Tag Archives: class

A RANT ABOUT LOWLINESS, POVERTY, AND HOUSEWORK

Lisa Freitag says:

In the May 18 issue of TIME Magazine, I read an interview with the new Prime Minister of India, the man whom everyone thinks will succeed in changing that country for the better, Narendra Modi.

I don’t have anything against Modi, really. I know nothing about him except what was in that TIME interview, but I need nonetheless write a rant about something he said. I know that his words are, perhaps, not entirely his fault. He was merely living up to a common myth, the Great American Dream of lifting oneself out of poverty.

The quote is pretty benign, taken in that light. Modi grew up in a small town steeped in poverty, and for that reason he has been inspired to make a commitment to helping the poor. Modi says, “I was born in a poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood.” This quote is important enough that Modi actually uses it twice in the interview.

We are supposed to be very proud of this great man who raised himself from humble beginnings to a position of power. We are perhaps supposed to believe that, since he comes from there, he understands poverty well enough that he is the perfect person to do something about it. After all, he found a way out for himself, so must see the way open to others. As a solution to poverty, however, becoming the Prime Minister of India or, indeed, the President of the United States, is not a terribly viable option. Of the hundreds of thousands of poor tea sellers, only one can become Prime Minister.

I predict that he will not succeed in making even a dent in poverty. The reason is buried in his twice-quoted statement about his poor mother. He sees poverty as shameful. Or, more accurately, he sees the work done by his impoverished mother as shameful. We are to be impressed with him, because he has risen above the shame of poverty and is now in a position to raise others as well. He no longer has to sell tea, and presumably she no longer has to earn money in any way she can. Yet he has, seemingly, not thought about the nature of the work his mother did.

What awful thing did his mother do to earn a livelihood? She washed utensils, clearly a horrifying task! One has to wonder if Modi loads his undoubtedly top-of-the-line dishwasher himself, or if he considers the person who does it for him better or worse than his mother. She also did “lowly household work in the houses of others,” another thing generally acknowledged as being “below” most other professions, if it is considered a profession at all. Yet, I rather doubt Modi cleans his own bathroom. I have no idea what he thinks about the person who does, but I suspect that he does not notice her at all. He may not even realize that she exists. He is probably unaware of the size of the pittance she is being paid by the people who hired her for the task. But I have no doubt that Modi’s bathroom needs just as much cleaning as anyone else’s.

My problem, I think, is the vast set of assumptions behind the identification of household work as “lowly.” Yes, cleaning is boring, and dirty, and often hard on the knees. Does this automatically make it lowly? Carpet laying and plumbing are also dirty and hard on the knees. These professions are certainly beneath the Prime Minister, but I doubt Modi would refer to any of his constituents as a lowly plumber. Perhaps most plumbers in India are men, and only the knee-destroying, low-paid work done by women is considered lowly? Perhaps fixing bathroom leaks in India is more necessary than cleaning toilets? Or perhaps plumbing is not so lowly because it is not so terribly badly paid?

It is worth thinking about whether housework is lowly because it is low-paid, or low-paid because it is lowly. I think both of these aspects are true, and circle each other in a downward spiral that serves to keep people, particularly women, in poverty. The spiral may have started with the invisibility of women’s work, creating the impression among the rich and powerful that the world just cleans up after itself. Modi does not have to ask who will do this lowly work, after he pulls everyone out of poverty alongside himself, because he does not know that it must be done. Yet the work of washing Modi’s dishes, and cleaning Modi’s bathroom, will continue to be absolutely necessary.

The problem, perhaps, is not with the work itself, but with the lack of notice, respect, and payment given to the people who do that work. Modi will not be able to do anything substantial about poverty until he is able to recognize as essential the “lowly” work that his mother did, and that someone else must now do in her stead. As long as the essential work of the world is held to be without value, there must be people who have no option other than to do it for almost nothing, and who thus will stay poor.

If Modi truly wishes to do something about poverty, he should start with noticing the importance of the work his mother did, and stop thinking of it as lowly. He must, of course, work toward raising wages, but I think he will not succeed unless he also begins promoting such work as honorable. Getting paid more to do the dirty work is not enough, if the people doing that work are still seen as shamefully dirtied by doing it. The “lowly” aspect of his mother’s cleaning the houses of others was not just that it was badly paid, but that her son believes that it was beneath his notice.

