Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: hiring labor

[Catherine Harper (tylik]

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Casey Morrigan wrote:

> Well, that is a great question that I don't know the whole answer to.  Here
> is a partial answer.  He does not like to pay others to do work because it
> reinforces classism and an unequal relationship between the wage payer and
> the wage earner.

Just from my own experienes dealing with this dynamic, for what it's
worth:

My husband and I went through a long period of tension over housework.
Pretty standard stuff -- we had pretty different priorities about
cleanliness, different skill sets (I lucked out in being the person who
knew the most about cooking, plumbing, carpentry *and* gardening) and each
had projects other than housework we'd like to be pursuing.  (I was the
neat freak, and the person who felt terribly embarrassed if anyone saw our
house in a state of substantial disarray, and the one who found mess to be
distracting and generally prohibitive to doing other things.)

Eventually, he brought up the possibility of hiring someone out of his own
pocket to clean the house periodically.  I was dead set against it.

At the time, my issues with the idea were: first off that it seemed like
an abdication of responsibility on his part, and a statement that while
housework was appropriate for me, he was above it.  I also had a deeply
ingrained sense -- obviously underlying the first bit -- that if you hired
someone to do housework you were basically making a public statement that
you were at least partially of the idle rich, that you were into
conspicuous consumption, had money to burn, and that you were better than
the people you were hiring.

Eventually, and I'm omitting here a couple of years of disucssion ;-) we
decided to try it out anyway.

It's been several years, and my feelings on the matter have changed
substantially.

First off, I really feel now that a lot of my problems were attitudes that
I'd absorbed as a child, and projected onto the situation.  When I hire a
person to do a job -- even if it is a job I can technically do -- it
doesn't mean that I think less of them.  I can value them and value their
work.

(My heavens, if I did every job around the house that I can technically
do, I'd go stark raving mad -- mostly because that's *all* I'd ever be
doing.  There's some interesting stuff here about how avoiding domestic
help interacts with gender roles when both partners are working.  Not
that our gender roles are especially traditional.)

Besides all the philosophical questions, there's been a major practical
learning curve.  Finding people, learning how to manage those
relationships...  these are not things I really grew up knowing.  We were
particularly blessed in finding absolutely wonderful people the second
time around, and are currently hiring members of their extended family.

(As a side note, what my housekeepers make hourly isn't far off of what I
was making hourly.  They clean vastly more efficiently than I do, though.
 Partly for this reason, I will only hire independant cleaners, who are
licensed and bonded, and will not go through the large services that pay
their workers scarcely over minimum wage.  Partly because I disapprove of
the practice, and partly because if I'm having someone in my house, I want
them to be happy with their jobs, and feel like they personally have a
stake in their reputation.  My sister's stories from when she worked for a
service contributed to this attitude.)

Both Craig and I still both work around the house -- of course.  Having
someone come in twice a months doesn't take care of everything.  (It just
means our floors get mopped more often than once a season...)  I probably
do a bit more cleaning type stuff than he does, but it's not as major a
difference as it once was.  And my time has been freed up both for my
projects, and to spend more time cooking (a serious hobby of mine -- I'm
something of a food writer) and to work on other house projects.  And the
dynamic has been generally improved by the addition of another housemate.

It's been a pretty happy solution for us, though it took us a long time to
get here.

                                        Catherine

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