Laundry

[ailbhe]

The children's duvets are washed and dried, all hail massive nuclear reactors, and their bedsheets are drying. My bedding is also drying but the duvet itself really does need a laundrette. And two loads of clothing laundry are in process.

There's hope for us yet, in other words. Four loads in one day seems excessive, but there's still more piled up to do!

Comments

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Feminism shchmeminism. The *real* reason I'm not having kids is that I fucking hate laundry.

[ailbhe]

I don't mind it when the weather is good but because I won't use a tumbledryer, lousy weather makes it a hell of a chore.

On the other hand, I hate dirt more.

(Feminism schmeminism - the best reason not to have kids is because you don't want to).

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

Well done! I really hate housework, and one of the scarist things about being a 'housewife' is the idea that your main job is housework, which is endless drudgery. You don't get the feeling you do if you write a book, a report, take a photo, whatever, when you can put it on the shelf/wall and say 'I've finished'. Housework comes back tomorrow. So you are doing a tremendous job, and I hope you get the chance to put your feet up for a bit and get over your illness.

[ailbhe]

I don't use the term housewife because it makes me spit.

I do more than half the housework, but my actual day-to-day job is childrearing, not housework, and I can't be having with the implication that housework is a built-in part of the job description. If we win the lottery, for example, I will be hiring people to do it for me, and I will still consider childrearing to be my job.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

I deliberately use the term, because part of the problem with child-rearing is that in many people's eyes, housewifery goes with it. And it's the bit of the job with least reward. Unfortunately, even if you do try to split housework evenly, just being at home tends to mean that you're more likely to have to deal with all the *urgent* bits of housetorture that come up. Like making sure you have a bed to sleep in that night. And I'm right with you; if I won the lottery, I'd be paying someone to clean and iron and do all that sort of thing.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

If I won the lottery, I'd make sure I had enough energy saving devices and a well organised and compact enough home that keeping it clean is not torture.

Outsourcing chores I don't like to (usually) a woman from a lower socio-economic status, often an immigrant or someone else who can't really protect themselves from exploitation, is icky on feminist, political and ethical grounds. I'd rather not.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

I don't give a flying f*ck what gender the person is who cleans my house. I would happily pay them more than minimum wage, and give them paid leave and flexible working. I don't want to take advantage of someone. Equally, I'd make my house as energy-efficient and easy to clean as possible. But I'd still rather pay someone else to do the house work.

[ailbhe]

It's not that you get to choose the gender, it's that in general women are more likely to be in a position to be doing this particular brand of usually underpaid work with low to no safety net, and men get to avoid jobs like that. In general, on average, etc.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

But you wouldn't have to exploit them, you could just employ them yourself instead of using an exploitative agency, and be a good employer, and still make it so that cleaning your house isn't torture.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't *have* to exploit them, but then you wouldn't have to employ them in the first place, so that's moot really.

The reality is that it's unlikely that you will be prepared to pay your cleaner a pro-rated portion of what, say your GP earns. By employing them in the first place you are part of an market that drives people into low paid service occupations, and the tricky bit is that once they've entered the vicious circle of the working poor it's very hard to get back out again.

(Full disclosure: as someone most of whose family - doctors and academics in the main - has worked in cleaning, street sweeping, child minding etc.[1] at one time due to immigration, I hold Strong Views on these things.)

I've not put this into very clear language to myself so far, but I've been thinking about related topics[2] recently, and in general my intuitive ethical position is that not liking something is not a strong basis for delegating a task, especially if you're delegating down the socio-economic ladder. Interestingly, most of the things we dlegate *upwards* (say, surgery) are things that we can't, rather than won't, do.

Don't mind me, just thinking out loud here.


[1] Except for my dad - he was a night watchman in a psychiatric hospital.
[2] The ethics of engineering robot servants. Don't ask.

[ailbhe]

Mm, yes; I had some heated arguments with a babysitter once who didn't understand why I thought she was undercharging. In the end she accepted the balance as a tip but not as part of her hourly rate.

Let us now discuss two-working-parent households who say that childcare is expensive. Go oooooon.

[rmc28]

It is expensive. It's cheaper than not being a two-working-parent household though.

[ailbhe]

It's only cheaper than doing it yourself because it's *cheap*.

[rmc28]

Mmm, and because we are highly paid, and we flex our office hours to reduce what we need to pay for and there's only one child. The numbers start looking rather different if we earn less or can't flex or have a second or third child.

