Coming Clean On Home Help
The Age
Wednesday October 21, 1998
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. 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 preoccupied 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.
Phil Ruthven, of 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 and men - but their incomes are being recycled to the less-skilled via the outsourcing of domestic tasks.
The problem, as The Australian Financial Review saw it in an editorial this year, is that many busy middle-class families cannot 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, $5200 a year plus better food and accommodation.
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 New South Wales have done in a recent study, which compares the results from the official surveys of household spending in 1984 and 1993-94.
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 4per cent of households paid for cleaning services. And there was no significant change in this over the previous decade.
Next, paid lawn-mowing and gardening. This grew somewhat over the decade, but still applied to only 9per cent of households.
Then there's laundry. Ten per cent of households outsourced clothes care by using dry-cleaning and laundry services, but this spending actually declined over the decade.
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.
But almost all the growth was in spending on institutional care (at child-minding centres, creches and the like) with little growth in spending on baby-sitters and childminders. And the figures imply that fewer than 1 per cent of families ran to the expense of a nanny.
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 (although it may have reduced unpaid care by relatives and friends).
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. As well, the proportion of grocery spending going on raw food declined in favor of reduced-preparation and convenience foods.
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 devote to cooking and cleaning up.
How do working women manage to fit everything in? That's how. Employing domestic servants? Only in their dreams.
E-mail: opinion@theage.fairfax.com.au
© 1998 The Age
