Maid in Canada

I've been reading Jan Wong's current series in the Saturday Globe and Mail, in which she goes 'undercover' working as a maid in Toronto in order to illuminate the lives of the working poor (especially poor, uneducated women) in Canada.

It's a bit rich, especially as she admitted in her first installment that she employs a 'housekeeper' in her own tony residence in Toronto. And the grim world she uncovers is no great revelation, at least to me. It's a sobering truth that a significant minority in this wealthy country of ours live below the poverty line, despite working grueling hours. And as others have pointed out, Barbara Ehrenreich undertook a similar, and far more thorough, experiment in a few years ago, which she documented in her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

What has struck me most about Wong's series, however, is her portrayal of the type of people who hired her and her colleagues to clean their slovenly homes. Overwhelmingly young, professional, and well-off, they treat the hired help with contempt, while at the same time behaving as though they are invisible. Wong relays nauseating anecdotes of turning up to sprawling homes only to encounter clogged and overflowing toilets, or pet droppings obviously untouched for days and left for the maid to clean up. It's no wonder that, by her second installment, Wong writes that she has come to loathe these people, and regard housework as endless drudgery that is beneath her dignity.

At the end of the day, though, housework has to be done, and someone's got to do it. If you can't or don't want to, I don't see any problem with paying someone else to do it for you. But there's no excuse for the contemptuous treatment Wong and her co-workers seem to be subjected to as a matter of course. Anyone who would treat another human being in such a way is loathsome, in my book.