Stop making me think! October 19, 2007
Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , trackbackSide note of the day: Soleil has Dacryocystitis. Tear duct infections. Lovely. She already had a minor procedure for this, but now we might need surgery. With lasers. Nance is not a happy camper. Not at all.
Sometimes, you run across bloggers that make you think, and hard. Lately, Jody over at Raising WEG has been doing this. There are 2 recent issues she brought up. I want to discuss hiring help for the house today. I have a house cleaner. I started this when I was on bed rest with Soleil. I suddenly was confined to the couch. I was not a happy camper. I hired a local company.
I ended up with two different women every time. They were white, American workers. I paid the company. I talked to some of the women and I found from their conversations that things were tough for them. Living paycheck to paycheck and trying to get enough for rent and their kids. I couldn’t decide if it was good, or bad to have hired this company. After Soleil was born, I was not comfortable with this company. Lots of reasons, but we fired them.
When we moved to our current house, I hired a friend. She was great. She had started her own business and she did a great job. Unfortunately, she had to quit to work in an office to make more money. We always paid her in cash. I spoke to friends and found another woman. She was from Brazil. She was wonderful, but she had her daughter do our house and slowly that relationship fell apart. We found another woman (again Brazilian) and we worked with her for a while, but then the first Brazilian woman asked if she could work with us again.
After much talking, we decided to hire her. Let’s call her J for fun! J left Brazil with her husband and two children. She joined family here in the States. She went through an abusive marriage, divorced her husband and raised the kids. She started cleaning houses for other people and then started her own business. As far as I know, she is a legal immigrant. I know she hires family. I do not know if she hires legally or not.
Jody brought up the issue of using immigrants for cleaning. Are we exploiting immigrants by hiring them "under the table?" This is a very good question. I think about J. Now J is a bit of an anomaly. She LIKES cleaning. She loves it! She has told me "this is hard work, but I love to see and smell clean houses". I don’t get it! I like clean houses too, but I hate the work!
Jody wrote
Cleaning my house should not be an underground activity conducted by
people living on the margins of our economy. My aunt for many years
hired a local woman to clean her house, a farmer’s wife who reported
all her income and furnished documents to her employers every year at
tax time. I’d be more than happy to do that. Not one of the people I know locally with house cleaners has such an arrangement.
And she is correct, I have never asked J if she does income tax or how she works the Medicaid, etc. I DO know that J is documented. She goes back to Brazil once a year and this means she has the paperwork to travel. But she does drive a early model vehicle. She has a great relationship with a friend of mine and she once asked for an advance of payment because her cash flow was tight. She has called us about switching days and times so she can see a doctor (which I completely said yes). We have slipped her an extra $20 when the house is extra dirty. But we have never asked her "How do you pay your family?"
I don’t think, at this point, I would change my hiring of J. We definitely give her extra money at holiday time (and BEFORE Christmas, so she has the cash to buy what she needs, not after) and we tell her often how much we appreciate her. But do we contribute to her being pushed to the edge of the middle-lower class in the Boston Metro area? The rents here are outrageous. Really. She loves it here (there is a large Brazilian population in Boston). But can she afford it here? Her rates are not dirt cheap. She is not much cheaper than a company who can come out with different people each time and with insurance to make sure our home is safe… These are the same companies that offer ads with "Our women speak English!", the ads that make me just a little sick to read….
I don’t know, but dang it Jody, you are making me think!
Comments»
Our cleaner is foreign but happens to be legal, but you know what, I’d want him to work for me either way. Israeli workers (very very few of whom are even willing to clean houses) have a safety net. They have government health insurance, affordable transportation, welfare if they need it, and in most cases at least some kind of roof over their heads, even if things are very hard.
My foreign (leaving out country on purpose) cleaner doesn’t have anything. When a trusted friend disappeared while carrying $5000 of his hard-earned money back home for him (since they don’t have access to safe banking) he had no recourse. That loss meant staying an entire year extra to try and recoup the money. K used to teach agriculture back in his country. Yes, you read that right. He is educated, a teacher even, but he is still willing to endure multi-YEAR separations from his wife and children (yes, there are 3 children back home that he hasn’t seen in years) for the ability to stay here and scrub my toilets. He lives very simply, in a crappy inner-city neighborhood and sends nearly everything he’s got back home. That money that he earns from scrubbing the toilets of those lucky enough to be from a higher social strata supports TWENTY-SIX family members. When I look at it that way, how could I not hire him?
I’ll see if I can get my sister to weigh in on this one. She was, until recently, a lawyer working for a not-for-profit organization providing legal assistance to undocumented domestic workers.Interesting factoid - if you abuse your nanny or housekeeper by withholding wages, not paying overtime, or not paying minimum wage EVEN if she doesn’t have a legal right to work in this country, she can sue you and collect damages. My sister has since moved on to a different NFP but I think she could give you some more insight. I believe she, herself, employed women who came to her organization seeking assistance. As for me, I’m a pain in the ass and would rather just do it myself. Ever since I read Nickle and Dimed I cannot stomach the thought of hiring a cleaning service and I’m not good at vetting individuals. I think that undocumented workers are such an entrenched part of our society and economic system that *maybe* the best thing you can do is not feel guilty about hiring someone who wants to work, but treat them with dignity and PAY THEM what they are worth…
I have lots of thoughts on this as well….our old babysitter was “an immigrant”, although during her time with us, she actually became a citizen. We paid her cash, there were no witholdings, etc. Did she declare her income for taxes? Don’t know, decided to not go there in conversation….
Ah, a timely topic. Recently I was thinking about hiring a part time nanny. Around here they are almost invariably Filipino. I’ve heard they leave their kids and families behind to come here and work for an amount that is likely less than minimum wage. OTOH that money goes very far back home. I just don’t feel good about hiring someone because they are cheaper than local “white folk”. It just feels wrong. Somehow I feel we are victimizing them. I ended up not needing anyone, so that solved that dilemma.
I have always used cleaners that are local, not immigrants, and have their own business. One left to be a hairdresser. The others, who I was very satisfied with, don’t work in my new area. As much as I want to save money, I won’t go with a local “cleaning lady warehouse” like Molly Maids as it is someone different almost every time and I’m sure they get paid crap. At least with the self-owned ladies they get every penny I pay them. I didn’t ask about income tax and documents but since they are legit businesses I’m assuming they have to document and just include tax in their estimates.
Funny, when we lived in Boston we also had a Brazilian. She was fantastic and very sweet even though she barely spoke English. She came with the house (rental) and had been working for the landlords for years, so I assume she was happy.
It is a very tough ethical dilemma. Would the low-paid immigrant want us to hire her? I think so. Does it feel right? Not really. I need to explore this further…
My in-laws immigrated 30 years ago and are quite successful, and they hire more recent immigrants from their own country to clean their house, work in FIL’s business, and take care of children and older people. (G and her younger cousin were both looked after by these ladies when they were babies.) I’ve always been full of white-middle-class guilt about this, but MIL just shrugs and says that they’re doing them a favor by hiring them, and it’s a lot more money than they could ever make at home.
While I don’t think this makes it OK, it does raise a lot of questions about cultural attitudes and what exploitation really means. Is it exploitation when I hire someone from another country to clean my house (which I never do, BTW), but not when MIL and FIL do it? Is it exploitation if they really are making more money than they would at home? What if they’re earning more than minimum wage? What about the paternalistic benefits that come along with jobs like this? (People who work for MIL and FIL get hand-me-downs, rides to work, free meals, and sometimes help with “life stuff” like buying cars or finding places to live.) I don’t know.