Exploiting women to support yourself

BS, part of ethical factories is that each employee works fewer hours and the quotas for production are reduced. It isn't about employing fewer people but about each person producing less.

This won't really do though almond, because as has been pointed out, when things cost more this is inevitably going to reduce consumption. Consumption already having fallen/also falling because of reducing working hours per person doesn't change that. You are still left with some people whose livelihood was the sweatshop, who are now going to have to go for their next worst option, which by definition is worse than the sweatshop, and you either give a fuck about this or you don't. You certainly don't make things any better for them by pretending they don't exist, and this goes back to my point about how closing the sweatshops is the easy part.

I'd put painting and decorating into the skilled category. It's quite easy to make a mess and you need proper tools. For example houses in my street need internal scaffolding. There is no way husband and I could paint or decorate. And it's so time consuming- cleaning can always be a make do effort - if you can't be bothered one day - you can have another go another day.

Hmm but the problem with this analogy is that you've chosen an unusually difficult aspect of painting and decorating there Lass. I mean yes, there are clearly some houses that require internal scaffolding and the like when they're being done up, but equally there are people like me who live in bog standard postwar affairs who can and do get most of the painting done themselves with no skill or training. Knowing what I do about the British housing stock, Group B are the larger group.

So yes, it's true that some painting and decorating requires particular skills and training, but equally that point could be flipped on its head by pointing out that so does some childcare. Some children have extremely complex needs. There are, for example, parents on here who've become experts in their children's medical and SN conditions and provide extremely skilled management, education etc. This sort of specialist skill and knowledge, rather than simply keeping a small child happy, safe and entertained, is the appropriate comparison: after all, if a child is NT and easily managed you could do that by throwing food at them at regular intervals and letting them go on the Ipad all day. Basically, you are not comparing like with like.

bridget666 But that means a couple earning £50k each will pay the cleaner/childminder £50k a year, whilst a SAHM will pay them nothing.

This is to my mind the reasonable solution..you pay your cleaner or child minder a rate commensurate with the loss to you if you had to do the work..and yes..split it with your partner.

Men (why does the OP not mention men?) and women paying for childcare are not "exploiting" other women if they pay a reasonable rate.

Do we all "exploit" others in low paid jobs like shop workers, agriculture workers? Then we should campaign to raise the MW and other things.

Staff in nurseries and nannies and cleaners are paid minimum wage or above. CMs set their rates, which can be less than the MW per child - I felt local CMs' rates were too low and offered to pay more.

Of course it's not good that a lot of low paid work is done by women - care of the elderly also comes to mind. And other slightly higher paid roles, like teaching and nursing.

Tying this back to the initial discussion ...

A collusive refusal to see skills and to see labour has to be the most effective tool of exploitation/oppression, surely?

If you think about Hegel's (or Marx's version thereof) master-slave dialectic, if you have both master and slave not seeing what the slave does as work, or work with no skill ... where does that leave you?

I was really struck by the eloquence with which HowBadIsThisPlease outlined some of those skills.

Parenting is so interesting, isn't it? Suggesting that it may, in fact, be skilled, difficult, hard to get right, require practice, draw on various micro-skills (which are dispersed differentially throughout a population and may, themselves, require acquiring/refinement) threatens to open a veritable minefield.

For myself, I think one helpful analogy is learning how to play an instrument. It takes many hours of practice to acquire proficiency in an instrument. Many people can acquire proficiency if they put those hours in. Very few (but there are some) are limited in their ability to pick the skills up because of something innate that hampers them. Some people (very few) have an amazing aptitude. But for most people, it's about practice. And, of course, you can extend proficiency into real mastery and expertise.

When you think about it, you have a baby - and it's a shock. Some babies are quite 'easy', some are 'trickier', and some have quite complex needs. However 'easy', you have to make a series of rapid, quite profound re-adjustments. The skills are new but (relatively) simple. The biggest shift, I think, comes in altering your mindset: you have to alter your mode of being into a state of responsibility - and interpretation, I think. There's a lot more to say about this but I'm sure others have said it better.

I like Buffy's description of 'plaaning-response-re-planning'. That is so apt. It is like being in charge of establishing and/or monitoring a complex system - with no instructions.

So that goes on for a bit. And it's a bit like practising, practising, practising with an instrument. But the odd thing is, the system/instrument becomes incrementally more complex. And the skills it requires to be operated/interacted with become more complex. You scarcely notice.

The other difference between learning an instrument and parenting is that you are hugely incentivised to learn. The cost of failure is high. The margins are, mercifully, quite wide but ... emotionally, it's analogous to being forced to learn a piano by some terrifying person who is threatening to cause harm to your child if you 'fail'.

So most people don't fail. They learn fast, with high levels of competence.

By the time a child is five, say, your average mother will have put in an enormous number of hours of (highly-incentivised) practice. It's no wonder that we look as though it is 'nothing' and fairly effortless.

I suspect if many of us put in that number of hours, with that level of incentive, into brain surgery a lot of us would be pretty competent. Mind you, I think a better analogy might be with those groups of men and women who were mobilised and sent to the Front to work in field hospitals in the 1WW, being expected to pick up medical skills fast. Or the fighter pilots.

The fact that parenting is skilled work is probably less interesting to me than why this is so tricky to acknowledge; how that lack of acknowledgement limits our thinking and actions; and the thinking about what that 'skill' is comprised of.

It's difficult to define hard isn't it? Personally, if I am not very good at something e.g. I am not at all dextrous then I call things requiring dexterity hard.

If I am a natural at something (which other people who aren't would call hart) I would define it as easy.

