developing world crafts-people. Why should housework, among all the goods and services we consume, arouse any special angst?

Yet it does, as I have found in conversations with liberal-minded employers of maids, perhaps because we all sense that there are ways in which housework is different from other products and services. First is its inevitable proximity to the activities that constitute "private" life. The home that becomes a workplace for other people remains a home. Someone who has no qualms about buying rugs woven by child slaves in India or coffee picked by ruined peasants in Guatemala might still hesitate to tell dinner guests that, surprisingly enough, his or her lovely home doubles as a sweatshop during the day. You can eschew the chain cleaning services, of course, hire an independent cleaner at a generous hourly wage, and even encourage, at least in spirit, the unionisation of the house-cleaning industry, but none of this will change the fact that someone is working in your home at a job she would almost certainly never have chosen for herself
- if she'd had qualifications, for example - or that the place where she works, however enthusiastically or resentfully, is the same as the place where you sleep.

It is also the place where your children are raised, and what they learn pretty quickly is that some people are less worthy than others. Even better wages and working conditions won't erase the hierarchy between employer and domestic help, since the help is usually there only because the employer has "something better" to do with her time. Housework, as radical feminists once proposed, defines a human relationship and, when unequally divided among the social groups, reinforces pre-existing inequalities. Dirt, in other words, tends to attach to the people who remove it - "dustmen" and "cleaning ladies".

There is another lesson the servant economy teaches its beneficiaries and, most troublingly, the children among them. To be cleaned up after is to achieve a certain magical weightlessness and immateriality. Almost everyone complains about violent video games, but paid house-cleaning has the same consequence-abolishing effect: you blast the villain into a mist of blood droplets and move right along; you drop the socks knowing they will eventually levitate, laundered and folded, back to their normal dwelling place. The result is a kind of virtual existence in which the trail of litter that follows you seems to evaporate all by itself. Spill syrup on the floor and the cleaning person will scrub it off when she comes on Wednesday. Leave your newspaper scattered around your aeroplane seat and the flight attendants will deal with it. A servant economy may provide opportunities, however limited, for poor and immigrant women. But it also 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.

Individual situations vary, of course, in ways that elude blanket judgement. Some people - the elderly and disabled, parents of new babies, asthmatics who require an allergen-free environment - may well need help performing what nursing-home staffers call the ADLs, or activities of daily living, and no shame should be attached to their dependency. And in a less gender-divided social order, husbands and boyfriends would more readily do their share of the chores. The growing servant economy, with all the quandaries it generates, is largely a result of men's continuing abdication of their domestic responsibilities.

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a liveable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, in which so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits such as stock trading, image making and opinion polling, real work - in the old-fashioned sense of labour that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world - tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job.

· This is an edited extract from Maid To Order, an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, one of 15 in a book, Global Woman, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, to be published by Granta Books on July 24, priced £8.99. To order a copy, with free UK p&p, call 0870 066 7979. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003