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The Servant Problem by Rosie Cox
THE SERVANT PROBLEM: Domestic Employment in a Global Economy by Rosie Cox
IB Tauris £15.99 pp175
Reviewed by Minette Marrin
Traditionally, the servant problem was that there weren’t enough of them; today, according to Rosie Cox, the servant problem is that there are still any at all. Worse than that, she claims, the numbers are increasing in this country, as a result of growing inequalities both here and globally. Drudgery is not a thing of the past. “There are,” she writes in her opening sentence, “perhaps 2m domestic workers in Britain today — more than there were in Victorian times.”
It is, perhaps, unwise for an academic at London’s Birkbeck College to begin a campaigning book about servants with a “perhaps” about the numbers, especially as the accompanying publicity says “there are perhaps 3m domestic workers in Britain today”. That is a difference of, perhaps, 1m people. This discrepancy does not inspire confidence.
Nor does the book’s first footnote. In support of her statement that 2.7m British households now employ some kind of domestic help, she cites an article in the Financial Times magazine of 2001. Far be it from me, a journalist, to suggest that journalism should not be taken seriously, but on such a central point it would have been reassuring if Cox had quoted other sources as well. She creates an impression, which the rest of the book does not dispel, that this is not an entirely scholarly work. “Many employers forget,” she writes in chapter seven, “that their domestic worker is doing a job at all. As a result, unsurprisingly, lots of employers are very bad managers.” That may well be so, but Cox ought to provide at least a footnote to point to a little evidence, if not actually “lots” of it. Still, I suppose there is no reason why she should not write a book of less than academic rigour on this intriguing subject.
It is an assumption of the book that all domestic work is of itself demeaning, undervalued and underpinned by inequality, exploitation and guilt. Neo-liberal market capitalism, gender inequalities, income inequalities, racism, family-unfriendly work patterns and inadequate, unaffordable childcare provision are all blamed for the unacceptable fact that some people can pay others to do domestic chores for them, whether essential or not. “Employing domestic help is at best an individual solution to a social problem. At worst it is the use of another human being to enhance and display wealth and status. Neither is to be encouraged.”
One has the impression that if Cox had her way both would not merely be discouraged but stopped at once; this would be her solution to the “servant problem”, although it would, of course, lead to the unemployment of, perhaps, 3m people, and the loss of huge sums of remittance money to the Third World.
However, it is not self-evident at all that paid domestic work is necessarily demeaning. Of course it can be, and has been; some people here are, to this day, still treated as “servants” in the obsolete sense, particularly those trapped by immigration rules into tied employment with foreign families. Cox writes well about exploitation, from the sufferings of lonely au pairs to the abuse and virtual slavery of some “ undocumented” servants. But, in truth, domestic work is nothing that one would not do for oneself — ironing, cleaning the bathroom, walking the dog, changing nappies, washing up — and, with a reasonable employer, in reasonable conditions, there is nothing inherently degrading about it. It is the practice of the employers, not the principle of the work, that is sometimes wrong.
The proof is, surely, that many of these chores are not considered debasing when done outside the home in commercial institutions such as nurseries, laundries, care homes and kitchens. What is the difference? And as for Cox’s objection to “using another human being to enhance and display wealth and status”, what does she imagine is going on at a hairdresser’s salon, a gift-wrapping counter, a manicure bar or in a taxi? How is it that she does not consider such very similar services in the least demeaning just because they are outside the home? This is something she simply ignores.
There are some profound and interesting questions underlying all this. One is the nature of guilt that employers feel, and which makes them tie themselves up in such knots of embarrassment and faux-egalitarian insincerity, which Cox treats well. Another is the nature of pollution, which she touches on only briefly. Not all domestic work is dirty, but some is, unavoidably; traditional societies have regarded taking on other people’s dirty work as polluting and degrading, sometimes turning those who do it into pariahs, such as India’s Harijan or untouchables. I will never forget seeing a Harijan man in Delhi slopping a filthy cloth round a filthy lavatory floor, merely spreading the stinking puddles more widely; at last I realised that he had come to see his role as not to clean but to be made dirty himself, to accept the pollution of others. Perhaps some such atavistic feelings persist in Britain today about the position of someone who does personal services, such as rinsing people’s smalls. However, this is not something this book addresses.
