I LOVE The Takeaway, and this episode laid out some ridiculous inequities of domestic work. This pandemic illuminated issues for so many that never pause to consider domestic workers and the inequities they already faced before the pandemic. Now it is brought into focus that this “invisible workforce” is undervalued, to the point where we expect these services at wages where domestic workers break their own backs, and then cannot afford to care for their own selves or families, let alone feel they are in the position to demand PPE and safe working conditions.
According to The Takeaway, $17,000 per year is the average annual wage for domestic workers. That number was my exact income as a domestic worker in New York City, coincidentally. Looking back, I’m not sure how I did it, but I know it was a horrible time in my life, and I was just taking care of myself. I didn’t have my own children to care for. I saw colleagues who did have children, who were leaving them at home either alone or with family/community groups providing informal childcare, so they could work watching wealthy children, not just ensuring safety but constant entertainment (a problem in itself!), shuttling them to-and-from fancy classes and exclusive, socio-economically segregated playdates.
As a domestic worker, I didn’t think “sick leave” was a real thing. I didn’t think “paid time off”, or even unpaid vacation time was a thing either. Reliable hours and pay were never the norms. I was stuck in a survival game where I didn’t have the time or resources to critically think about the fairness of it all, that consideration was, in-and-of-itself, a luxury, not a given.
Society often refers to this work as “help”, a demeaning way to further diminish this valuable work that privileged families rely on for their own survival, or so privileged women might have their own careers. But these workers are not doing this work for fun! It is WORK that is ESSENTIAL, the infrastructure of our community, and imperative to maintaining a successful complex economy.
Confronting the realities of our workforce can be maddening, especially when I consider that I finally made it out of that endless seeming cycle through the privileges I was born with enabling me to “fake it till I make it”, charming my way into privileged circles. I had to conform to their standards, culture, and conversations, and do my best to mask myself as being from a different socioeconomic class, which was draining and difficult, but doable.
Not everyone is afforded the combo of privilege, hard work, and sheer dumb luck that converged all at once, giving me a battering ram with which to smash my own misshapen windows and climb through the walls that had bound me. As I read in AAUW, “The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap”, the wage gap is closing faster for white women than it is for women of color, to the extent that even with a degree many women of color barely feel a narrowing of the wage gap at all, where white women who eventually receive a degree will experience a shrinking of that gap.
I also found Kims, “Policies to End the Gender Wage Gap in the United States” to be highly informative, and had me “mhmm-ing” along with every point made. Despite typical conjecture from men on the subject (at least in my experience), this study was able to dispel some of the commonly used arguments that attempt to disprove any existing disparity in the gender wage gap by controlling for factors that might “explain them away”, mostly in relation to women “choosing” lower-wage and part-time work to maintain their ability to later raise a family.
I nearly broke my neck nodding along with the passage that explains why it’s important to equalize family-friendly policies, which of course are another example of the ways feminist labor fights for men’s equality too, in this case especially single fathers and m/m partnerships that choose to have children. Kim writes, “One must ensure that family-friendly policies do not reinforce the gendered division of labor, however (Bergmann 1997; Singley and Hynes 2005). Allowing part-time work only in low-paid female jobs, paid parental leave for women but not men (e.g. women receive disability payments for childbirth in some U.S. states), and higher pay for men ensures that women rather than men will care for families. Thus, part-time work should be available in high-paying fields, both parents should be required to take alternating periods of “use or lose” paid parental leave, and families should not forfeit the higher pay of fathers who take such leave (Singley and Hynes 2005).”
All families that are doing the incredibly taxing and undervalued labor of bringing children into this world and raising them deserve to make their own choices about the breakdown of that labor depending on their preferred family structure, it shouldn’t be assumed (like many experienced during the pandemic) that the woman/mother will be the parent that assumes these caretaking roles.
Other insightful points were made, one about pay secrecy stuck with me too. It’s always seemed remarkably blatant that this social taboo, and even workplace rules, surrounding talking about how much money you make is another tool of oppression at the end of the day. If it’s against company policy to share how much you make in comparison to your colleagues, how would you ever measure if there is pay discrimination happening in the first place? Abolishing these practices (which are often not legal but practiced anyways) would be immensely helpful in terms of the ability to organize, and even see oppression for what it is.
This week’s readings further expanded my awareness of the misleading distinctions (or lack thereof) between race, and how lumping different groups together in the way that we do now seems fundamentally skewed and racist. I learned from AAUW, “The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap” that Asian women lumped all together will on the surface appear to have a far smaller gender pay gap disparity, but, if you separate Asian women into more regionally specific subgroups, you can see that only specific groups enjoy higher earning wages, while others will face extreme disparities. Surveys that ask about race typically seem reductive and seeped in white supremacy, the categories are so broad themselves and typically offer a single selection.
I also resonated with the point stressed that we need to focus more on state legislature than federal. This country is VAST, and while human rights are universal, many of the paths we take to equality will look different based on the size and locations of the communities we are in.