I just did a quick calcuation based on a rough idea of how many child-hours our childminder does per week and she's earning around 21k now, and ~24k from next month, gross. Which is indeed a lot less than me, and slightly under the national average, but about double minimum-wage for 40 hours per week (and we pay her for bank holidays and 4 weeks holiday per year, just as a company would have to).

Mostly this makes me fear what nursery workers are paid, because she will be just slightly more expensive than the university nursery from next month. The nursery is open longer hours and doesn't close for holidays, and I have to wonder how they afford that.

[ailbhe]

Well, I already outsource some of it, and yes, it's easier to find illegal, underpaid labour than otherwise, but the woman who runs my cleaning service isn't given to self-exploitation.

(There was a cheaper service but they wouldn't tell me what the cleaners were paid hourly. Bzzt, wrong answer).

Nor is she an immigrant, unlike, oooh, me. She has Strong Views on immigrants, mind you, but apparently I'm different in that regard...

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

The Irish aren't _really_ immigrants. They're the unsavoury neighbours from down the grotty end of the estate, so to speak... ;-P

Now me, I'm a proper immigrant me - 3 times over no less!

[ailbhe]

You imply that it's the same estate. Uhoh.

(FWIW I did ANGST like CRAZY before paying someone to do my cleaning, and I am aware that a lot of the work I do for other women is unpaid, and with two sisters in professional childcare I am aware of the systematic undervaluing of female labour in traditionally feminine roles - but there are ways to increase the value other than doing it all oneself for free too).

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

For a United Britain!

Ahem. Don't mind me, just my native expantionist tendencies showing through here. =)

Listen, I'm totally not judging you. We all do what we can. I do shitloads of stuff I massively disapprove of - chiefly more air miles a year than a cratefull of New Zealand kiwi fruit. I'm just putting some actual thinking about what for most people, most of the time, is just a bunch of givens underpinned by vague assumptions.

I also live in a tiny flat, alone. And don't mind cleaning too much.

Still fucking hate laundry though!!

[ailbhe]

You are certainly judging my actions, though, on account of exercising judgment being one of the thinking things which raises humans above (or shoves 'em below, it depends) rats.

I think outsourcing anything is fine as long as one pays for it on a reasonable scale. I buy coffee in cafes, cake in bakeries, pasta in supermarkets, but actually I could do all that myself fairly easily. Cleaning services, and laundrettes, ironing services, nappy laundry services, etc, don't come with a Fair Trade style marking for ease of ethical decision making, but it's still possible to make it a reasonable thing to do for a living.

I strongly advise you not to look at the Facebook group about the Male Privilege knapsack though. Strongly.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

#1: OK then, I shall close my eyes, plug my ears, and fob you off with platituted like "horses for courses" and "swings and roundabouts". At the end of the day.

#2: An interesting observation that hadn't occurred to me until you made that list: have you ever noticed how for most of those it's you who goes to the provider, as opposed to them coming to you, domestic maintenance services being the exception? I'm not sure what it means yet, but I suspect I shall be mulling over it for the next little while.

#3: I'm not on Facebook, so risk tidily averted, but thanks anyway. =)

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

PS, I reckon you've had a tough week so you deserve to enjoy some schaedenfreude: last night I sent most of a mug of coffee flying all over the carpet, the sofa, and most annoyingly, into my glass of cranberry juice! *grrr*

[ailbhe]

Double-shot cranberry rug? Hmm.

My mattress smells of coffee. At least I don't take milk so it's just coffee.

[ailbhe]

Ironing services with premises (sp?) do exist, also laundrettes, but collection-from-home equivalents do exist. Also tailoring. The from-home version is almost always more expensive than the from-a-shop version, for whatever reason. Same applies to childcare. Housecleaning can't be done from a shop so I'm not sure how to compare it to anything.

Grocery-ordering/delivery is back now, too, though obv we don't do it because of local organic fair trade addiction.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with me being the only person on the planet who wants to pay the cleaner the same hourly wage as the primary breadwinner earns (my most recent hourly wage was far lower than I'd pay a cleaner because it was exploitative! Yay!) so most cleaners, ironing services etc can't *afford* premises - though Molly Maids and Daily Poppins both do have offices and headquarters where people report to work and collect their rubber gloves, bucket etc (7.50-9.00 quid an hour, if you're asking, which is why I didn't).

[flybabydizzy.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'd like to go out to earn enough to pay someone to clean my house. Unfortunately, I can't find a job that would pay as much as cleaners charge around here.
Diz