The intractable problem underlying domestic employment — it is not a “servant problem” — is that when fathers and mothers work long hours they will both need and want help. They cannot do everything; some things will have to be done by someone else, or else not done at all. You could neglect the children, or the hoovering, or your sex life, or your trips to the opera, or you could pay for help. Something has to give.
Cox recommends abandoning the vacuuming; she suggests we should lower our domestic standards. We should have dirtier, messier houses, presumably like the famous Quentin Crisp who said that after the first few years of stopping cleaning, you don’t notice the dust. We should also abandon aspirations to cleanliness as a marker of social status, and rich people should stop showing off with high-maintenance interiors, where pale wooden floors, sparkling bathrooms, spotless towels and dust-trap designer knick-knacks are merely intended to impress. But her central suggestion is to make the taxpayer contribute; she calls for universal, good, affordable, socialised childcare — that universal panacea — this despite the evidence that nursery care is not good for young children. Presumably, everyone would then have to work even longer hours, to pay the extra tax, and then they’d need more domestic help. This book has not solved that problem.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 26, 2006 | Comments (0)
Only the middle class can’t afford babies
A sociologist from Mars would be mystified by the contradictions with which we torment ourselves in this country. First we are told that not enough women are having babies and that we are close to a disastrous fertility crisis. (“Britain suffers a baby gap of 92,000 a year,” according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research.) There soon will not be enough young people to support the old and taxes will have to go up.
Next we learn that some women are having too many babies and the government’s best efforts to discourage them have proved an expensive and scandalous failure: “£150m plan has failed to cut teenage pregnancies” screamed a news splash on Friday, based on official figures. Abortions are at a record high, approaching 200,000 a year, with the greatest rise among women in their early twenties.
It was also reported last week that women are planning to have babies later and later — and are then devastated by predictable problems in conceiving. Presumably younger, more fertile mothers are what we need; however, as reported, the government has been spending many millions to stop very young women having early babies.
Yet although the government is all too conscious of the numbers of teenage pregnancies and abortions and sexual disease here — the highest rates in Europe — it continues to allow sex education books for children in secondary schools that describe anal and oral sex in vulgar, matey terms too rude to repeat. Neutral or positive descriptions of sex suggest permission or virtually encourage. Certainly the explosion in sex education has coincided with an explosion in teenage sex (along with abortion and sexual disease). Surely there is some inconsistency here.
Another constant concern is overcrowding. This is one of the most densely populated counties in the world and many fear Britain’s green spaces, especially in the southeast, will soon be concreted over, not to mention the fact that hospitals, roads and public services are stretched to breaking point. So it might seem that there is something to be said for low or even static population growth.
I am not in favour of the uncontrolled mass immigration we have seen under new Labour, but it is surely inconsistent, in an exceptionally crowded country where housing is short and where hopeful immigrants are many, to see a shortage of native babies as a demographic problem.
If babies are merely seen as providers for our old age it is odd to try to get us natives to give birth to more; it will take at least 18 years to get them out to useful work if it can be done at all, what with their illiteracy and low skills, and they will all need pensions and geriatric beds in the end.
A migrant Hungarian or Pole, by contrast, will be well educated, eager to work and ready to do so at once, without 18 years of investment by the British taxpayer. What’s more, they might (unlike most Third World arrivals and their families) choose to go back home one day without staying on as a charge on the state in their declining years. On a purely utilitarian level, a grown-up Pole is surely better than a British baby.
