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A few weeks ago international business executives attending the Pacific Basin Economic Council meeting sat in the Hawaii Convention Center listening to the remarks of Dr. Nay Htun. The United Nations assistant secretary-general lectured delegates on global corporate responsibilities and exhorted them to share the benefits of global trade. Giving dignity to
domestic workersHtun's statements moved former Ecuador President Duran-Ballen to declare, "All we're hearing is about studies and making money...This is the first session, thank God, where PBEC shows it has a soul -- a social soul -- that we worry about the human beings, not just about making money."
In a vein that goes straight to the core of such humanism and my Second Wave feminist principles, veteran feminist and social analyst Barbara Ehrenreich writes about "sweatshops in our own homes" in the April cover story of Harpers magazine.
In "Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women's Work," she addresses my own generation, which came to political consciousness in the '70s and marched in the streets advocating "wages for housework."
Ehrenreich reminds us that feminist solidarity viewed all women as workers and challenged the devaluation of women's labor, male unwillingness to share domestic responsibilities, and the class/race hierarchy in which minority women picked up the mop so that educated women could pursue "loftier" goals.
Researching this piece, Ehrenreich herself worked as a maid for a corporate cleaning chain, detailing the exploitative practices and physical pain of house cleaning.
We all know Hawaii's women must work longer hours than our sisters on the mainland just to pay the rent and feed the kids. Do most professional women here hire cleaning services? Yes.
Do most of the local services employ women of color? Yes.
Should we ensure that these corporate services provide fair wages, benefits and working conditions to employees? Yes.
My middle-class sisters and I intend to pose these questions to our lawmakers, to insist that workers who come into and share our most intimate spaces are rewarded and respected for the service they provide.
Green cards, health insurance, child care for workers, fair wages, Social Security benefits, work breaks, other "home outsourcing" business practices -- yes, all these are feminist issues.
Ehrenreich traces some humiliating practices that lessen the humanity of domestic workers: the haughty "mistress-maid" assumption that cleaners are lowly; the insistence on servility; the invisibility felt by cleaners; bullying by spoiled, consumerist kids; sexual advances made by the "master" and sons of the household; and the piling on of uncompensated-for extra chores like picking up drycleaning, babysitting pets and buying groceries.
A deep examination of our own conscience might reveal that inherent in the relationship between those who hire and those who work "on their knees" is inevitably one of unequal power. As Ehrenreich states, "To make a mess that another person will have to deal with is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms."
Eleanor Roosevelt, a founder of the U.N., possessed a global consciousness. But she keenly understood justice at the micro-level as well.
"Where do human rights begin?" she asked. "In small places, close to home, so close and small they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person...Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, and opportunity, and dignity without discrimination."
Nancie Caraway is a Honolulu political scientist
who writes about global human rights issues.