Is it Okay to Have Servants?

 

So I went on a fun weekend with a friend last week. She is a good friend of mine, but one I don’t see as much as I would like. We met was just starting her undergraduate degree when I was starting my masters. We met when we were attending the same church and we have been through some trying times together. It was really nice to get to spend the weekend together.

The only thing marring the weekend was this discussion (shall I say ‘argument’?) that we had. It started when we were talking about our friend who we were visiting who was cleaning her apartment before she moves out. My friend (shall we say, Amanda) made a comment along the lines that she didn’t like cleaning. Myself, I guess always full of platitudes, said something like ‘well- its just a part of life’. To which Amanda replied- ‘Well, I’ve never really cleaned.’

It turns out that her parents employ a cleaner on a bi-weekly basis and when she lived in her own apartment in London she had done the same. I found the assumption that having a cleaner was normal a bit surprising, at least in the US having a cleaner come clean your student apartment would be very unusual (my friend and her family are no more wealthy than many of my classmates from my hometown and are a long way from being rich).

Somehow this degraded into a discussion about what things you should have other people do for you. From my perspective, I view tasks like cooking, cleaning, looking after your kids, as essential parts of life that you shouldn’t farm out to others. I am suspicious of modern lifestyles that flatten out your life so that you can spend all your time working (to pay for all the help of course!) or doing a very small range of tasks. To me this doesn’t make for a complex and fulfilling life. However, to my friend, who by her own account, eats almost all of her food out, and would gladly have a nanny when the time comes, it makes perfect sense to pay others to do the things you prefer not to do: then you can fill your time reading books, or doing things you enjoy more than cooking, cleaning, and the like. Its no different than anything else you pay for, she contended.

We continued to argue though because as much as I am aware that there is a cultural difference between the west coast of the US (where a word like ‘servant’ is a bit of the faux paux) and England (which is much more deeply aristocratic in its roots), I felt as though there is something fundamentally wrong in system described by friend. I recognise that part of the problem is simply one of wealth (some people have a lot of money and other don’t). However, I think that even aside from this important issue, employing others to perform basic tasks for you must act to further divide the classes. The lives of those that have money become even more different from those that don’t as society is divided into those that have money and those that serve them. The ethical dimension of the question is raised also by the fact that most jobs like cleaning in the UK are done by immigrants (especially those from South America or the Philippines). In the UK these people are paid a reasonable wage—they’re not really exploited, at least a strong sense of the word—but for me there is still something troubling about people from different racial backgrounds waiting on the white, English speaking people.

We argued about this for a while. It all stayed pretty friendly but I could tell that Amanda was a bit upset. She obviously thought her way of life was under criticism. I didn’t want to attack my friend who I care about and who can certainly make her own decisions for her life—but I didn’t feel like backing down from what I believe either.

Of course, I think there are legitimate reasons for having help. You’ve just had a baby; you are sick; you are elderly. I pay to have my hair cut; my post is delivered. If I had a kid, I wouldn’t have a live in nanny but I would definitely hire a baby-sitter on occasion. It is entirely a world of grey, and something everyone has to navigate on their own. But I do think it is a question with an ethical dimension and that the answer ‘its fine if you pay’ doesn’t really cut it. I would be curious to know what others think about this. Is there such as thing as getting too much ‘help’?  When in your own life is ‘getting help’ fine and when do you think it can be destructive (whether for you or for others)?

5 thoughts on “Is it Okay to Have Servants?

  1. This is an issue I have wrestled with since moving to Saudi five years ago. Of course I never would have thought of having “servants” before. There seems to be something in US culture that finds it distasteful, or at least not practical unless you are extremely wealthy. But here labor is cheap (mostly African and SE asian expatriates who get paid a pittance and have very few rights). Therefore many, many people, both upper and middle class, both Saudi and expat, employ live in maids/nannies, drivers, and gardeners. When I first considered the idea, I was completely against it. I couldn’t handle the idea of someone living in my house and doing my chores. However, for the past four years we have paid house cleaners to come in twice a month. In an hour, two guys are able to mop all the floors, clean all the bathrooms, dust, vacuum, and change the sheets on the bed. It costs less for the two of them than it would to pay one person for an hour in the US.

    I’ll be honest, though the idea still weirds me out a little, I’ve come around a lot on the idea of a maid/nanny. I’ve seen how great it can be for families. Some of our friends employ a nanny so they have quality and reliable childcare and the parents can both work. In other families I know, the mom stays at home but having the nanny allows her to spend the day doing fun things with the kids (and yes, taking care of herself) while not having to worry about laundry and dishes. In both cases the families actually have more quality time together because of having the help.

    Now that we’re expecting twins, it’s a very real possibility that we’ll go down this road. Not so I can go back to work, at least not in the first year, but because I know it’s going to be crazy difficult taking care of two babies. If I can have someone around all the time, helping take care of the house, able to hold a baby when I’m feeding the other, and available for childcare so I can actually get out of the house once and a while…if I can have all that for a few hundred dollars a month, I could see it being very worth it.

    There are cases of maids here that are horribly abused and mistreated by their employers, and they have very little recourse. This is a tragedy. But I think if you view hiring help as an opportunity to have an extra member of the family, to contribute financially to that person’s own attempts to support a family back in their homeland, and to maximize the all too brief time you have young kids at home, it can be a wonderful thing.

