In the current issue of The Atlantic, ("How to Treat the Help?") Caitlin Flanagan has weighed in on the thorny problems of how middle class people--i.e., those of us who did not grow up in vast estates staffed with servants--should deal with the hordes of cheap immigrant labor that we now find ourselves employing, whether as cleaning ladies, nannies, lawn-mowers or occasional handymen. She talks about having grown up in Berkeley, where her mother and most of the moms in her neighborhood employed "cleaning ladies" (black women, mostly, all of whom worked in uniform); she has had experience living in New Orleans as a young adult, and writes of having "fallen under the sway of a woman who had always had servants and who had been raised in a house full of them in the Deep South." This woman taught her some basic rules (pay the help even when you're not around; they don't get paid vacations and they need money; help with their personal problems to the extent possible; don't have a cow every time something gets broken because if you were doing the cleaning you'd probably have broken things, too).
So far, no problem. Then Flanagan talks about the nanny she hired when her twins were born, and the complicated emotions she felt about having hired this woman--so much poorer than she, whose life was so much less privileged than hers. "What was my right relationship with my domestic staff?" she writes. "As much as I had admired my former mentor, the servant culture of the Deep South--even at its most decent--was hardly the moral template I wanted to shape my behavior around."
Speaking as someone who grew up in the Deep South--and whose mom never had a "cleaning lady," black or white, in uniform or not--I think she could do worse. I've heard about this problem before, usually from friends who grew up in more privileged circumstances than I did, and I just don't get it. What is so hard about being decent?
Full disclosure: I employ a cleaning lady named Josey, who comes once a week. Since I pay her company, and not her individually, I am happily not responsible for Social Security withholding on the women who actually do the work in my home; technically, they are Josey's employees, not mine. I confess to being unreasonably happy about this arrangement, since I've caught a glimpse of those Social Security forms and they are a bitch. Most of the women who clean my house do not speak a word of English; we communicate in signs, in a few fractured words of Spanish that I've learned, and in their few fractured words of English. They work hard. They do a great job. I am immensely grateful to them. I even considered mentioning them in the acknowledgements of my upcoming book, since having a clean house every week played no small role in being able to maintaining my sanity long enough to finish the damn thing, but then I figured: who was that for? They'd never read it, and I'd come across as patronizing. Nevertheless, that's the way I feel about them.
What struck me about Flanagan's essay was how permeated with guilt it was, how riddled with self-consciousness. It's all about me, me, me: How do I feel about having you as my servant? To which I say: get over yourself. Instead, think: what can I do for them? When you approach things this way, things get very easy. Here are my rules:
1. Make sure you are paying them a fair wage. Josey claims that she gives me a lower-than-market-cost price for housecleaning because I'm a loyal customer and she makes big profits working for developers, cleaning new houses they are about to put on the market. I pay $85 a week, for two workers, who spend an average of two hours in my home for regular tidying up. I have no way of knowing what percentage Josey takes off the top, but let's assume it's a fairly draconian 70-30, which works out to $6.38 per worker per hour. I don't think that's enough, so I put a $20 bill on top of the check, and I make sure the workers know it is their tip, not Josey's. That's an extra $5 per hour per worker, bringing their wages up to a respectable $11.38, and that's a worst-case scenario. I also give Christmas presents. Do I pay them when we are out of town? You bet. Coming home to a clean house is one of the greatest luxuries of life.
2. "How many parents ask the employee to eat with the family?" Flanagan asks. Answer: if you are eating and the workers are there and have not eaten, you invite them to share your meal. End of story. How hard was that? Didn't her mother teach her it was rude to eat in front of people who had nothing to eat themselves?
3. Ditch the guilt; it is narcissism and snobbery lurking in disguise. ("What should I,I,I do? Oh my God, the horror of being a MAID.") Chances are, the people you employ are going to be poorer than you. If they were as well off as you, you probably wouldn't know them; if they were richer, you might be working for them. Treat them like people earning an honest wage, which is what they are, I would hope (if not, you should fire them). If you treat them like people, you won't have to worry about your respective standings on the economic scale.
4. Help them whenever it is in your power to help. I was cleaning out my jewelry box recently and dumped a whole bunch of 20-year-old costume jewelry I had not worn in a decade. One of the cleaning ladies saw an earring in the trash can and came to me with a questioning look. I said, "I'm throwing it away." Then a light bulb dawned. "Wait," I said. I went outside and looked through the Salvation Army bag where I had put all the earrings I wanted to get rid of that had mates, all the old necklaces, bracelets, etc., and brought them back inside. I gave the bag to this woman. "If you want them, if you like them, they are yours," I said. I got a big smile and a "gracias." She picked through, took what she wanted, and it cost me nothing. My rule in general is: if you have something and you are not using it, you are depriving somebody else who cannot afford it and who may need it. Most of us will end our days in a hospital bed, our only possessions a clock, maybe a picture or two and a bedpan. Don't waste your time with yard sales; give it away. I guarantee you, you have more Stuff than you will ever need, and there are people who do need/want it.
I hold no illusions about being personally able to solve the problem of world poverty, which seems to be the unspoken expectation fueling the guilt Flanagan feels (talk about grandiosity). And I don't think I am afflicted with nobless oblige. In human terms, nobody is my inferior; a few people are my superiors--the Dali Lama comes to mind, and also that guy whose car I scraped with mine but who didn't get his nose out of joint about it--but not that many. People are just people. Treat them as you would want to be treated. Take this rule to heart, Caitlin, and you will save yourself a ton in psychiatric fees. Maybe, with the money you save, you can pay your cleaning lady a little extra next week. Buy her poor tired feet a pedicure. Think how much better you'll feel.