As American women began their move into business, law, medicine and other demanding jobs in the 1970s, eager to make their marks in what were then mostly all-male professions, they expected their husbands and partners would pick up the slack at home. That didn’t exactly happen. But another phenomenon did: The woman who is slinging the mop and folding the laundry in many American homes today is no longer the lady of the house.
It is highly possible, especially in dual-income households, that the person keeping it all running smoothly is a woman who speaks very little English, earns just enough to get by and has a family she rarely sees. In many cases, she has come halfway around the world to do the work she does.
In the new global economy, American kids’ toys come from Beijing, their computer parts from Seoul and their clothes from Guatemala City. Meanwhile, Mexican and Irish nannies take care of American children. Polish caretakers look after middle-age Americans’ aging parents. Asian seamstresses tailor working Americans’ business suits and Russian manicurists take care of their nails.
In restaurants and cafes, women from Central America wash the dishes and help in the kitchen. In hotels, Mexican women clean the rooms. In office buildings, crews of Polish cleaning ladies work into the night emptying wastebaskets and vacuuming carpets.
Many of these immigrants are undocumented. They’re often paid in cash and they receive little or no benefits or health insurance. And despite their tenuous financial status, immigrant women workers often must send money home to the husbands and children they left behind.
Theirs is a segment of the economy rarely quantified by economists or recognized by most governments, according to “Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy” (Metropolitan Books, $26), a new anthology edited by social critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild.
The book essentially takes up the stories of women like Julita Pason, 29, who moved to Chicago in June after leaving her job as a nurse in southwestern Poland. Pason looks after an elderly Chicago couple who choose to remain at home instead of moving into a nursing home.
“Not speaking English was my biggest challenge upon coming here,” Pason said recently through an interpreter.
She found her job through the Polish American Association, which placed an ad seeking home health-care workers in a Polish-language newspaper; the association places about 70 women a year in the homes of elderly Chicagoans.
Karen Popowski, the association’s executive director, says, “People come to us specifically asking for Polish women to care for their parents. They believe Polish women are particularly nurturing.”
In Poland, Popowski added, girls and women “grow up with the idea that they will look after their relatives as they age. It’s something expected of them. That cultural piece fits nicely here, because our goal is to keep people living at home and not in a nursing home.”
The children of the elderly who are looked after by Polish caretakers also benefit, Popowski said.
“Our nurses provide company and that’s the biggest piece. The other benefactors are the family members who have peace of mind,” she said.
Pason cooks, cleans, does errands and drives. She is paid $6 an hour, plus benefits.
Pason considers herself lucky; she has a green card and works here legally. Along with her husband and son, she applied through the American Embassy in Warsaw and was given permission to come to the United States.
“My husband and I feel we’ve won the lotto of fate because we don’t have the obstacle of being undocumented,” she said. “We have that psychological assurance. We don’t have to hide or watch our every single move and be afraid.”
Pason lives here with her husband and 7-year-old son, unlike large numbers of immigrant working women who leave their families behind in their home country.
Working for son’s surgery
One woman who did just that is Maria Gutierrez. Thirteen years ago, Gutierrez, who asked that her real name not be used, traveled by bus from her hometown, Zacatecas, Mexico, to Tijuana. Leaving behind her 1-year-old son, Miguel, with her parents, she crossed illegally into Southern California, where she spent two years picking broccoli and garlic.
“My baby needed a lot of attention. He needed an eye operation, he had cataracts, but I had no job back home, so I came to this country to work to pay for that,” Gutierrez said recently through an interpreter. She shared an apartment with a dozen other workers, rose at 2 a.m. to catch a bus to the fields, started working at 3 a.m. and finished each night at 7. She was paid the minimum wage at the time–about $4 an hour.
“It was a really hard life. I was tired and depressed. I missed my son but I couldn’t see him,” she said.
