Posts tagged capitalism
The cleaner, the baker, the child care-taker
3
We pay a lot of lip service to those who work with children, don’t we? Moulding young minds, shaping the future, the most difficult (but rewarding!) job in the world (after motherhood, of course)…blah, blah, blah. Yes, so rewarding and important and indispensable that we can justify paying teachers, and particularly early years child care workers, a pittance. Some argue that teachers have shorter days and a shorter working year than most, with more holidays and job security. Therefore, they don’t need/deserve as much. Some people, like a man on BBC London’s call-in radio show this morning, say teachers aren’t paid that well, no, but they can take on extra jobs after school hours and in the summer holidays to supplement their incomes.
Correction: male teachers, the currently able-bodied and well-connected, and those without school-age children can take on temporary, part-time jobs as it suits their schedule (but only if they can find one — they’ll be in fierce competition with teens looking for summer jobs and the unskilled unemployed during a recession). Many teachers, however, are women with school-age children themselves and who are the primary carers, or primary child care arrangers, for their families. If a teacher is not teaching, her children aren’t in school either. What, pray tell, would this male caller propose she do with her children while she shuffles off to a part-time job, perhaps in retail, caring or tutoring, one that is unlikely to even cover the costs of paying someone to look after them? I’m guessing the caller’s wife took care of all that, leaving him free to take on the building and courier jobs that supplemented his below-average income. Well bully for him. Must be nice living in a bubble of privilege where child care is sourced and performed by the Child Care Faeries.
But ‘regular’ teachers’ pay isn’t even the issue here. The actual topic of discussion on this radio show was whether it was fair for a head teacher of a state school in Lonodn, which is publicly funded, to be earning more than £230,000 a year while the teachers themselves faced pay freezes under new government budget slashing, and the cleaners at the same school earn £10,000 per year, which is not even a living wage. Many callers thought he earned this high salary because, at the end of the day (the most overused expression in Britain), he takes full responsibility for the school’s performance. Oh, the weight on his shoulders is heavy alright — earning 20 times as much as some of your staff must be quite a gold-plated burden indeed. Pulling up in the Jag, sliding into that Reserved spot, clutching your lambskin briefcase and Starbucks coffee as you wave to the cleaning crew straggling in off the public buses after being up since 5am getting their own children dressed, fed and off to school across town before coming into work to mop floors and scrub toilets for below the minimum wage…what a chore! So worth the ridiculous salary, that.
As is often the case, even in female-dominated sectors like schools, the people at the top get all the credit and pay with little regard for the machine, as it were, as a whole. Instead of looking at employment structure as a pyramid, with one person on top and the rest of the underlings trickling down en masse, it would be helpful to consider it as a cog with interlocking teeth. All the parts have to work perfectly and in harmony to make things run smoothly. If even one small bit breaks down, the whole machine comes grinding to a halt. That includes the cleaners, cooks and teaching assistants at a school.
But after all, as one caller said, pushing a mop around or serving spaghetti isn’t exactly rocket science. Neither is changing nappies, caring for babies or running a pre-school, apparently. It’s not until you get to the prestigious job of shaping those young minds and filling them with information (or propaganda and biases, if you’re not a fan of education with a capital E) that it becomes real work worthy of a high salary and oodles of respect. Funnily enough, these top jobs are more often than not filled by men, even though the vast majority of those working within the state school system are women. Why might that be? Let me scratch my chin for a bit here. I’m thinking it starts with P and ends in -archy.
It’s the same reason why women are cooks but men are chefs. It’s why stay-at-home mums aren’t given a second thought but stay-at-home dads are fawned over and patted on the back. It’s why even in mummy blogging, dads come out top. It’s why men working in unskilled jobs (grave diggers, bin men, street cleaners, etc..) for Birmingham Council were given ‘bonuses’ to supplement their paltry base pay while women working similarly-skilled jobs (cleaners, teaching assistants, carers, etc..) were kept in the dark about this practice and remained on the base salary.
Until roles traditionally performed by women are given the respect and remuneration they deserve and until our disgusting, capitalist ‘winner takes all’ system is turned on its head or gotten rid of altogether, we will continue to see men in tweed jackets and business suits growing rich and fat on the backs of women, the poor and the disadvantaged.
This is not a whisper
13
A few weeks ago I discussed women’s bodies in the workplace and how our biological and social needs were never truly integrated, even when we were finally ‘allowed’ to work. I said:
The problem is this — nearly all of the business world was built around the male biological and social imperative. It was understood that a working man was either single and carefree or with a wife at home who took care of his house, his children and all domestic tasks, aside from the more ‘manly’ chores like grass-cutting, wood-chopping and car repairs. The male worker had no need for flexible hours that fit in around school or shopping hours. The male worker had no dramatic hormonal changes, pregnancies, breastfeeding or post-partum recovery to deal with.
I also said:
But one of the biggest problems remaining, in my view, is that women’s bodies have not been integrated and accepted into the workplace. Pregnancy and maternity leave are still career-killers.