Underlying all this anxiety seems to be a truth that is awkward to articulate among the bien pensant, but well understood. It’s not that there is a shortage of babies. It’s that there is a shortage of babies in respectable, middle-class, middle-income families. The rich and the poor are having plenty of babies. In upper-middle-class circles it is now a status symbol to have four or more children. Among the poor it is perfectly possible to have babies with or without a man or a job; the state will pay. Although it won’t pay much, it will offer as good a life as any other that seems available.
The women who are not having children are what would have been called in the 19th century the deserving mothers; they are hard working, competent and responsible but have come to recognise that they cannot, as feminism once promised, have it all. They either need to work or want to work, or both, but for those on middling incomes it is not possible to have lots of babies as well. It is too expensive and too risky — expensive in childcare and risky in job prospects. The recent IPPR study put out some rather questionable figures about the high opportunity cost — “the fertility penalty” — to women who have children early, but the point has been glaringly obvious for years.
The call goes up, therefore, for universal affordable childcare subsidised by the taxpayer. A nanny at home is for the rich only. Pressure groups and feminists call instead, with at least a hint of realism, for more institutional care for infants and toddlers in subsidised nurseries. Yet evidence mounts up that this kind of care is bad for infants and young children. Any Martian could look up recent studies which show this inconvenient finding.
Meanwhile, those women who do have more babies are what you might call the undeserving mothers and the extraordinary inconsistency, from a Martian’s point of view, is that they are rewarded for it, just as low-income fathers are significantly better off if they abandon their families.
What (broadly) distinguishes those who don’t have babies from those who do is the real cost of housing. Rich women and poor women on benefits are protected from it and it does not affect their decisions about having babies. By contrast, the middling sort of mother is burdened with a high rent or mortgage. On top of that she is highly taxed (unlike the poor or the rich) and increasingly taxed to pay for less deserving mothers. This is ludicrous.
If we want such deserving women to have more deserving babies to pay for our old age — if it is any of our business — there are two radical solutions. One is to allow the building of lots of new homes for sale to bring property prices down so mothers will not be forced out to work to pay the mortgage. The other, in tandem, is to give a tax holiday to cohabiting parents.
This would mean that two-parent families where at least one parent works would be much better off than welfare parents who either don’t work or pretend not to. They would nonetheless have an acceptable basic income. Neither is politically possible, of course. We prefer to live with cowardly, mind-numbing inconsistencies.
The Sunday Times | | Comments (0)
Selection, the word we dare not speak
Can it be possible that new Labour believes what it says? Ministers claim when pressed that the government has done a great deal for education or (if hard pressed) for primary education at least. The truth is different. It emerged last week that more than half of all five-year-olds are failing to reach the government’s education targets. The Department for Education and Skills now says that 52% of this age group have “failed to achieve a good level of development”. This raises questions about their “future potential to enjoy and achieve”.
Perhaps it would be unwise to panic. Some of these targets will not strike every citizen as entirely achievable by the age of five. One goal for these infants is to tell the difference between right and wrong. That is of course testing even for older children and indeed for many grown-up politicians.
It also emerged last week that comprehensives have failed, after 30 years, to improve the prospects of poorer children. An Edinburgh University study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that comprehensive schools had done nothing to promote social mobility — many people would go further and say they have reduced social mobility.
In July 2004, after seven years in office, Tony Blair admitted that it was a scandal that one in four children left primary school without being able to read or count properly — and that was after Labour had lowered the standard of the tests. The Tories claimed the figure was nearer one in three.
That autumn the National Audit Office reported that most — most! — school leavers lacked basic literacy and numeracy skills; 26m adults of working age were in the same position, and the UK had a higher proportion of adults with low levels of literacy and numeracy than 13 other developed countries. Employers complain about the uselessness of graduates. The Sure Start programme has been shown to be largely useless — and in some areas worse than useless — by a serious academic study.
In February last year Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, reported that more than one in 10 schools — about 2,000 — were failing and a further 1,000 schools had failed to make satisfactory progress since the last inspection. And nearly 1.5m children — 40% of secondary school pupils — were being denied a decent education. In 2004 a survey of university chancellors found that 48% of universities had been forced to provide special lessons in literacy and numeracy for first-year students; two-thirds stated that extra numeracy classes were now “the norm”. Remedial teaching is now the norm at half our universities. And so on.