When Junk Science Meets Junk Food

Laurie and Debbie say:

eating in a settlement house kitchen

Scientists at the University of Toronto have released a report claiming that the very existence and availability of fast food somehow makes us be in a hurry. “Fast food represents a culture of time efficiency and instant gratification,” says Chen-Bo Zhong, who co-wrote the paper with colleague Sanford DeVoe to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. “The problem is that the goal of saving time gets activated upon exposure to fast food regardless of whether time is a relevant factor in the context. For example, walking faster is time efficient when one is trying to make a meeting, but it’s a sign of impatience when one is going for a stroll in the park. We’re finding that the mere exposure to fast food is promoting a general sense of haste and impatience regardless of the context.” They did three experiments, each with less than sixty participants (less than thirty outside of the control groups), all of them University of Toronto students. So we already know we aren’t looking at real science. Their theory, which they “confirmed,” was that fast food logos, such as the ubiquitous Macdonalds’ golden arches, make people more impatient, and make them do tasks in more of a hurry. The experiments consisted of subliminal or peripheral vision flashes of fast food logos during other tasks. (We wonder if the control group got subliminal flashes of Alice Waters and the food at her restaurants.) While they don’t actually say in their paper that they are talking about why poor people make bad decisions, they do talk about “density” of fast-food restaurants, which we all know tends to happen in lower-income neighborhoods. (Fast food isn’t exclusively, or even perhaps mostly, the food of poor people. Know any white men in the tech industry? Any gamers?) Nonetheless, Kathryn Hughes, writing in the Guardian, has an excellent class-based critique: The panic around the moral and psychological damage of fast food … was always [fueled by] a much deeper suspicion of what it represented: ignorance, indifference, a wilful inability to imagine a better way of feeding the future. It’s for that reason that, back in the early 19th-century, moralists including William Cobbett churned out a whole array of “cottage economies” and “penny cookbooks” aimed at stopping the working classes from squandering money in the pie shop. These prim moral primers were full of bright suggestions for turning the scrag end of lamb and on-the-turn turnips into something that not only nourished body and soul but also saved pennies for a rainy day. … What all those Victorian moralists missed – just as the Toronto report ignores – is that fast food is the emblematic product of maturing and late capitalism. Urban workers, forced to work longer and longer hours, do not have the time to invest in cooking from scratch. Those who are obliged to live in shared accommodation and rented digs may not have the right equipment for making real food slowly (Agas don’t fit into bedsits; microwaves do). When you are exhausted after a 10-hour shift, then soup is fiddly to consume on the way home. Burgers and kebabs, by contrast, are easy to eat with one hand and require neither plates nor knives. Far from being the refuseniks of capitalism, unable to master its first principle of delayed gratification, the people who rely on fast food outlets are its honourable foot soldiers. We should salute them. Hughes is right on target for most of her essay, and is invoking a long and fascinating history of missionaries, settlement houses, and other do-gooder efforts aimed to make “the poor” eat “right,”  but we disagree with her that delayed gratification is a capitalist virtue, especially in 21st century capitalism. While she excoriates the study for ignoring how workers are pushed into fast food, she also ignores how consciously and carefully fast-food corporations engineer the attraction and desirability of fast food. Just to be clear, neither we nor Hughes are saying that fast food is a good thing, or good for us. Working through purchasable state legislatures, the corporations work hard to ensure ridiculous amounts of salt and sugar in every school cafeteria. Working with urban planners, they carefully calculate which street corners, neighborhoods, and strip malls will be most profitable for new locations. And working with food scientists, they carefully study exactly how much fat, salt, and sugar will make you reach for the next Dorito. So who exactly is into instant gratification? Who is trying to move fast, make immediate moves that might not be so sensible in the long term? Who is impatient? Well, fast food customers perhaps–but fast food owners, demonstrably. And no one is going to fund tiny, silly studies of what the owners do when their own logos flash subliminally onto a screen. Thanks to Annalee Newitz at i09 for the pointer.