Being in Brazil this week (but flying back home tonight) allowed me to follow some of the local current debates more closely than I would have otherwise. One of the ‘hot topics' at the moment is the new legislation regulating the working conditions of domestic workers. It is still very common in Brazil for a middle-class family to rely on a wealth of domestic workers, including cleaners, drivers, gardeners and perhaps most importantly, the (almost always female) live-in domestic workers who are responsible for the big chunk of domestic chores (cooking, cleaning, laundry, caring for children), known as ‘empregadas’. (Here is the trailer of a very interesting film/documentary on the phenomenon of a few years ago.)
Up to now, these live-in maids were basically expected to be ‘on call’ 24 hours a day, starting with breakfast early in the morning all the way until washing the dishes after dinner. Needless to say, salaries are usually pretty low, and there was until now no control over the amount of hours they were expected to work; thus the concept of ‘doing extra hours’ did not apply to them. To most foreign eyes, it is a very strange arrangement, which can only be understood as a painful reminiscence of Brazil’s recent slavery past (where slavery was only officially abolished in 1888).
Thus, the new legislation is a very welcome development, hopefully bringing an end to or at least attenuating a situation of blatant exploitation. However, as to be expected, there is major ongoing uproar among the employers of the empregadas, who are much too used to this convenience, and will from now on have to pay more for this precious service. (See this interesting text on the topic, in Portuguese.)
Now, one of the paradoxes of the ‘empregada’ institution is that it in fact makes it much easier for women to have professional careers, once they are unburdened from most domestic chores, and with the outsourcing of a big chunk of child caring. (There is really way too much outsourcing going on in some circles in Brazil, for example with the phenomenon of 24/7 nannies.) Personal experience tells me (but I don’t have hard data to offer at the moment) that women in general are much more present in the work floor here in Brazil than elsewhere (for example in the Netherlands), and I have no doubt that the empregadas greatly contribute to this. So here we have a situation where the improvement of the social position of a certain group of women depends largely on the exploitation of another group of women, namely the large masses of poor, uneducated women in need of work and thus prepared to become empregadas.
One might think that, while better control of working hours and higher salaries for empregadas is a much welcome development, the whole idea of having this kind of domestic help is simply not to be reconciled with egalitarian ideals. And here I beg to disagree. Since I became a mother more than 8 years ago, I have relied on a steady stream of loving, caring people who have been involved in the rearing of my children, and I can say without hesitation that I would never have been able to grow professionally as I have without the help of these wonderful people. I’ve professed my enthusiasm for the concept of allo-parenting before, and in the acknowledgments of my 2012 book, I made a point of thanking each of those people who helped us care for our children during the time that I was working on the book.
Our current arrangement is the au pair system; we always have a Brazilian au pair living with us (the au pair visa is for one year only), and she helps with caring for the children and taking care of light domestic chores. I have no idea what would be of us without this amazing help that we receive. The catch is of course not to be ‘cheap’, i.e. to make sure that they are accordingly rewarded, both financially and in terms of our appreciation for their contribution to the household. (Fortunately, we are lucky enough to be able to afford this arrangement, which is of course not the case of most people living on academic salaries.)
So to conclude, I want to reaffirm my enthusiasm for the concept of allo-parenting: as the proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child… But precisely for this reason, everyone involved in allo-parenting should be thoroughly acknowledged and accordingly rewarded; it is one of the toughest and most important jobs one can think of. This new legislation in Brazil is a small but important step towards delivering Brazilians from the slavery mentality which is still much too prevalent.
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