6 - Meanings of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour

Summary

It was an epiphanic moment, when two sprightly White British women who had recently opened a cleaning business firmly told me they had clients, not employers. Could I dismiss their understandings of their working conditions and relationships as false-consciousness? From then on, I asked the UK service-providers and service-users how they defined their employment relationship. Later, these data informed my re-presentation of my respondents’ accounts.

Introduction

‘[M]y assumption was that cleaning is something that enables people to get a bit of extra cash.’ (Harriet)

‘I want to put money in a bank account so that a bank can see that I’m earning, so that one day I can get a mortgage. … So I need proof that I earn a certain amount of money. So the more that I can prove, the better for me really.’ (Jessica)

This chapter interrogates the meanings of cleaning work for the British and Indian cleaning service-providers for their selfhood and as kin-members. It then considers the material injustices in cleaning done as work or labour. Within Douglas's overarching framework (see Chapter 2), Pollert's (1981, 1996) historical materialist analysis provided the starting point for this chapter: gender and class are simultaneously primary analytical categories, because both in private and in public, class mediates gendered oppression; this mediation is historically (Vera-Sanso, 2008) and temporally (Bailey and Madden, 2017) specific. I also refer to the Marxist feminist lens, where relevant, to aid linking my analysis to wider (feminist) research on paid domestic work. Finally, upper-class gender and class ideologies might function as reference standards not only among respondents but also for researchers, who are classed and gendered themselves. To limit the influence of my etic understandings on the analysis, I drew on Jackson's (2011) notion that reflexivity is not class- or capital-bound, and on Kabeer's (2001) conceptualisation of ‘empowerment’.

The positive meanings attributed to low-paid care work have been analysed by several researchers (see review by Hebson et al, 2015). Drawing on Bourdieu, feminists such as Skeggs (1997/2002) have argued that working-class women's (mis)appropriation and (mis)accrual of middleclass feminine capital, in the presence of limited economic and education capitals, keeps them entrenched in society's basement. The sense of ‘fulfilment’ in their caring labour cloaks the pain of no gain in symbolic capital.