2 Margaret Talbot reports in the New York Times Magazine that “personality testing in the workplace is at an all-time high” and now supports a $400-million-a-year industry (October 17, 1999, p. 28).
3 The Bureau of Labor Statistics found full-time “private household workers and servants” earning a median income of $223 a week in 1998, which is $23 a week below the poverty level for a family of three. For a forty-hour week, our pay at The Maids would amount to $266, or $43 above the poverty level.
4 Nationwide and even international cleaning services like Merry Maids, Molly Maids, and The Maids International, all of which have arisen since the seventies, now control 20–25 percent of the housecleaning business. In a 1997 article about Merry Maids, Franchise Times reported tersely that “category is booming, niche is hot too, as Americans look to outsource work even at home” (“72 Merry Maids,” Franchise Times, December 1997). Not all cleaning services do well, with a high rate of failure among the informal, mom-and-pop services, like the one I applied to by phone that did not even require a cursory inter-view—all I had to do was show up at seven the next morning. The “boom” is concentrated among the national and international chains—outfits like Merry Maids, Molly Maids, Mini Maids, Maid Brigade, and The Maids International—all named, curiously enough, to highlight the more antique aspects of the industry, although the “maid” may occasionally be male. Merry Maids claimed to be growing at 15–20 percent a year in 1996, while spokesmen for Molly Maids and The Maids International each told me in interviews conducted after I left Maine that their firms’ sales are growing by 25 percent a year.
5 The maids’ wages, their Social Security taxes, their green cards, backaches, and child care problems—all these are the sole concern of the company, meaning the local franchise owner. If there are complaints on either side, they are addressed to the franchise owner; the customer and the actual workers need never interact. Since the franchise owner is usually a middle-class white person, cleaning services are the ideal solution for anyone still sensitive enough to find the traditional employer-maid relationship morally vexing.
6 I don’t know what proportion of my fellow workers at The Maids in Portland had been on welfare, but the owner of The Maids’ franchise in Andover, Massachusetts, told me in a phone interview that half his employees are former welfare recipients and that they are as reliable as anyone else.
7 When I described the methods employed by The Maids to housecleaning expert Cheryl Mendelson, author of Home Comforts, she was incredulous. A rag moistened with disinfectant will not get a countertop clean, she told me, because most disinfectants are inactivated by contact with organic matter—i.e., dirt—so their effectiveness declines with each swipe of the rag. What you need is a detergent and hot water, followed by a rinse. As for floors, she judged the amount of water we used—one half of a small bucket, which was never any warmer than room temperature—to be grossly inadequate, and, in fact, the water I wiped around on floors was often an unsavory gray. I also ran The Maids’ cleaning methods by Don Aslett, author of numerous books on cleaning techniques and self-styled “number one cleaner in America.” He was hesitant to criticize The Maids directly, perhaps because he is, or told me he is, a frequent speaker at conventions of cleaning service franchise holders, but he did tell me how he would clean a countertop. First, spray it thoroughly with an all-purpose cleaner, then let it sit for three to four minutes of “kill time,” and finally wipe dry with a clean cloth. Merely wiping the surface with a damp cloth, he said, just spreads the dirt around. But the point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as to create the appearance of having been cleaned, not to sanitize but to create a kind of stage setting for family life. And the stage setting Americans seem to prefer is sterile only in the metaphorical sense, like a motel room or the fake interiors in which soap operas and sitcoms take place.