Very subjective I know

Hard =/= requires qualifications
In the context of paid employment , yes.

How many people could do child minding as opposed to brain surgery.

You will like it on FWR, Howbad.

Hard =/= requires qualifications

That is a really sexist comment Howbad

You can go on as much as you like about how difficult looking after a child is - it doesn't alter the fact billions of people, men and women, manage with no special need for qualifications.

Howbadis I think that is an incredibly sexist comment. Both men and women can be good or rubbish parents. In some way looking after your own children is far better than earning a living, due to love, nurture, seeing them grow and achieve and in other ways can be as harder.
The truth is both parents (in a non-abusive relationship with shared finances and shared household chores) are normally jealous of the other because the grass is greener - regardless of who does the majority of 'homework'.
I see the difficulty is that the conversation who does what and expectations is not had before the pregnancy and often women settle for a worse position - no idea why.

HowBadIsThisPlease: "Actually I think childcare - of babies and small children - is abominably difficult. I think it demands incredible endurance PLUS incredible subtlety and various forms of intelligence and understanding."

I so agree. I was shocked by how hard it was. I often tell people that I felt like a caterpillar/butterfly: my entire psyche sort of melted and was then re-formulated by the parenting process.

(And the rest of your post has made me laugh and smile wryly at the same time. )

Actually I think childcare - of babies and small children - is abominably difficult. I think it demands incredible endurance PLUS incredible subtlety and various forms of intelligence and understanding.

I think that people who think it is easy are possibly terrible* at it. I think the world is awash with damaged adults who were not brilliantly looked after as children by parents of the 70s and 80s who didn't really actively think about whether they wanted children, or make many personal sacrifices of time and energy to look after them in emotionally sustaining ways.

*actually let's break this down a bit. I think men who think childcare is easy are probably terrible at it. they probably dick about on their phones rather than engage properly with the child, they probably don't cook decent food and pull things out of the freezer if left to do tea, they probably don't observe clues about tiredness and so on and trigger meltdowns, they probably don't even attempt to multi task on the things like laundry and tidying and food shopping that are the back drop to a comfortable life for the child.

women who think childcare is easy are likely to be trying really bloody hard and beating themselves up about how hard they find it because they have internalised messages that it should be trivially easy

most people can clean a house just as most people can paint one. And yet society probably does see painting and decorating as more skilled than cleaning, yes, so the former probably get paid more. The question to ask ourselves is, why?

I'd put painting and decorating into the skilled category. It's quite easy to make a mess and you need proper tools. For example houses in my street need internal scaffolding. There is no way husband and I could paint or decorate. And it's so time consuming- cleaning can always be a make do effort - if you can't be bothered one day - you can have another go another day.

Child care seems on the one hand incredibly hard and on other one of the easiest things in the world as billions of people do it and most don't make too much of a fist of it.

So to answer your question there is a smaller pool of people who know how to paint and decorate a room with 15' ceilings than know how to keep a small child happy, safe and entertained whilst parents are at work or know how to clean a kitchen.
Obviously there are carers working with special needs and specialist cleaners which are a different case.

Having said that my nannies were far more qualified than me to look after a baby and they had the papers to prove it.

Also not sure, when looking at 'unpaid' work - if a SAHM, for example, is supported by her husband, is he not 'paying' her?

Supported is probably the wrong word but yes I agree. If one partner is working full time outside the home and the other is taking care of the home and children then presumably the income is treated as shared household income. I appreciate it that might not always happen in practice but that is an issue between the parties concerned.

Is it exploitation if I pay the nanny more than I earn myself? She is doing pretty well financially and isnt very experienced.

Production has already fallen by capping working hours per person.

Almond This still increases the price of the goods and reduces demand. Overall production will fall, so less workers needed.

Not sure why employing anyone on NMW is exploiting them - we all pay people to do things we cannot or do not want to do, and work doing things we need to be paid for because we would not do them for free.

Also not sure, when looking at 'unpaid' work - if a SAHM, for example, is supported by her husband, is he not 'paying' her?

BS, part of ethical factories is that each employee works fewer hours and the quotas for production are reduced. It isn't about employing fewer people but about each person producing less.

Indeed. There's also the point that women disadvantaged by both their sex and other factors such as race, class, religion etc will be experiencing some of that oppression from people they love. That is, the men in their own communities. I have some limited experience of this myself, and what I found was that it's much easier to hate the oppression perpetrated by people you don't live with and cherish. That is, by women who are more privileged than you rather than the men in your own community. This doesn't hold true for all non-sex based forms of disadvantage, for example a disabled woman doesn't necessarily have male family members who are also disabled. But for women who also deal with racism, sectarianism, class disadvantage etc, they probably do. So this is a part of the reason why many liberation movements, whilst justified and righteous, end up being very patriarchal.

"practically, I worry that the 'support for one disadvantaged group entails support for all' line of thought leads to an absurd situation in which you are not allowed to try to make any efforts to change the social system unless you are addressing every conceivable inequality with in it, which paralyses any change at all "

Yes, that is the point of this line - we are supposed to feel too guilty to continue to attempt to make changes. It is supposed to preserve the patriarchal status quo. This is the point of this argument - not to liberate low paid workers into richer, happier lives - but to make sure that women as a class are too hamstrung by guilt to change anything.

Felascloak, coming to this late and skim reading (I admit) - I don't think it's so much that you were being attacked, nor that this is a squabble between liberal feminism and radical feminism. I think you're bringing here (sincerely, for all the right reasons) an attack on feminism, by patriarchal media. I think it's that simple. I think there is a certain level of impatience with it, because it's a canard, but not with you.