Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism by Laurie Penny Page A

beyond the satisfaction of a job well done, but because no modern government can afford to pay its women for the lifetimes of work they do for free.
     
Passing the buck
    Sadly, the trench warfare that currently has men terrified into refusing housework and women longing to rid themselves of it is pernicious enough that very many women would rather be complicit in the exploitation of other, poorer women than confront their own partners. The questions that Jane Story posed when writing for New Internationalist in 1988 are still hanging: “It appears that women professionals – feminist and non-feminist alike – have solved their personal housework crisis in the easiest way possible. They’ve simply bought their way out of the problem. Instead of being exploited themselves, they shift the exploitation to another woman. But not everyone can pass the buck in this way. Who cleans the cleaner’s house?” 22
     
    Of the women I spoke to who had found a workable solution to the sharing of domestic work in their households, 90% employed some sort of home help, from a weekly cleaner to a live-in au pair. Many more expressed a hope that they would one day be able to afford similar domestic help. Rich households have always had servants, but the anxiety and reach of contemporary Western women’s employment of cleaners and carers to relieve them of the double shift of housework and paid work is unprecedented. This strategy is not without its drawbacks. Hardly any of the women questioned were entirely comfortable with the situation, as well they might not be: nearly all cleaners, childminders and nannies are female, and a large proportion are foreign-born, either legal or illegal migrants. Western women’s despair at the very point of asking our male relatives to do their bit, our unwillingness to challenge the system at its root, is such that an entire generation has been willing to simply hand down their oppression to poor, migrant and ethnic minority women.
     
    Whilst most domestics are paid, albeit poorly, a proportion are illegal immigrants controlled by gangs, and some are victims of human trafficking. Although due to the nature of international operations accurate estimates are still impossible, it is believed that fully twelve percent of the 27 million victims of human trafficking worldwide – 700,000 in the United States alone – are indentured domestic slaves. A further 36% are delicately described as ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘other’ workers, meaning in plain English that some sex slaves are also expected to wash the sheets afterwards.
     
    It would be soothing to think that the wealthy men and women employing these unfortunate women are largely ignorant of their plight, but this is not the case. In Westernised areas of the Middle East such as Dubai, the burning of domestics’ passports is routine -and illegal residence in the country is punishable by death. In 2007, a wealthy couple from Muttontown, New York, were convicted of enslaving and torturing two Indonesian women who were brought to their mansion to work as housekeepers, and similar cases have come to light across the United States since federal anti-trafficking laws were brought into force in the year 2000. Across the world, disgusting damage is inflicted by our unwillingness to confront our terror of gender-specified drudgery.
     
    Judith Ramirez, co-ordinator of the Toronto-based International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation (INTERCEDE) insists that there is no simple solution to what she calls “a modern day variation on the slave trade” – hiring a nanny or a housekeeper is really a question of women trying to fend for themselves. “I don’t see any other way when there are so few day-care places for young children. We’re nowhere near a universal day-care system accessible to everyone. As long as that’s the case, there are going to be a lot of women hired as domestics.”
     
    Men and women have been passing the buck for too long.