8 The women I worked with were all white and, with one exception, Anglo, as are the plurality of housecleaners in America, or at least those known to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the “private household cleaners and servants” it managed to locate in 1998, the BLS reports that 36.8 percent were Hispanic, 15.8 percent black, and 2.7 percent “other.” However, the association between housecleaning and minority status is well established in the psyches of the white employing class. When my daughter, Rosa, was introduced to the father of a wealthy Harvard classmate, he ventured that she must have been named for a favorite maid. And Audre Lorde reported an experience she had in 1967: “I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket . . . and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid’” (quoted in Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A.: Perspectives on Gender [New York: Routledge, 1992], p. 72). But the composition of the household workforce is hardly fixed and has changed with the life chances of the different ethnic groups. In the late nineteenth century, Irish and German immigrants served the urban upper and middle classes, then left for the factories as soon as they could. Black women replaced them, accounting for 60 percent of all domestics in the 1940s, and dominated the field until other occupations began to open up to them. Similarly, West Coast maids were disproportionately Japanese American until that group too found more congenial options (see Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 [Temple University Press, 1989], pp. 12–13). Today, the color of the hand that pushes the sponge varies from region to region: Chicanas in the Southwest, Caribbeans in New York, native Hawaiians in Hawaii, native whites, many of recent rural extraction, in the Midwest and, of course, Maine.
9 For the affluent, houses have been swelling with no apparent limit. The square footage of new homes increased by 39 percent between 1971 and 1996, to include “family rooms,” home entertainment rooms, home offices, bedrooms, and often a bathroom for each family member (“Détente in the Housework Wars,” Toronto Star, November 20, 1999). By the second quarter of 1999, 17 percent of new homes were larger than three thousand square feet, which is usually considered the size threshold for household help, or the point at which a house becomes unmanageable to the people who live in it (“Molding Loyal Pamperers for the Newly Rich,” New York Times, October 24, 1999).
10 In Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House (Scribner, 1999), Cheryl Mendelson writes, “Never ask hired housecleaners to clean your floors on their hands and knees; the request is likely to be regarded as degrading”(p. 501).
11 In 1999, somewhere between 14 and 18 percent of households employed an outsider to do the cleaning and the numbers are rising dramatically. Media-mark Research reports a 53 percent increase, between 1995 and 1999, in the number of households using a hired cleaner or service once a month or more, and Maritz Marketing finds that 30 percent of the people who hired help in 1999 had done so for the first time that year.
Managers of the new corporate cleaning services, such as the one I worked for, attribute their success not only to the influx of women into the workforce but to the tensions over housework that arose in its wake. When the trend toward hiring out was just beginning to take off, in 1988, the owner of a Merry Maids franchise in Arlington, Massachusetts, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I kid some women. I say, ‘We even save marriages. In this new eighties period you expect more from the male partner, but very often you don’t get the cooperation you would like to have. The alternative is to pay somebody to come in’” (“Ambushed by Dust Bunnies,” Christian Science Monitor, April 4, 1988). Another Merry Maids franchise owner has learned to capitalize more directly on housework-related spats; he closes 30–35 percent of his sales by making follow-up calls Saturdays between 9:00 and 11:00 A.M.—which is “prime time for arguing over the fact that the house is a mess” (“Homes Harbor Dirty Secrets,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1994).
12 At the time, I dismissed this as a scare story, but I have since come across ads for concealable video cameras, like the Tech-7 “incredible coin-sized came
ra” designed to “get a visual record of your babysitter’s actions” and “watch employees to prevent theft.”
13 This invisibility persists at the macroscopic level. The Census Bureau reports that there were 550,000 domestic workers in 1998, up 10 percent since 1996, but this may be a considerable underestimate, since so much of the servant economy is still underground, or at least very low to the ground, where few data collectors ever venture. In 1993, for example, the year when Zoë Baird lost her chance to be attorney general for paying her undocumented nanny off the books, it was estimated that fewer than 10 percent of those Americans who paid a housecleaner more than $1,000 a year reported these payments to the IRS. Sociologist Mary Romero offers an example of how severe the under-counting can be: the 1980 census found only 1,063 “private household workers” in El Paso, although at the same time that city’s Department of Planning, Research, and Development estimated their numbers at 13,400 and local bus drivers estimated that half of the 28,300 bus trips taken daily were taken by maids going to and returning from work (Maid in the U.S.A., p. 92). The honesty of employers has increased since the Baird scandal, but most experts believe that household workers remain largely uncounted and invisible to the larger economy.