I do not doubt that Blair wanted to reform education. Yet all his attempts have proved a colossally expensive failure. He now awaits a serious humiliation in a few days’ time, with the publication of a new education bill over which Labour rebels have forced him and the luckless Ruth Kelly to perform the most ignominious backflips.
Why does radical reform appear to be impossible? Why are the Conservatives so nervous about it? I think it’s due to a national inability to confront the awkward truth that people’s innate abilities vary. Decades of worshipping at the altar of equality have frightened many people into thinking that admitting to obvious differences among children — inequalities, perhaps — is some sort of shameful sin.
The main obstacle to the original, radical white paper was fear on the part of Labour rebels but also I think among the electorate, as the Conservatives also seem to believe. Fear of independence in schools but most of all fear of selection in schools.
Selection! That terrible word! You might as well come right out and say you are in favour of social exclusion, institutionalised inequality and the class system if you are in favour of selection. Yet, more than anything else, selection, more than independence, is what would improve standards in schools and chances in life for all children.
Many people genuinely fear selection; it’s not merely ideological bloody-mindedness on the part of old-fashioned social engineering egalitarians, such as Alastair Campbell’s girlfriend Fiona Millar, though it is that too. It is the understandable fear that selection means the misery of the 11-plus era, which I remember well; the cruelty of dividing children at 11, for ever, into those with a future and those without, into alphas and others, not sparing the children of ambitious middle-class parents in the process. The very word seems to banish thought, and make otherwise rational people gibber nonsense about imaginary differences between aptitude (fair) and ability (unfair).
Yet unless people are able to think constructively about selection, schools will never get better. For there is more and more evidence emerging to show what was always obvious to common sense: that children learn best in groups with others of very similar ability — which is to say selected according to their ability.
The old egalitarian idea that fast learners would pull slow learners along with them was not just unfair; it was mistaken and horribly wasteful. Mixed ability teaching has been a tragic failure for all children and the proof is that about 40% of schools have at long last come round to using at least some forms of setting and streaming.
To call for much more selection inside a school is not necessarily to call for more selection at the school gate. A large comprehensive could be open to all-comers and yet insist on rigorous setting and streaming within the school; there could even be “schools within schools”, in the fashionable phrase, all on the same campus, including special needs schools, and there are some interesting models already. This sounds nice and inclusive and it seems to be what the Conservatives favour.
In practice I wonder whether the numbers add up. I wonder whether a year group of 100 unselected children at an average comprehensive would in practice produce optimum groups. In my experience, even at highly selective schools there are quite marked and counterproductive differences of ability in any one class or set — how very much more so at non-selective schools. Perhaps comprehensives would have to be still bigger, which is hardly desirable.
But until people are prepared to accept that selection in some form is essential, there will be no reform, or at least nothing to boast of.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 19, 2006 | Comments (0)
Muslims are trading respect for fear
Respect is not a right. Almost anything one can think of these days is, supposedly, a right, and judging from the angry demands on all sides for respect, one might easily be bamboozled into thinking respect is somehow a right as well. Not so, rightly not.
Yet all the terrifying Muslim uprisings across the world in response to the Danish cartoons have all been about a demand for respect, as of right. They are demanding respect for religion, or at any rate for their own religion and their own religious sensibilities. The same is true of the more moderate demonstrations in London yesterday. Worse, many westerners are penitentially admitting that Muslims do indeed have a right to respect for their faith, and that it is wrong to express disrespect for a religion. This is disastrous.
Yesterday’s demonstrations were organised by the new Muslim Action Committee, which claims to represent more than 1m Muslims. They may indeed be moderates, as they claim, yet what they say sounds anything but moderate. They demand changes in the law and a strengthening of the Press Complaints Commission code to outlaw any possible publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the UK. “What is being called for,” said Faiz Siddiqi, the committee’s convenor, “is a change of culture. In any civilised society, if someone says, ‘don’t insult me’, you do not, out of respect for them.”
