Saskia Sassen,
"The Other Workers in the Advanced Corporate Economy"
(page 3 of 4)
Domestic Work in High-Income Households
Two trends have come together in global cities over the last twenty
years to produce a repositioning of what it means to be a domestic
worker in high-level professional households. One is the growing demand
for female professionals, and the other is the strong preference among
both male and female professionals for living in the city, given their
long hours and very demanding responsibilities in the workplace.
The result is a proliferation of what I like to refer to as "the
professional household without a 'wife.'" The absence of the 'wife'
happens precisely at a time when professional households need to
function like clockwork, much like the infrastructure in global cities,
because they are crucial to the functioning of globalized sectors.
Indeed, these types of households should be reconceptualized as part of
that infrastructure. Here the low-wage domestic worker is actually
maintaining a strategic infrastructure, which has the effect of changing
the valence of this work.
The demands placed on the top-level professional and managerial
workforce in global cities are such that the usual methods for handling
household tasks are inadequate. Most of the research on this subject has
focused on the poor working conditions, exploitation, and multiple
vulnerabilities of household workers.[5]
These conditions are
undeniable. But, analytically, what matters here is the strategic
importance of well-functioning professional households for the leading
globalized sectors in these cities and, hence, the importance of this
new type of serving class.
Immigrant and minoritized women are a favored source for this type of
work. Theirs is a mode of economic incorporation that makes their
crucial role invisible. Being immigrant or minoritized citizens breaks
an important connection: the nexus between being workers with an
important function in the advanced global economy and the opportunity
to become an empowered workforce. Historically, workers in major growth
sectors were able to organize and gain ground. In this sense, we can say
that being an 'immigrant woman' becomes the systemic equivalent of the
offshore proletariat with its lack of power and lack of political
visibility.
The fact that domestic work in high-level professional households is
increasingly recognized as important for busy professionals and hence
their firms' households, is suggested by the fact that it has become one
growth sector of global staffing companies—even though it remains
lowly paid. Some of these companies have expanded into household work to
help the transnational professional workforce. For instance, Kelly
Services, a Fortune 500 services company in global staffing, which
operates offices in 25 countries, now has added a home care division,
which provides a full range of help. It is particularly geared to people
who need assistance with daily living but also for those who lack the
time to take care of the household, which in the past would have been
the responsibility of the 'mother/wife' figure.[6]
More directly pertinent to the professional households discussed here is a growing
range of global staffing organizations whose advertised services cover
various aspects of daycare, including dropping off and picking up, as
well as in-house tasks, from child minding to cleaning and
cooking.[7]
One international agency for nannies and au pairs, EF Au Pair Corporate
Program, advertises directly to corporations, urging them to make the
service part of their employment offers to potential employees to help
them address household and childcare needs. Increasingly the emergent
pattern is that the transnational professional class can access these
services in the expanding network of global cities among which they are
likely to circulate.[8]
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