dear god the sheer magic of being so invested in a book you just sit and read half of it feverishly without any ability to stop, just gulping down word after word like it’s water in a desert and your eyes aren’t fast enough for your mind and when you reach the last page you look up and realize you’re not decades and miles away but in the space of your own room,,,, truly unmatched by any other human experience
i do care if someone hires someone to clean though like you can’t just throw that out there as if it isn’t well known that those people that are hired to clean your home exist because they’re poor. wash your own dirty dishes
I understand what you’re saying, but you also seem to be ignoring the fact that people who are hiring these poor people to clean their houses are giving those people jobs. If they weren’t hiring them to clean their houses, these people may not have a job at all.
i don’t agree with this logic. i don’t think we need to settle for a job or nothing, is the same to be said for women who work under slavery like conditions in clothing factories in poor countries? why can’t we fight for change instead of accepting that some people just have to be maids
Before she moved in to take care of her, my aunt hired a maid to come to my disabled grandmother’s house once a week to clean for like 2-3 hours and paid her $80 every time she came over. There’s no way my grandmother, who had a bum hip from a car accident and hobbled around with her walker (back when she could even walk), could clean her own house. Maids provide an invaluable service, especially for the elderly and disabled, and they shouldn’t be eliminated just because you think their jobs are somehow not good enough for anyone to be doing. Many jobs like housecleaners, gardeners, etc., are great for people who may not speak the local language, who may have had a limited education, or who came here as adults with limited opportunities. My grandfather, who could speak four languages fluently but his English sucked, became a janitor at the age of 58 to support his family when they first came to America, and his kids always advocated that you should treat blue-collar and traditionally low-paid workers with respect because those jobs are valuable and even someone who cleans toilets is a person who is trying their best. Basically, we shouldn’t try to eliminate these jobs; they should just be better compensated.
I’m irritated by the reductivness of the tumblr discourse in some of these replies, and I’m going to try to be as nice as possible while I point out that this is some ableist thinking.
All kinds of people need help “washing their dirty dishes” and doing basic household chores. Sometimes they need that help consistently, sometimes on a short term basis.
People with mobility impairments and chronic pain issues benefit from this assistance. People who are recovering from illness or surgery do to.
So do people who are aging in place and seeking to live independently as long as possible.
So do people with mental health struggles and executive dysfunction issues. I know several people for whom doing dishes is something they struggle so much to do for mental health reasons, and the impact of that struggle is debilitating to a degree where it puts their health and livelihood in jeopardy. Paying someone to come in once a week and do the dishes they didn’t manage is crucial to their ability to be safe and healthy.
The same is often true for people doing a lot of caregiving work too- a working parent with young children…or maybe someone who’s supposed to be on bed rest during their pregnancy… a person who is caring for their parent with dementia may all need extra help, especially if that help option doesn’t exist within their support network.
So no, “Just do your own dishes” isn’t the woke stance you may think it is. We need to denounce exploitation, yes. And there are often racism issues at hand where exploitation is occurring (often with massive corporations paying starvation wages as well). But “retiree on a fixed income with a mobility issue pays a fair market rate for help with cleaning once a month”… isn’t that.
Let’s also take a moment to talk about the sexism that gets tied up in this. House cleaning is coded in society as “women’s work”, which even though we know that’s a constructed view…doesn’t stop people society sees as women from being judged as “bad” and harassed/punished if they pay for someone else to do these tasks in a way that folks who benefit from male privilege don’t endure to the same degree.
And this labor—that requires skill, efficiency, knowledge, and training to do professionally, and should be respected and compensated accordingly— is the subject of scrutiny for existing as a profession in a way that I’ve never seen for similar types of work (like window washing and house painting) that is disproportionately done by men, and are widely accepted as valid and respected types of professional labor.
Maybe instead of reinforcing the ‘reputation’ of jobs related to domestic labour by saying they shouldn’t have to exist period, we should try reframing how we think about those jobs in the first place.
If you are paying a fair wage, providing a safe working environment, and not hiring someone to do an inhumane or illegal amount of labour in one, too-long ‘shift’, there is nothing wrong with outsourcing domestic labour. This is something that helps economies work. It creates jobs. It’s not the workers’ fault that you think that job shouldn’t exist.
The fact that you look at the job of ‘maid’ or ‘cleaning service worker’ and your mind automatically goes to ‘this is wrong and dehumanizing work’ is a problem in and of itself. Can it be? Yes, absolutely. But nearly any job has that potential.
It’s all about having a fair contract. If all parties are being good to each other? Who cares if someone hires someone else to help around the house? Why is that different from hiring someone to do your taxes? You can do your own taxes, you know. You can buy software to help you with it if you’re struggling, just like you can buy a Roomba or one of those Scrubbing Bubbles self-cleaners for your shower. Is it because the accountant had to go to school for it? Hmm. Still sounds to me like you’re the one placing a moral judgement on domestic labour, then.
Not to mention, the reason we undervalue domestic labour is because it’s simply “expected.” Well, I’m sorry, but we don’t live in a world where most households are a single-income household with one party able to be at home and do a large amount of the housework - and even if we did, there are issues with that, too, especially when you start stacking homecare on top of child care. The “second shift”, which is coming home from work just to do all the domestic labour, is unpaid work, and because that is so normalized, it makes it seem like anyone who doesn’t do it themselves is lazy or selfish. That’s simply not true. There are only so many hours in a day.
Where I live? A value is given to domestic labour in spousal support calculations upon divorce because we recognize that it is work. If it’s work, and has a value, then why do people need to look at it as degrading and dehumanizing work for someone who actually does the work for pay?
And lets be honest. If individuals didn’t hire people for domestic labour, the job title wouldn’t simply disappear. There would just be even more competition for limited jobs doing domestic labour for corporate clients like hotels and office buildings.
