blog 9

The Tronto article analyzed the “nanny question” from three perspectives: the workers, the employing parents, and the children. She stressed that the nanny-employer relationship is a market one, despite it being in the home/love sphere. What makes the system so unjust is exactly what makes it so effective: the parents have all the power. With enough money, you can have both intensive mothering and dual-career family, though it often means exploiting a domestic servant. She calls feminists out for failing to predict that this would be a problem. She suggests that minimum wage and working condition standards should be put into place, as well as a more collective attitude towards child care. The notion of a child “belonging” only to his/her parents is partly to blame for this issue.
Her idea that child care should be more collectivized and children should not “belong” so much to one set of parents is similar to Rothman’s point in that article we read a few weeks ago. Though I understand what they are talking about and can see how that would solve many of the problems associated with childcare, it makes me uncomfortable. It just doesn’t seem right, to not have your own child belong solely to you, even if other people are taking more care of it than you. But that is exactly her point: our worldviews are so constructed around capitalist notions of ownership and private property that we even see ourselves as owning our kids. Though, I must say, we are collectivizing childcare in a way. Think about how many people raise a child today (mom, nanny, soccer coach, teacher). That’s collectivized childcare; the only difference is that the parents (the owners) pay the people to do it, as opposed to the unofficial mutual assistance way it was before.
Bonnar’s article explores how and why caregiving work is undervalued in our society. We can’t rationalize it completely, since it involves so much emotion, so it is not considered valuable “market” work. Feminism, she thinks, reiterated the idea that anything done in the home sphere was trivial. Her main point is that people need more than just money to survive, a notion that doesn’t necessarily fit well with our industrialized society. Her suggestions include: modifying the work day time requirements for parents, paying homemakers (questionable?), discontinuing the policy of pushing welfare recipients into paid labor.
Though I don’t think wages for homemakers is going to catch on anytime soon (we don’t live in a socialist state, the government does not have enough money from tax collection to pay for that, and people don’t seem in a hurry to switch over to a welfare state), I think that modifying the work day time requirements is a better idea. People might be more productive with a shorter day, since 8 hours is a tough time to get through. Having worked at standard 40 hour jobs, I know that people’s minds start wandering at 3 anyway. Also, parents should be able to have more flexible hours, like working late if they take the morning off to go to a child’s doctor appointment.
Chapter 1 of Domestica discusses the state of domestic work in the economically stratified Los Angeles area. Race, class, immigration, globalization, and ideas about carework all combine to create a very distinctive culture of domestic labor. The number of domestic workers, mainly Latino immigrants, is growing, and their wages and working conditions are often very subpar. California’s economic climate and immigration history, combined with the U.S.’s laissez-faire domestic worker market, has led to a large domestic labor market.
Chapter 2 talks about the working lives of Latina nanny/housekeepers. The live-ins have the worst conditions and receive very little privacy, respect, or pay. The live-outs are paid better and have a better separation of work and family time, and tend to emphasize care work over the assigned housework. Housecleaning is the best job for Latinas with families, since they can work independently, choose their hours, and supplement income. Latinas are preferred for these jobs because they are “other.” The Latinas themselves transpose a racial hierarchy on their employers, favoring some ethnic groups over others.
That is the trouble with a pluralistic society: everyone has prejudices against everyone. It is not just the dominant groups that have negative stereotypes about minorities, it can be the other way around. But in the cases of these Latina domestic workers, their experience has dictated that certain ethnic groups tend to be harsher employers. This is often due to cultural differences in attitudes about servants, as the author pointed out. Just as some cultures have attitudes towards domestic workers that strip them of their dignity, perhaps we can work harder to create a distinctive attitude here in America towards domestic workers that acknowledges their dignity. That is why I support the unionization of domestic workers, standardized wages, and minimum working conditions. However, I realize this would lead to a decrease in the demand for domestic workers, since it would be too expensive for most people to afford if they had to pay minimum wage. But I think a good number of people would still be willing to pay for the valuable services they provide.