How come it's okay for Gemma Tiptonto have a pedicure but not to have her shoes shined?
"Lazy capitalist bastard," the man says. Not to me, oddly enough, because I am no different from the father sitting beside me, whose two young daughters are climbing on his lap. We are both, this lazy capitalist bastard and I, getting our shoes shined at Dublin Airport.
It is not something I've done before, although my mother always told me that plenty of polish is the best way to make good leather last. I've always felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea of someone sitting, literally, at my feet, being paid to do what seems a very menial service. On the other hand I don't seem to apply the same qualms to a pedicure.
Maybe it's something to do with an idea of skill, something you can't do yourself. But that can't be it either. I am, after all, more than able to rub my feet and slap a bit of polish on my toenails. Perhaps there are cultural memories in there somewhere, stretching back to the times when indigent Irish immigrants shined shoes on freezing street corners in the US to keep themselves from starvation. "One step ahead of the shoe shine," as Simon and Garfunkel used to sing. The three of us getting our shoes and boots done shift uncomfortably.
Whatever the reasons, the thing about the man's outburst that gets to me, apart from the awful uncomfortableness we all experience when someone publicly makes a scene, is the way he ignores the people shining the shoes. "Getting your kicks on the back of exploiting people's poverty," he continues, adding another "lazy capitalist bastard" for good measure.
The man beside me ignores him, which seems intelligent, although his little daughters look quite shocked and upset.
"He didn't seem very interested in me," the woman from Latvia, who has got to the buffing and waterproofing stage of my boots, says later. "I think it's something to do with the whole sitting-at-our-feet thing," I suggest. "Does he expect me to sit on your head?" she asks before telling me she doesn't feel exactly poverty stricken. "I can save more money here in a month than I can earn in two months at home. I'd like to become a translator eventually, but I need to work on my English."
So does she feel exploited? "Not exactly. I like it better than waitressing, working in a petrol station or standing in a shop. I get to sit down while I work, it's in the warm, I get to talk to lots of people - so it helps with my English - and the tips are good."
It gets me thinking about a conversation over a Christmas dinner with a guy from Poland. He was a designer at home but is working in a stockroom here. "Don't you want to get back into design?" I wondered. "No," he confessed. "I never much liked the job. I'm happy here, the people I work with are great and I wouldn't change. It's you I feel sorry for," he went on, perplexingly, before explaining: "I can come here, earn plenty of money and buy myself somewhere good to live back home. But you, you have nowhere to go."
Look deeply into its dark heart and capitalism is disturbing, full of injustices and exploitation. At another level, though, it offers people choices. The inequalities lie in the range of choices available to each of us. The fact is, however, that we seem to swallow the idea of some injustices more easily than others. Looking around the airport I wonder where most of the goods in the enticingly bright shops were made. How much were the people working in those factories earning? The Irish minimum wage? Almost certainly not. Where are the passengers in the departure lounge going? Tunisia, perhaps (isn't it wonderful everything's so cheap, although the locals just won't leave you alone), Belgrade (you can buy apartments there for nothing, you know) or some "unspoiled" paradise where the moment you land you demand to be utterly and entirely spoiled, no matter what the environmental consequences may be.
In the US, where economic stability requires that every citizen spend and consume as much as possible, people continually dream up services to keep the money moving around. Now the same is happening here: home delivery, dog walking, manicures, massaging, consulting on everything from finances to fashion.
Tasks we would happily have done for ourselves a generation ago (if we had actually thought to want them) have become part of a growing service industry, of which a shoe shine at Dublin Airport is just one small part.
It's an industry, however, that is based on some people's having less than others. Then again, so is manufacturing, and I can't imagine the man at the airport calling me a lazy capitalist bastard for wearing a factory-made sweater that I could probably have knitted for myself.
The problems arise when people with less are denied the opportunity and assistance to make more for and of themselves, and when we ignore them or treat them differently on the basis of what they do for a living. Those are the injustices we have to watch out for.