Exploiting women to support yourself

[Felascloak]

This is partly inspired by another thread and partly by an item on immigration I heard on women's hour a couple of weeks ago.
Women returning to work typically the use other people (usually women) to provide childcare, and maybe do cleaning/housekeeping. In some countries, so many women are emigrating to richer western countries to do these jobs that it leaves a care deficit in their home country, causing issues there.
I've read numerous arguments implying that middle class feminists have exploited working class women for their own benefit and this is anti-feminist.
For most women, being able to access childcare/cleaning etc is necessary to allow them to work at all. I also feel that if I was to pay e.g. a cleaner, I would be giving her an income so she wasn't financially dependent on her husband or on benefits. Maybe that's me trying to justify myself though.
I don't know what the answer is. I want to get my thoughts straight on this so wondered what others though?

There we go - normal service has been resumed.

I don't think anyone's said you can't discuss the idea OP, but since when does a discussion mean nobody can tell you when you're wrong? Some of the things you've said don't hold up to scrutiny. I wouldn't have come out and said you're part of the problem, but it is true that some of the ways you've characterised this issue suggest that the domestic labour of middle class families is the responsibility of the women. That needed to be deconstructed. This isn't a gender issue, it's a class issue.

I think another point that needs making here is that this argument only focuses on the traditionally female labour that gets passed on to other people at low wages. There's a song and dance about middle class families using cleaners and nurseries, but not painters and decoraters, taxi drivers or landscape gardeners. The things more stereotypically associated with men. Men who can afford to employ other men to do these household related duties aren't accused of exploiting other men. We could usefully discuss why that is.

Heavens, Grimarse, you are a tedious gent, are you not?

If I can't discuss the idea (which is not my idea) that middle class women benefit from taking advantage of other women on a feminism board, where can I?

I'm extremely frustrated to be told that I'm part of the problem when I just wanted to deconstruct an argument that I find challenging in lots of ways

You are extremely frustrated because you were expecting posters to agree with you. Posting some twaddle from the Guardian's women page and Caitlin Moran does not make your case any more persuasive. Very far from it.

You still have failed to explain why one person paying another person to do a job is somehow grossly exploitative if the person paying is a middle class woman.

Oh and Grim I agree.

Lass, OP doesn't come across as trying to prove such hiring is exploitative, rather as being concerned that it might be.

Then pay a decent wage instead of all this hand wringing. Still does not explain why it's a women's problem.

Assuming you are exploiting anyone who earns NMW, then that is around 1.3 million in the UK <a class="break-all" href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/413415/The_National_Minimum_Wage_Low_Pay_Commission_Report_2015.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2015 low pay commission report.
In full time work, women have 28% of total jobs and only 18% of NMW jobs, so more exploitation of men. In part time roles, women have 22% of all part-time jobs, but 41% of NMW part time roles.
Overall, women have a larger % of NMW roles than total jobs, but mainly due to the number working part-time.
Still not sure why employing a cleaner is middle-class women exploiting working class women, but buying a McDonalds is not.

I think that really the main point of the problem is that the mc DO benefit from/exploit the wc (and upper class from the mc etc) and I'm very 'no shit, Sherlock' about that.

Making it about MC women going to work is just blaming women for how capitalism operates, in a society where men are the main decision makers, so they are the ones who invented that this aspect of inequality.

Capitalism relies on a certain % of the population being flexible for times of boom and bust. The people who get shoved into that 'flexible' category are the ones with the least agency. That doesn't mean that women are exploiting women, it means that capitalism (and the most powerful/influential people within it) are exploiting the more vulnerable.

You cannot absolve all women from active support for capitalism and supporting the status quo though, KickAss. Janet Yellen, Christine Lagarde, and the next leader of the world's largest economy, Hillary Clinton. In the UK we had Margaret Thatcher who quite happily gave no fucks for the poorer elements of society. I don't see any of them rushing to overturn the system.

I don't see anyone entirely excusing women, simply pointing out that far from having more responsibility for this than men as the argument in the OP suggests, we have less. Sure, a lot of the individual women who've had power have reinforced equality. That doesn't change the fact that we have less of it than men, and pointing this out isn't trying to excuse anything. It's simply placing the appropriate amount of responsibility in the appropriate places.

I also think that it's worth pointing out that women going out to work as a modern 'thing' is a complete fallacy. Women have always worked. True, the wealthier families have had less women working, but then the truly wealthy had men who didn't work either. The lord of the manner probably put as many hours into speaking to the estate manager as her ladyship put into speaking with the housekeeper. It's only ever been the middle classes where women staying home (in part as a display of their wealth) while the men went out to work has been done. After the second world war there was a HUGE push to get women to leave jobs, as western european governments were desperate to have jobs available for men returning from the war. At that point there was so much emphasis on the role of the mother in the home, along with a baby boom, and suddenly that became seen as 'normal'.