  2. I know this is something you have thought a lot about Bluebell. I remember us talking about this same issue when you came to visit me a couple of years ago. If having servants is more normal in England than in the US, it is even more mainstream in Saudi.

    For the record, I think that having two brand-new babies may be a good reason for getting some help. I still think however that there is something fundamentally unjust in general cultural setup over there (and over here).

    I guess part of the issue is how ‘help’ are treated. When my cousin stayed in the UK, she lived with a family and worked for them as a nanny a few hours a week in exchange for free lodging and a little extra pocket money. I see nothing wrong in this at all. She was never treated as part of a different class and was fully as part of the family. But I think this arrangement is much less natural when the people who wait on you are coming from a different ethnic background and social class, especially if you don’t speak the same language.

    I see nothing shameful in working as a cleaner or a nanny— my aunt was gardener and another member of my family worked for a while as a maid in hotel. I have also worked a few different low-paying jobs and can easily imagine myself doing the same thing. However, if these are jobs that only some groups of people have and not others, it reminds me too much of the American south: one group of people (with a certain ethnic background) get served and the other group doing the serving. I am not convinced that it makes a significant difference if people are paid, especially if it is a system where they don’t have any opportunity to move up or find other work.

    That is not to judge your actions, however. You know the situation there much better than I and have obviously thought a lot about the question. (I remember you explaining that nannies are paid through an organising firm and you can’t even choose to pay them more if you wanted). I guess if i was making the same decision part of the question would be if the person I hired would really be able to become ‘part of the family’, or whether they would fundamentally be part of a serving class. In the end, this is what I dislike- not that people clean, or cook, or whatever- but a class system where certain groups of people do these tasks for their entire life (rather than, say, young people working random jobs), and other groups of people are waited upon for their entire life (by virtue of their background).

  3. Great post! So many things to consider!!

    Growing up in a tourist town, the majority of my childhood friend’s families had cleaning crews come at least once a week. It was a regular thing to have to wake up by 9am on a Saturday or Sunday after a sleepover because their maid needed to wash my friend’s sheets or dust around the room. I never thought anything of it, we didn’t have that but it didn’t matter that they did. But I also get what you mean about it being a class thing, every maid I’ve ever seen in a friend’s house was Latina and they rarely spoke English. I was never introduced to these women, or expected to talk with them, which is definitely uncomfortable as you get older. I do know my friends did interact more with these women, but never much more than a relationship with a hair dresser or a nice person to practice Spanish with.

    I also know that for my mother the idea of having someone else come into her home and touch things is cringe worthy, she said she’d have to clean before they came just to feel okay with someone coming in. But as the years have gone on I’ve found myself encouraging her to consider it. Her house isn’t small, and for one person to mop the floors and dust and vacuum and clean toilets and mirrors and sheets and laundry and dishes as often as possible for every year of your life, it starts to become too much. I don’t want my mother to spend her Saturday’s moping the kitchen floor. I want her to be outside working in her garden. And while she is totally capable of keeping a decently clean home on her own, for a few hundred a month it seems completely worth it to me to ask for a few hours of help every other week.

    For me, it comes down to what my time is worth. I make a certain wage at work, and for every hour outside that window my time is valued at some price. I can opt to do a thing for free, of course, but for things I’d rather not do I have a price. Right now, hiring a cleaner for my apartment definitely isn’t worth ANY price, because it is a small place and I have so few other responsibilities. But eventually YES, I think having help could totally be worth it. And while I definitely don’t want to contribute to class segregation and general societal bad things, I don’t think this is the place to fight it. By not hiring the woman who wants to clean my house I’m only hurting her. And since I’m not going to stop eating cheap food from restaurants or getting a pedicure once a year because my grandma asks, it feels hypocritical to boycott cleaning in an attempt to make a difference. I’d rather hire the mother of three, pay her well and write recommendations letters for her kids, especially over hiring a teenager who is just working a summer job. To me, the clearest solution for making our world better is that more people should opt to hire help, then either the cleaners can charge more or it will become more normal for all types of people to do the job.

    1. I agree with a lot of what you said here, Lupin. Especially the part at the end about how the ideal is just for these types of jobs to become better paid and better respected in society, so that they are the type of job anyone could have rather than just people in extreme need from other backgrounds. I am not sure if ‘more people hiring help’ is the best way to bring this about (as it doesn’t appear to have had that effect in Saudi or the UK, where employing people for these jobs is much more typical). But, yeah, if these jobs were better respected, well paid, and not segregated I would see it as mostly just a personal choice if a person wants to hire someone (even if I still resist the extreme situation where people never learn to cook and clean for themselves!).

    2. I completely agree with your point about the value of time. My husband and I have discussed that a lot as well. He is very pro getting a maid/nanny when the babies come, because he knows he will still be working a full time job and doing an MBA, and the hours he has after work and on his free weekends are very valuable to him. He doesn’t want to spend them doing mountains of laundry or cleaning up messes I wasn’t able to get to all week because of, well, two babies. I get that completely, and I think we all make choices all the time of how to spend our money to gain or maximize our free time. If we do hire live-in help, this will be a primary justification for it.

      I think another important difference between maids working in the US and those here in Saudi is the existence of a minimum wage. Here, they aren’t paid much if you break it down by hour, though they do also receive health insurance, food, and lodging for free. But in the US or UK those people won’t be making any less than someone working at McDonalds, so is it really any more “low class” than any other minimum wage job?

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