…Some people would even begrudge a woman the right to pump milk at work, calling it an ‘extra break’ and complaining that she’s getting ’special treatment,’ which I think any mother who has ever breastfed or expressed knows is misguided. Trying to get as much milk as possible out of your breasts while hunched over an electronic pump in a storage closet, hoping no one walks in on you, is not a ‘break’. It’s just more work, though of the unpaid, ‘unimportant’ variety in capitalism’s eyes.
Finally, I concluded that:
Because industry and business were built upon male norms, the working environment reflects this attitude as well. We got on the ladder alright, but what we should’ve been after was an entirely different climbing apparatus, one in which we could move horizontally across a continuum we helped create, not forced to climb vertically up those rigid, historically-male rungs (in high heels, naturally) before hitting that infamous glass ceiling.
Essentially, I was arguing that we can’t ‘fix’ the current system or try to force our way into existing frameworks because those systems and frameworks don’t serve our needs or our lives, which is what author Hilary Mantel says in today’s Guardian as well. What both of us are trying to say, I believe, is that moulding ourselves to fit a system designed without our bodies, our wants or our priorities in mind can do us harm. It does do harm to women the world over, every day. Being forced to delay children until our 30s and 40s in order to establish successful careers is harmful. Being denied educational and professional opportunities if we choose to have children in our teens or 20s is harmful. All this analysis of feckless, fertile teen mums and desperate, over-achieving 40-somethings undergoing IVF sends one clear message and it is this:
You can’t win.
You can’t win because the perfect time to have a child, according to current advice, is in one’s mid-20s to early 30s. Unfortunately for us, that also happens to coincide with the prime years for establishing a career and moving up the ladder, or pursuing further education. Taking long ‘career breaks’ (because, as we know, having and raising children is not considered ‘real work’), even if short-term, harms our long-term financial and professional potential. Women who take career breaks at this time in their lives rarely end up in senior positions, earning as much and on the same par with similarly-aged male colleagues. If we want to have even a chance at joining their ranks we have two choices — don’t have children for another 10-15 years (or at all) or have children but get back to work quickly by placing them in care, the provision and management of which will be made preposterously difficult given the restrictions of the working environment.
Each of these ‘choices’, of course, has negative consequences. Risking infertility or having to pay someone else most of your salary to care for your child in the first years of its life are not ideal options, though they are the ones we have to live with in the here and now. Without truly flexible academic and professional accommodation and without access to affordable, quality childcare and meaningful, fairly-waged part-time work, we are getting nowhere. Giving dads a bit more paternity leave or giving mums a bit more money for their leave, while a nice gesture, is pointless in the end. It’s an adhesive, cartoon-faced bandage for a gaping, bleeding shotgun wound of a problem. No matter how many smiley-faced plasters we stick on it, the wound will ooze and fester without first extracting all of the detritus and cleaning it up. Putting superficial fixes on a wound of this size only masks the rotting infection underneath.
Eventually, the infection will spread and what little good the bandages did will be for nothing. We will be pushed out of the workplace again, unable to operate within the male-structured system, or continue to rely on luck and technology to have children later in life. The poor, the working class and even much of the middle class (i.e. most women), for whom talk of career breaks and IVF isn’t even relevant or possible, will continue to have children at their reproductive peak and be punished for it by being priced out of decent housing, higher education and training, and quality childcare. They will also continue to have the blame for perceived societal breakdown lain at their feet, convenient scapegoats for a system that set them (and all of us, including our children) up to fail.
I am not being dramatic at all when I say we need radical, revolutionary change. Asking the men behind the curtain very nicely and calmly if we can have this or that concession, only to see if taken away again with budget cuts that deem “women’s issues” unimportant in comparison with military spending or lining bankers’ pockets has proven ineffective. The overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class parliamentarians will pay lip service to equality and fairness, sure. They’re not stupid and know they need our votes. I’m sure many of them do know the system is unfair and would like to change it. But when push comes to shove, people protect themselves, their own families and their own jobs and interests first, we know that. We all know who is doing the shoving and who will be shoved. An increasingly hostile, ‘anti-PC’ segment of the public who feel threatened by challenges to their long-standing privileges also contributes to this climate of intolerance, narrow-mindedness and unwillingness to change on any substantial level.
No one is giving anything to us. Wringing our hands and writing moving essays or angry blog posts is not enough. As far as I’m concerned, it’s time for battle and we need more soldiers. I’ve had enough. And though I understand completely that not everyone feels so passionately about it, or thinks we can actually change anything, or even has the desire to, I can’t help but feel completely, helplessly angry when I know that if we really could get a million women to rise, we’d finally be noticed. If, like our sisters of the first and second waves have done before us, we sat down, refused to move, refused to accept the status quo or meek little promises of incremental change, we would be an undeniable force to be reckoned with. We are 52 per cent of the population. We vote. We live here. We matter. And I, for one, am tired of playing it down and carefully explaining and ‘being reasonable’ and keeping my voice down.
I’m fucking angry and I want you to be too.