14 A report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in July 2000 found most nursing homes dangerously understaffed, especially profit-making nursing homes, such as the one where I worked. Among the consequences of understaffing, according to the report, are increases in preventable problems like severe bedsores, malnutrition, dehydration, congestive heart failure, and infections. While I never saw a patient neglected or mistreated in the dining area where I worked at the Woodcrest, it would have been easy for an aide to make a life-threatening mistake, such as serving sugar-containing foods to a diabetic. I consider myself—and my patients—extremely fortunate that I did not inadvertently harm someone on this day when I fed the Alzheimer’s ward by myself.
three
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Selling in Minnesota
From the air Minnesota is the very perfection of early summer—the blue of the lakes merging with the blue of the sky, neatly sculpted clouds pasted here and there, strips of farmland in alternating chartreuse and emerald—a lush, gentle landscape, seemingly penetrable from any angle. I had thought for months of going to Sacramento or somewhere else in California’s Central Valley not far from Berkeley, where I’d spent the spring. But warnings about the heat and the allergies put me off, not to mention my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do. Don’t ask me why Minneapolis came to mind, maybe I just had a yearning for deciduous trees. It’s a relatively liberal state, I knew that, and more merciful than many to its welfare poor. A half an hour or so of Web research revealed an agreeably tight labor market, with entry-level jobs advertised at $8 an hour or more and studio apartments for $400 or less. If some enterprising journalist wants to test the low-wage way of life in darkest Idaho or Louisiana, more power to her. Call me gutless, but what I was looking for this time around was a comfortable correspondence between income and rent, a few mild adventures, a soft landing.
I pick up my Rent-A-Wreck from a nice fellow—this must be the famous “Minnesota nice”—who volunteers the locations of NPR and classic rock on the radio. We agree that swing sucks and maybe would have discovered a few more points of convergence, only I’m on what a certain Key West rock jock likes to call “a mission from God.” I’ve got my map of the Twin Cities area, purchased for $10 at the airport, and an apartment belonging to friends of a friend that I can use for a few days free of charge while they visit relatives back East. Well, not entirely free of charge, since the deal is I have to take care of their cockatiel, a caged bird that, for reasons of ornithological fitness and sanity, has to be let out of the cage for a few hours a day. I had agreed to this on the phone without thinking, only fully recalling, when I get to the apartment, that birds-at-close-range are one of the phobias I have always allowed myself, along with oversized moths and anything derived from oranges. I find the place with no trouble, delighted that the city and my map are in such perfect agreement, and spend an hour with one of my hosts absorbing cockatiel technology. At one point, my host lets the bird out of its cage and it flies directly at my face. With enormous effort, I bow my head and shut my eyes while it hops around on my hair, pecking and grooming.
Don’t let the cockatiel throw you off; this is no yuppie ambience. It’s a tiny, cluttered one-bedroom affair furnished by the Salvation Army and done up in late seventies graduate student décor. When my hosts leave, I find no olive oil or balsamic vinegar in the cupboards, no half-empty bottles of Chardonnay in the fridge, no alcohol at all other than a solidly blue-collar half-pint of Seagram’s 7, and the favored spread is margarine. It’s pleasant enough, even cozy, with a firm bed and views of a tree-lined street—except for the bird. But as I’d learned from my coworkers in Maine—several of whom had spent time in tightly shared space—people who depend on the generosity of others for their lodging always have something untoward to put up with, typically incompatible relatives and long waits for the bathroom. So let the cockatiel—Budgie, as I came to call him, instead of his more pretentious given name—be a stand-in in this story for the intrusive in-laws and noisy housemates that a person of limited means crashing with distant family in a strange city might normally expect to endure.
