Events | 2009.09.29
Unspoken contracts | Kate Clanchy
Like Lady Scotland, many professionals rely on an army of cleaners with dubious legal status
What is it with women attorney generals? In the 90s, Bill Clinton\'s first two picks for the US post were found to have employed illegal migrant housekeepers and couldn\'t be appointed. And now here is our own Baroness Scotland with a £5,000 fine and her future in the balance over the same issue.
Are female lawyers particularly lazy around the house, or especially keen on foreign, exploitable help? Bluntly, no. Lady Scotland and Clinton\'s nominees are simply soft targets: conspicuously successful women in a very demanding profession; extreme, top-end examples of an overwhelming social trend.
Anyone at the very top of their profession will have worked extraordinarily long hours to get there, because that is now how all our professions now operate. Women at the top who also have a home will have noticed, somewhere along the line, that because of these hours they need to have help or their home will collapse. If they were men, they would probably still expect this help to be organised, or given directly, by a wife. As women, though, they have to organise their own. And that takes most women, via a scribbled card on the co-op noticeboard or a quiet word from a friend, directly to the grey economy, because that is where cleaners live.
We have no idea how many cleaners there are in this country: perhaps two million, perhaps five. It depends whether you ask the cleaners or the cleaned for; those at home or those in the office. Illegal cleaners are exploited by agencies to clean offices and public buildings- even the Home Office was once found to be cleaned by illegal labour -; in teams to polish up blocks of flats, and they work on a massive, uncountable scale inside private houses. Illegal cleaning merges with semi-legal cleaning (a nice young language student working a few too many hours); with semi-deliberate fraud (cash in hand for next doors\' legally employed housekeeper); and with knowing fraud (the cash top-up on the declared wage). It also melds invisibly with childcare, ranging from a school pickup a week by the cleaner to a full-time, live-in , wholly undeclared nanny.
Like Lady Scotland, though, professionals tend to be very quiet about such helpers. If we are feminists, we may well be disappointed in our inability to "have it all" – including a clean house and nurtured child. If we are liberal, we may be horrified to find we need a "servant". And if we are neither liberal nor feminist, we\'d rather not notice the help in the first place. And the help does not want to mention itself. Many cleaners are asylum seekers, forbidden to work but determined to do something for their children – or, like Lady Scotland\'s cleaner, students with expired visas, working away against the day when they will be deported. Still others have long been dependent on benefits, or they work limited hours and claim tax credit, with the cash in hand as top-up.
When it comes to cleaning, the interests of the employer and the interests of the cleaner coincide all too neatly. The employer wants a short-term, informal fix. She may not even want to know the full name of her employee, let alone wish to go through the complex, arduous and long-term process of registering her for tax and tax credit. And the employee may have far-reaching reasons for avoiding the forms. When I registered my nanny, Antigona , for tax, she objected strongly. Not only did she not wish either of us to pay tax – unfair, since she much approved of our police and hospitals – but she could not see why she should contribute long-term to our society. She would not be staying, she said. Besides, why buck the trend? She and I were small cogs in a large machine. Unfortunately, she was partly right.
The problem here is not Lady Scotland – who is certainly a good enough employer – but the nature of her job, which gives her a very high income but no time to care for her home. Nor is it her housekeeper, who worked hard at her job. It is the vast economic inequalities which made that job seem a great opportunity to a student from Tonga. The problem is not the number of cleaners we can\'t count, but the jobs and the people we don\'t count, either in our professional lives, or in our society.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]oness-scotland-illegal-cleaner