Her uncle, a Chicago hotel worker, encouraged her to move here 11 years ago, she said. Gutierrez now cleans 18 rooms a day in a downtown Best Western Hotel.
“I got a ride and came here,” she said. “Compared to working in the fields, cleaning hotel rooms is easy.”
She joined a union, the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees, Local 1, and earns $10 an hour plus benefits. Because the tourism industry in Chicago has been affected by the faltering economy and uncertainty over terrorism, her take-home pay is uneven; sometimes she works a 40-hour week, sometimes only 16 hours.
Gutierrez, 40, now has four children, 16 years to 8 months old. The three born in the U.S. are citizens. She managed to bring her oldest son to Chicago; he remains undocumented, as does Gutierrez.
Ehrenreich and Hochschild said their goal in compiling the book is to get Americans–particularly women–to look at the impact the global economy has had on other women like Gutierrez or Pason.
“If you enjoy another person’s love of your child or your parents, you need to know that the love is a global product, too, and remember where it came from,” Hochschild said. “We should make it easier for these women to bring their kids with them. Or we should help developing countries grow their economies so that we don’t drain them of their workers. … People shouldn’t be forced to neglect their own children in order to feed them.”
Hochschild, who wrote “The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work” (Owl Books, $16), added an essay to the “Global Woman” anthology titled “Love and Gold.” It is about Filipinas who are trained as teachers, nurses or engineers. Because salaries in the Philippines are so low, the women work abroad as nannies or maids. Hochschild called it a “care drain” from poor to rich nations. She said American women are too busy to help with the cooking, cleaning or child care, and in turn have pushed the drudge work onto women too poor to refuse it.
Ehrenreich said she has been flooded with mail from American women who resent the suggestion that they give up their household help. “There’s nothing inherently cruel about hiring a maid, but we should pay her well, give her time off and pay her benefits,” Ehrenreich said. “It’s a subject that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, because hiring a woman to clean our house wasn’t part of our original feminist goals.”
Outside help inside the home
Hochschild says there are no studies yet that have provided hard data on the number of hours per week of housework being done in American homes by outsiders.
“But it’s clear we’re looking at a care deficit on the home front,” she said. “In the First World, we’re between a rock and a hard place. It’s not a case of women sitting home eating bonbons while maids in little white caps are serving them. People are putting more hours in at the office and other work places and more of the work at home is being done by outsiders.”
No one’s faulting American women for hiring other women to work for them, she said. “But how do we do it ethically? How do we make a good work place in our homes?” she asked.
Ehrenreich said feminists planned to involve more men in housework, which never really happened; in many two-career couples, cleaning turned into a power struggle.
“Some cleaning services even advertise: `We can save your marriage,'” she said. The problem, she noted, is that cleaning companies charge customers $25 an hour, but they pay their employees closer to minimum wage–currently $5.15 an hour.
“Why is it that cleaning work is considered lower, so looked down on, even below the nanny level?” asked Ehrenreich. “And what message are we sending our children, that a female of another race does the work that Mommy and Daddy are too busy to do?”
Ehrenreich said a goal of the book is to stir sympathy for foreign women who care for America’s children. “They’ve left everything behind and are often lonely when they come here,” she said. “The only human connection they have when they get here is who they work for. They pour all their love into the children they care for, then, boom, if there’s some problem, they’re let go with no notice, no warning.” They can be fired suddenly with no right ever to see the children again and no credit for what the children go on to accomplish. “We devalue the people who care for our children,” she said.
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%% U.S. women employed
Percent of women working by marital status group.
YEAR SINGLE MARRIED
1970 53.0% 40.8%
1980 61.5% 50.1%
1990 66.4% 58.2%
2000 168.4% 62.1%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002
Female foreign-born domestic workers
Domestic workers include cooks, housekeepers and child-care workers.
YEAR % FOREIGN BORN
1996 31.5%
1997 30.7%
1998 34.8%
1999 35.7%
2000 39.6%
2001 39.7%
Source: Current Population Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics
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