Never mind. I’m off first thing in the morning to look for a job. No waitressing, nursing homes, or housecleaning this time; I’m psyched for a change—retail, maybe, or factory work. I drive to the two nearest Wal-Marts, fill out applications, then head for a third one a forty-five-minute drive away on the opposite edge of the city. I drop off my application and am about to start hitting the Targets and Kmarts when I get an idea: no one is going to hire me based on an application showing no job experience—I have written, as usual, that I am a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce. What I have to do is make a personal appearance and exhibit my sunny, self-confident self. So I go to the pay phone in the front of the store, call the store’s number, and ask for personnel. I’m put through to Roberta, who is impressed by my initiative and tells me I can come on in to her office in the back of the store. Roberta, a bustling platinum-haired woman of sixty or so, tells me there’s nothing wrong with my “app”; she herself raised six children before starting at Wal-Mart, where she rose to her present position in just a few years, due mainly to the fact that she’s a “people person.” She can offer me a job now, but first a little “survey,” on which there are no right or wrong answers, she assures me, just whatever I think. As it happens, I’ve already taken the Wal-Mart survey once, in Maine, and I rush through it again with aplomb. Roberta takes it off to another room, where, she says, a computer will “score” it. After about ten minutes, she’s back with alarming news: I’ve gotten three answers wrong—well, not exactly wrong but in need of further discussion.
Now, my approach to preemployment personality tests has been zero tolerance vis-à-vis the obvious “crimes”—drug use and theft—but to leave a little wriggle room elsewhere, just so it doesn’t look like I’m faking out the test. My approach was wrong. When presenting yourself as a potential employee, you can never be too much of a suck-up. Take the test proposition that “rules have to be followed to the letter at all times”: I had agreed to this only “strongly” rather than “very strongly” or “totally” and now Roberta wants to know why. Well, rules have to be interpreted sometimes, I say, people have to use some discretion. Otherwise, why, you might as well have machines do all the work instead of actual human beings. She beams at this—“Discretion, very good!”—and jots something down. With my other wrong answers similarly accounted for, Roberta introduces me to “what Wal-Mart is all about.” She personally read Sam Walton’s book (his autobiography, Made in America) before starting to work here and found that the three pillars of Wal-Mart philosophy precise
ly fit her own, and these are service, excellence (or something like that), and she can’t remember the third. Service, that’s the key, helping people, solving their problems, helping them shop—and how do I feel about that? I testify to a powerful altruism in retail-related matters and even find myself getting a bit misty-eyed over this bond that I share with Roberta. All I have to do now is pass a drug test, which she schedules me to take at the beginning of next week.
If it weren’t for the drug test, I might have stopped looking right then and there, but there has been a chemical indiscretion in recent weeks and I’m not at all sure I can pass. A poster in the room where Roberta interviewed me warns job applicants not to “waste your time or ours” if you’ve taken drugs within the last six weeks. If I had used cocaine or heroin there would be no problem, since these are water-soluble and wash out of the body in a couple of days. (LSD isn’t even tested for.) But my indiscretion involved the only drug usually detected by testing, marijuana, which is fat-soluble and, I have read, can linger in the body for months. And what about the prescription drugs I’ve been taking for a chronic nasal congestion problem? What if Claritin-D, which gives you a nice little bounce, shows up as crystal meth?
So it’s back to the car and my red-inked help-wanted ads, both in the Star Tribune and a throwaway called Employment News. I visit a couple of staffing agencies aimed at industrial jobs and certify that I have no physical limitations and can lift twenty pounds over my head, though I would feel better if I knew how many reps they have in mind. Then there’s a long drive to the other side of town, where I have an actual appointment for an interview for an assembly job. It’s been a few years since I engaged in urban highway driving, and I give myself high grades for fearless and agile navigation, but eventually the afternoon traffic defeats me. I can’t find the factory, at least not before 5:00 P.M., and pull into a shopping center parking lot to find a way to get turned around. I find myself in front of a Menards housewares store—a midwestern Home Depot–like chain—and since a sign says, “Now Hiring,” I might as well go on in and put my confrontational strategy to the test again. Wandering into the lumberyard behind the store, I flag down a fellow identified as Raymond by his ID badge, who offers to walk me to the personnel office. Is this a good place to work, I want to know. He says that it’s OK, it’s just his second job anyway, and that he doesn’t get mad at the guests because it’s not his fault if the wood is crap. The guests? These must be the customers, and I’m glad to have learned the term in advance so I won’t wince or gag in front of management.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America Page 12
