Are You Really Being Served?
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday October 21, 1998
Is an income-rich and time-poor Australia about to see a revival of the maid and the valet?
SOMETIMES we can get carried away by the pace of change, imagining the world is changing more than it is. Take that great buzzword of the '90s, outsourcing. We all know that many big businesses have been busily engaged in outsourcing their "non-core" activities.
Any task that doesn't have to be performed in-house is parcelled out to another firm, one specialising in that activity.
But we also perceive that the outsourcing revolution has reached the home. With 55 per cent of married women now in paid employment - more two-income families than ever - more of us have become "income rich, but time poor".
So many of us, we believe, are paying for the performance of various kinds of housework that formerly we did ourselves. As part of this, we're bringing people into our homes to act as cleaners, child-minders or nannies; people to do our washing and ironing; people to mow our lawns and do gardening.
But is this a healthy social trend? Attitudes differ. Some commentators see it as the re-emergence of something we confidently believed was dead and gone forever: domestic service.
Is the servant making a comeback in supposedly egalitarian Australia?
Some American observers see in all this not just a strengthening of class barriers, but overtones of racial and ethnic dominance. Here are rich white families employing and possibly exploiting poor immigrant women, with bad English and dubious migration status.
Is it all that different in Australia? Are all our cleaners and nannies getting proper breaks and award wages?
And what about our kids? Are we regressing to the "upstairs, downstairs" world where children are deprived of intimate contact with their pre-occupied parents?
But standing against all these gloomy sentiments are the economic optimists. All we're witnessing, they say, is the latest stage in the long-standing process of economic development. Tasks have been shifting from the home to the market for centuries; this is just the new frontier.
Phil Ruthven, the forecaster from IBIS Business Information, puts it nicely. In the agrarian revolution, we outsourced the growing of things, in the industrial revolution, we outsourced the making of things and now, in the infotronics revolution, we're outsourcing the doing of things.
In any case, where's the problem? We have a rise in the number of highly paid managers and professionals - women as well as men - but their incomes are being recycled to the less-skilled - particularly women - via the outsourcing of domestic tasks.
The problem, as The Australian Financial Review saw it in an editorial earlier this year, is that many busy middle-class families can't afford the high wages paid to domestic servants and many Australians don't want to do such work.
So why don't we do what many countries have done and introduce a program of "guest workers"? Live-in maids in Indonesia are commonly paid as little as $40 a month.
Many young women from Asia would leap at the chance to come here for a few years, earning, say, $5,200 a year plus superior food and accommodation. They'd be better off, their families back home would be better off and so would many time-pressed Australian families.
So what's it to be: is the outsourcing of housework a bane or a boon?
Try none of the above.
It's fun to build grand theories on our casual observation of changes in the world around us, but it's always a good idea to touch base with the facts. This is just what the sociologist Michael Bittman and his fellow workers at the Social Policy Research Centre in the University of NSW have done in a recent study.
Every few years the Bureau of Statistics conducts a survey of exactly what households spend their money on. Bittman compared the household expenditure surveys for 1984 and 1993-94 to determine just what changes have occurred in household outsourcing.
His results may surprise you. Let's start with cleaning, the area that's attracted the most adverse comment. The most recent figures show that a mere 4 per cent of households paid for cleaning services. And there was no significant change in this over the previous decade.
(Nor does it follow that most of those who do pay for cleaning are employing particular women, as opposed to using contract cleaners who whip through many houses each week and see themselves as small-business people, not servants.)
Next, paid lawn mowing and gardening. This grew somewhat over the decade, but still applied to only 9 per cent of households.
Then there's laundry. Ten per cent of households outsourced clothes care by making use of dry cleaning and laundry services, but this spending actually declined over the decade.
We're sending laundry out less today than we were before World War II.
Presumably, we're less fussy about starching and ironing things, and we're making more use of "mod cons" such as automatic washing machines and clothes dryers.
One area where we have been doing more outsourcing is, not surprisingly, child care.
Spending on child care has grown strongly and, by 1993-94, 30 per cent of households with children under 12 were doing it.
(Bear in mind that the decade in question was a period when the Hawke/Keating Government was greatly increasing its spending on the provision of subsidised child care.)
The incidence of such spending rises with income. About a quarter of the poorest of these families were paying for child care, compared with 40 per cent of the high-income families.
But almost all the growth was in spending on institutional care (child-minding centres, creches, kindergartens and preschools) with little growth in spending on baby-sitters and child minders.
As for nannies, the modest amounts spent on non-institutional care imply that fewer than 1 per cent of families may be running to the expense of a nanny.
And as for all those neglected children, separate "time use" surveys show that, between 1987 and 1992, both men's and women's time devoted to primary face-to-face child care grew modestly.
So more spending on paid care did not replace unpaid care by parents (though it may have reduced unpaid care by relations and friends).
This continues what seems to be a century-long trend of Australians devoting both more time and more money to our kids, even while family size has fallen. We should feel guilty?
But the area where there was most replacement of housework by paid services was food preparation. In the two weeks of the 1993-94 survey, 90 per cent of households spent on restaurant meals, take-aways or school lunches.
Such spending grew significantly over the decade. Spending on these things rises with the household's income, but those that can't afford to eat out often at least can afford take-aways.
As well, the proportion of grocery spending going on raw food (such as flour, cereals, vegetables and meat) declined in favour of reduced-preparation foods (pasta sauces, pizza bases) and convenience foods (processed meat, biscuits, confectionery and fruit).
Food preparation occupies more time than any other type of household work. But time-use surveys show that, between 1974 and 1992, there was a remarkably large and accelerating reduction in the amount of time women devoted to cooking and cleaning up.
How do working women manage to fit everything in? That's how. Employing domestic servants? Only in their dreams.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
