What is domestic labour and who does it?

A quick search gave me this answer, so I quote – “Domestic labour refers to the unpaid work done within households, encompassing tasks like housework, childcare, and other forms of care work.” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/domestic-labor)

The key is that it is unpaid work and 56 years after I joined the 1970 Women’s Movement it is still mostly women’s work. I quote again – “Without this type of labour people (humans) would not be able to survive both as individuals, and as society.” (https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/foe/article/view/735)

The fact is that human life depends on “Domestic Labour” that is unpaid and mostly women’s work. I will emphasise that this means family life, household hygiene, food preparation, care of babies, children and the sick, the disabled and the elderly. All these stages of our lives depend on a degree of unpaid domestic labour and care.

Here is the problem about Domestic Labour. It has low status and there is a surprising amount of bigotry around about it. It is a curious fact that even PAID Domestic Labour carries a stigma. The reason for this is that it is often very intimate work conducted in a personal space that has to do with “dirty laundry”, waste rubbish, and cleaning places where people shit. One key question is whether the low status is because it is women’s work or because it is about hygiene? Mary Douglas wrote about hygiene and pollution in her book Purity and Danger. These areas of human life are guarded by culture, social traditions and religious beliefs and that may explain why attitudes are slow to shift. These jobs are a good and essential service to humanity but if the people who do them are called “servants” what does that mean for their work?

The Google dictionary says a servant is a person who performs duties for others, especially a person employed in a house on domestic duties or as a personal attendant. A member of Parliament, a priest, a government official are all servants in employment, but the question becomes fraught when a wife serves her husband. Where are her boundaries and does he arrange them to a macho plan by some god or other?

Are servants the lowest part of a class system? Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party and Kazuo Ishigura’s The Remains of the Day depicta changing class system where the “servants”, butlers, cooks and housekeepers, employed and paid by the “upper class”, are very skilled, knowledgeable and hard-working.  

Does that mean that other ethnicities and othe social classes don’t need domestic labour and so do not survive. That of course would be nonsense. All humans need domestic labour. The poorer the people are who provide care and domestic labour the more they will be exploited. The poorer people who need domestic help are, the more exploitative they will be.

The most extreme exploitation is slavery and indentured work which has existed as long as humans have needed help and enforced it. Consider the way domestic labour was shared out in villages, families and small communities. Consider that one of the reasons men (and their senior wives) wanted three more wives was because there was more work than was manageable by one wife once she had babies. (Read Lucy Mushita’s novel Chinongwa.)

The working classes also depended on Domestic Labour, but this was often unpaid and kept within the family and done by grandmothers, spinster aunts, daughters not in education, and the wife. Today Domestic Labour is provided by machines that wash, cook and vacuum floors for us. We are promised robots to care for us in old age. Shopping is done online and arranged by Amazon. We eat Fast Food and Readymade Meals but before we sneer at people who employ domestic labourers at low rates we should remember the people working at low rates by Amazon, Food Factories, Industrial Farms, Fast Food Outlets and their cycling couriers. Above all consider the workers in hospitals and care homes. How many of these people are illegal and underpaid migrants? Nowadays if you think you have never needed domestic labour you have probably outsourced it and have no children or dependent old folk to care for.

The work keeps changing and the so do the people who provide it.