Is Outsourcing the Solution?
The limits of even hypermodern technologies of convenience to compress time is reflected in the massive shift in the balance between privatized household work and the provision of market-based domestic services. The contracting out of housework is a growing trend in afluent societies, especially among middle-class households. The feminization of the labor force has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform, such as cleaning, cooking, and child care. Indeed, there is a direct link between married women’s earnings and the time they spend performing routine household chores (cooking, washing the dishes, house cleaning, and laundry). As women who are employed full time earn more, they reduce the time they spend performing routine housework, “defray[ing] their housework time by using their earnings to purchase market substitutes, or services, for domestic labor.”24
This phenomenon has received relatively little attention, largely because sociological research on housework has concentrated on the sexual division of domestic tasks. Feminist researchers have had to confront inequalities between women and address the contradictory interests that women have as employers and employees. After all, it is largely women who hire and fire other women to do housework and substitute mothering, as paid domestic servicing usually involves labor substitution for men in the household.
While the rich have always hired domestic servants, there is today a mass importation of caring labor from the third world. Many immigrant women leave their own children in order to work as nannies, cooks, and cleaners for families in the first world. From Hong Kong to the United States, for example, Filipina domestic workers are employed for low pay and long hours. Indeed, countries such as the Philippines have become economically dependent on the remittances women domestic workers send home. What is distinctive about this form of labor is that it straddles the boundaries of public and private and of free and unfree labor. In the case of live-in domestics, for example, what the employer is buying is not just the worker’s labor power but their personhood.25 This increasingly internationalized trade in emotional labor, “the global care chain” is based on intersecting hierarchies of sex, class, age, race, and nation.
Doing Domestic Time
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