It's no accident that 2nd wave feminism kicked off a few years later.

Getting women to stay out of work, and to see doing housework as their role in life was a deliberate ploy to create jobs for men. When there aren't enough jobs to go around, the people with less agency are expected to step down. Then in times of boom, when there's more employment, they're expected to step up and get called lazy for not doing so.

Compared to that cycle of treatment, whether some people are employing cleaners/gardeners etc. isn't really the main area of exploitation.

Women do most NMW jobs. From your report, CarolDecker:

An important aspect of the social make-up of the NMW is that women were 50 per cent more likely than men to be in minimum wage jobs. Around 6 per cent of jobs held by women were paid at or below the minimum wage compared with 4 per cent of jobs held by men. Consequently, women made up the majority of the minimum wage workforce (59 per cent), higher than their share of the total workforce (50 per cent), as shown in Figure 2.9. Looking at the gender split by hours worked, around 41 per cent of minimum wage jobs were held by female part-time workers, almost twice as high as their share of all jobs. A further 18 per cent of minimum wage jobs were held by female full-time workers. The remaining 41 per cent of minimum wage jobs were held by men. These were fairly evenly split between full-time
(22 per cent) and part-time (19 per cent).'

I don't see why we are blaming 'middle class women.' Under various government benefits regulation, there simply is no choice for many often single women to stay at home and do their own childcare. They have to work and put their kids in childcare heavily subsidised by the government paying a childcare benefit. Many, often cohabiting, women have no choice but to stay home or work part time because they are not entitled to many benefits and can't afford childcare.

I don't want to destroy the whole of capitalism, but I believe we have to accept its limitations. If we want every family to be able to afford somewhere to live, adequate heating, clothing and housing and access to education and health and childcare for their children, the truth is that is not possible under pure capitalism, even in the UK. Somewhere or other the state has to step in and pay for many of those things. They are not going to appear for most people through the market.

It is ultimately up to the state to regulate and subsidise many of these things. Capitalism relies on people, usually women, to do unpaid caring work to create and maintain the work force. The state has to pay to maintain the workforce or Capitalism will collapse. Although of course they are pursuing the alternative method of women in other countries doing unpaid caring work and then us reaping the benefits by the young adults they raised moving here.

Also this notion that if we close a sweatshop the employees move to a brothel!

Somewhere is the business rival to the sweatshop- the factory that pays decent wages. When that business is closed down because everyone's buying from the sweatshop, don't that factory's employees end up in a brothel instead?

Someone, somewhere loses their job whichever one is bought from. It's still better to buy from the factory with safety standards for workers.

And Primark doesn't have a worse record on buying from sweatshops than most other high street stores. It just gets singled out because it is associated with the poor.

Also, refuse collection is not poorly paid. This is all part of that illusion where we have to pretend 'the poor' include men like refuse collectors and builders so we can ignore the fact that the UK poor are mostly women.

When we're talking about the gendered aspect of exploitation, I also think that we should bear in mind that, while a lot of women may be employed in NMW work, historically (and probably even now) a vast number of women are engaged in work that is not paid at all and therefore invisible.

It is an irony that it is only as (some) women left the home to move into paid employment out of the home that the work they were performing in the home was only categorised as 'work' when other people (women, mostly) performed that work in exchange for money.

(That is one horrible sentence - congratulations if you read it! )

I really agree with almondpudding when she says that capitalism relies on the unpaid (largely invisible) labour of women. I believe that was one of the purposes of the 'Wages for Housework' group (though I think they dispute that!) - it sounds like a small demand but if it were to happen, it would put enormous strain on capitalism.

In a sense, we're seeing what happens when you do pay wages for housework. The difference is that the effects are global (with societies in developing countries feeling the effects).

I wonder, Fela, if what you are after is a way of bringing into focus the gendered aspects of this situation? There clearly are gendered aspects. These need to be borne in mind whilst simultaneously using that knowledge of the role of gender to extend the questions and analysis out to include men and capitalism into the analysis (as people have done).

I don't think any of this seeks to abolish the agency of women. It is rather to find analyses that best describe the situation.

I'll just throw this into the mix, too: I think a lot pf progressive political movements used to be - and perhaps still are - slightly hypnotised by the desire to find some position (embodied by some idealised poitical subject) of political purity. In that position, the person is wholly innocent: exploiting nobody.

