yer a wizard, harry

my god i’m so lonely ~ 🎵

All kinds of people need help “washing their dirty dishes” and doing basic household chores. Sometimes they need that help consistently, sometimes on a short term basis.

People with mobility impairments and chronic pain issues benefit from this assistance. People who are recovering from illness or surgery do to.

So do people who are aging in place and seeking to live independently as long as possible.

So do people with mental health struggles and executive dysfunction issues. I know several people for whom doing dishes is something they struggle so much to do for mental health reasons, and the impact of that struggle is debilitating to a degree where it puts their health and livelihood in jeopardy. Paying someone to come in once a week and do the dishes they didn’t manage is crucial to their ability to be safe and healthy.

The same is often true for people doing a lot of caregiving work too- a working parent with young children…or maybe someone who’s supposed to be on bed rest during their pregnancy… a person who is caring for their parent with dementia may all need extra help, especially if that help option doesn’t exist within their support network.

So no, “Just do your own dishes” isn’t the woke stance you may think it is. We need to denounce exploitation, yes. And there are often racism issues at hand where exploitation is occurring (often with massive corporations paying starvation wages as well). But “retiree on a fixed income with a mobility issue pays a fair market rate for help with cleaning once a month”… isn’t that.

Let’s also take a moment to talk about the sexism that gets tied up in this. House cleaning is coded in society as “women’s work”, which even though we know that’s a constructed view…doesn’t stop people society sees as women from being judged as “bad” and harassed/punished if they pay for someone else to do these tasks in a way that folks who benefit from male privilege don’t endure to the same degree.

If you are paying a fair wage, providing a safe working environment, and not hiring someone to do an inhumane or illegal amount of labour in one, too-long ‘shift’, there is nothing wrong with outsourcing domestic labour. This is something that helps economies work. It creates jobs. It’s not the workers’ fault that you think that job shouldn’t exist.

The fact that you look at the job of ‘maid’ or ‘cleaning service worker’ and your mind automatically goes to ‘this is wrong and dehumanizing work’ is a problem in and of itself. Can it be? Yes, absolutely. But nearly any job has that potential.

It’s all about having a fair contract. If all parties are being good to each other? Who cares if someone hires someone else to help around the house? Why is that different from hiring someone to do your taxes? You can do your own taxes, you know. You can buy software to help you with it if you’re struggling, just like you can buy a Roomba or one of those Scrubbing Bubbles self-cleaners for your shower. Is it because the accountant had to go to school for it? Hmm. Still sounds to me like you’re the one placing a moral judgement on domestic labour, then.

Not to mention, the reason we undervalue domestic labour is because it’s simply “expected.” Well, I’m sorry, but we don’t live in a world where most households are a single-income household with one party able to be at home and do a large amount of the housework - and even if we did, there are issues with that, too, especially when you start stacking homecare on top of child care. The “second shift”, which is coming home from work just to do all the domestic labour, is unpaid work, and because that is so normalized, it makes it seem like anyone who doesn’t do it themselves is lazy or selfish. That’s simply not true. There are only so many hours in a day.

Where I live? A value is given to domestic labour in spousal support calculations upon divorce because we recognize that it is work. If it’s work, and has a value, then why do people need to look at it as degrading and dehumanizing work for someone who actually does the work for pay?