and ain't i a woman?: The end of drudgery?

March 8, 2000
Issue 

and ain't i a woman?

The end of drudgery?

According to an August 20 Business Review Weekly article, "household services" will outdo tourism as Australia's foremost "frontline new-age industry". At present, the industry employs more than 720,000 people and contributes about 3% to the country's gross domestic product.

Titled "The path to domestic bliss", the BRW article touts the expansion of the industry as "a win-win for society" because it solves the domestic dilemmas of cash-rich, time-poor, double-income households, while helping to solve the unemployment problem.

BRW attempts to answer those who (rightly) say that the new household industries are "creating a lower class of servants, maids, and drudges in Australia". The articles argues that this is the same fallacy that arose when the manufacturing industry emerged at the end of the 19th century: "This industry went on to require skilled tradespeople, managers and entrepreneurs, all of them doing better than those in most of the older industries and with higher status and wages".

I wonder who the BRW scribe thinks was doing all the work in the manufacturing industries of the time. The managers? The entrepreneurs? The truth is that the workers in the new industries (largely women and children on pitifully low wages) were so overworked that laws had to be introduced to limit their working hours so that the bosses did not work them to death.

Who is doing paid household service today? Overwhelmingly, it is women. Household services are among the lowest paid of unskilled jobs.

Cleaning, child-minding, washing, ironing — these are the main areas where the demand is growing. This results from people with jobs working longer hours, while the number of unemployed people who are prepared to provide such services for low wages is increasing.

Women make up the bulk of people living in poverty in Australia, and it is from this pool of people that those who will provide poorly paid domestic services, either through agencies or working for cash in hand, are drawn.

The expansion of the household service industry is supposed to free us from drudgery, but the women who do this work deal with double the drudgery — their own at home, and someone else's. The class divide between women who can afford to escape drudgery and those who have twice us much is very clear.

"And will poorer households ever be able to afford the purchase of such services?", BRW asks. "Of course. It is always the well-off households that buy the goods and services first, then the middle class, then the poor. Higher volumes, innovation and competition lead to lower prices, creating a point at which nearly everyone can enjoy the new products."

This may make sense with reference to electrical appliances for households, but BRW is talking about services provided by real people, not gadgets. When wages are pushed down by competition, the poor get poorer, and the consumers, not the providers, of these services are the "winners".

The biggest winners, of course, are those private companies that sell the domestic services. By paying the workers a pittance, while charging the highest prices they can for the services, they reap big profits. In the meantime, the capitalists' representatives in government keep cutting back publicly provided services, thereby facilitating private profiteering in this industry.

From the capitalist class's point of view, the ideal situation is to have all, or most, of these services provided for free by the household members themselves — usually the women. This is the cheapest option. However, if this is not possible (because more and more women want to do other things besides housework), "outsourcing" the work to women who have no choice absolves the government of responsibility for providing the services.

Technology can take much out of the tedium out of domestic tasks, especially when the tasks are done on a larger scale (such as in laundromats). And for those who do the work, good wages and working conditions can make the work worth their while. But that would mean treating workers, especially women workers, like valuable people, and that is about as far from the perspective that BRW wants to foster as you can get.

By Margaret Allum

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