A similar quest is that of finding the subject position of 'the most oppressed/exploited'. I guess that person will be extremely exploited and exploiting nobody.

While I think that it is useful to think about those positions, I wonder how inhibiting it also is. For example, is it the reason that some people will leap on the idea of the middle class woman exploiting her working class sisters in order to 'discredit' a (rather undeveloped) notion of feminism? (I say 'undeveloped' because I think most of us have longs since moved away from the notion of an undifferentiated mass of 'sisterhood' which automatically bestows a seamless political innocence).

Personally, I like the idea of individuals with multiple aspects to their social-political identity. And, yes, in one aspect of your identity you may be exploited/oppressed, whilst in another aspect you are conferred privilege. It certainly seems to describe life in a more realistic way: as a first-world woman, I am enormously privileged - but I am aware that the developing world is paying the cost for that. I can choose to struggle against it, say 'not in my name' but the privilege still flows to me.

I also don't think I believe in political innocence any more: the idea that there are positions that are completely free of the taint of exploiting others. Or rather, I don;t think I want to let the quest for that kind of purity inhibit the ability to think about the complex web of exploitation and being exploited that goes on in most people's lives all the time.

(Not sure how much sense any of that makes. Ive only started thinking about all this sort of stuff recently, after years of being burned out and unwilling to think at all!)

It is an irony that it is only as (some) women left the home to move into paid employment out of the home that the work they were performing in the home was only categorised as 'work' when other people (women, mostly) performed that work in exchange for money.

Yes, absolutely.

This thread has been interesting. I am about to find a cleaner because, due to health reasons, I am now unable to do dusting, however, I will be paying them a good hourly rate, which seems to be the best way to deal with the dichotomy.

It is an irony that it is only as (some) women left the home to move into paid employment out of the home that the work they were performing in the home was only categorised as 'work' when other people (women, mostly) performed that work in exchange for money.

Like say, Farmers versus Farm Workers - that sort of irony ?

No cadno.

No, cadno. The work 'farmers' is seen, has been seen, will be seen. 'Women's work' was utterly invisible for a long time, and is still massively under -theorised.

There's a great, recent example, which I have to hunt down and look at.

A charity gave families a cow in order to lift them out of poverty. A group of economists studied the effect of giving the cow. They came to the surprising realisation that, in fact, the only way that the cow-giving could be seen to lift the family out of poverty was by not calculating the labour costs of the woman (and it was the woman of the family) in tending for the cow.

If the labour involved in tending the cow was calculated at any rate at all, the family went into deficit. The cow-giving, in effect, led to the (further) super-exploitation of women. For the cow-giving to be a benefit, it was necessary to calculate the women's labour at zero.

The invisibility arises from the fact that, prior to that study, cow-giving had been going on for some time and no-one had even noticed the women's work.

(I seem to remember Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak having written a good article about super-exploitation and women. But I am really sorry that I remember no more than that.)

There are lots of other - even more invisible - examples. My personal favourite is emotional work. This is often done by women. It's hard to identify, talk about, quantify. It's not really taken seriously. It's not really seen as work. Even raising it as a serious issue will set people off spluttering ('It's not just women who do that'; 'You mean women listening to each other complaining about men?'; etc.).

However, there was a thread on Mumsnet about 'wmotional work' a while back. Interestingly, it had arisen because of the issue of women feeling they were being expected to do teh lion's share of 'emotional work' in the workplace. It was becoming visible. But still very hard to talk about.

I find the invisibility of women's work fascinating.

There are real issues about how we think of 'work'. We do tend to think of it as something that can be calculated in terms of a direct relation to some sort of profit-making end result.

Even as we re-theorise 'women's work', it is still in terms of this profit-making end result.

A lot of women's work isn't easy to see in these terms. Yes, you can often trace a circuitous path to profit but I do wonder if, in doing so, we still miss something very important abut a lot of 'women's work'. Perhaps there really is work which is not about profit, and benefit, etc. ...

It's an interesting debate. I work as a minimum waged TA and my brother works as something very highly paid and profit making. We were having one of those late night discussions about work and he was asking about my role. I gave him a quick outline which includes dealing with children who are highly distressed eg through bereavement or wanting to run away from school. He commented that it would be really hard to put a monetary value on that role. So I suppose that is what is meant by invisible emotional work.

In some sense I think you are agreeing with Cadno?

The work that smallholders (often women) do is often invisible in the economy, yet many societies would collapse without it.

Not sure what you mean here by 'farm workers' Cadno.