Here in one sentence lies the entire, tangled problem; it is all entwined round several different uses of the word “respect”. First of all there is a tendentious conflation of respect for one’s religion and respect for oneself. It may be true that in traditional Muslim thought a perceived insult to the Prophet is an insult to the believer, but in western culture there is a crucially important — and highly prized — distinction. Freedom of speech depends on people accepting that criticism of a belief, even aggressive, satirical or offensive criticism, is not necessarily intended to insult a person or an ethnic community.
Even in cases where perhaps it might be — where the criticism of a belief is quite clearly disrespectful — then putting up with that is the price of freedom of speech, and a price well worth paying.
Freedom of speech is the keystone of western civilisation, of individuality, of scientific discovery, of wealth and of democracy; without it, the entire edifice would collapse.
Indeed it is arguable that it has been the lack of freedom of speech, along with an excessive respect for authority and religion, that has for centuries held back and impoverished the once great civilisation of Islam. Faiz Siddiqi’s call for a change of culture is indeed nothing less, and a very destructive and retrograde one at that.
Of course, Siddiqi is right in saying that in any civilised society, most people do generally avoid insulting other people’s beliefs, but that is not necessarily out of respect for them, or for their beliefs. It is very often out of an overriding respect for something impersonal — for the benefits of civility in a civil society and above all for the ideal of tolerance.
I personally have always been enraged by Catholic teachings, or by Maoist doctrines but I have no desire to insult Catholics or Maoists personally, merely a temptation to argue with some of them. I have been to parties where thumping crooks have been treated with great civility by other guests, for a similar reason. But it would be wrong to mistake that sort of civility for respect.
Respect cannot be demanded, or imposed by a free state. It can only be freely given. The demand of Muslims for uncritical — and legally binding — respect for their beliefs is simply not one that can be met in a society like ours. And the failure, by some Muslims at least, to perceive these distinctions is, without exaggeration, tragic.
It is a failure for which we in the West — we in this country — bear a great deal of responsibility. Until very recently, the doctrine of multiculturalism reigned supreme here. For at least 15 years public services and the liberal media have been riddled with the idea that all cultures are equally deserving of respect, and that the values of the host culture are not supreme, but on the contrary, rather racist and oppressive (so possibly not equally deserving of respect). At last this has come to be understood. There are countless examples: the finding of the Climbie report that social workers were inclined to apply different standards to different cultures, and therefore overlooked or explained away what was happening to the wretched Victoria; a similar lack of will to question religious practices such as exorcism.
Others include the decision of HM chief inspector of prisons not to allow the English flag in English prisons, in case the red cross might be offensive to Muslims; the blind eye that is turned to physical punishment of young children and long hours in some madrasahs; the shameful tolerance here of domestic violence and arranged marriages of convenience to highly unsuitable strangers, in the name of religion; the public library in Buckinghamshire that banned a notice of a Christian carol service and yet held a party to celebrate Eid at the end of Ramadan. These things are done, apparently, out of a desire to show equal respect to all faiths.
Quite why large sections of the host culture here were taken in by the confused claims of multiculturalism remains a mystery to me. But the consequence is that many Muslims (among others) have come to believe that we agree that their religion and culture are entitled to unquestioning respect. They must have seen that the post-Christian majority, especially in the state sector, has been mired in an unthinking relativism, and has lost the conviction to stand up for essential western values.
What’s more these state organisations have humbly accepted the charge that they are institutionally racist, which has further demoralised them. This is a very extreme form of trahison des clercs — the betrayal of the functionaries. It is hardly surprising, now, that the more extreme and politicised Muslims and their unthinking hangers on feel entitled, in defiance of our greatest freedoms, to demand respect from us, as of right. The tragedy is that what they are now getting from the rest of us is not respect at all, but fear, posing as respect.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 12, 2006 | Comments (4)
