Sociology: Rosie Cox's tendency to substitute indignation for evidence mars her study of domestic employment in a global economy, writes Cormac Ó Gráda
In Dublin a century ago, one female employee in four was an indoor domestic servant. Nonetheless, there and elsewhere for middle-class housewives the "servant problem" was finding affordable and reliable help. So much so that just after the first World War the Ministry of Reconstruction set up an inquiry into the "domestic service problem". The number of domestics dropped dramatically in the following decades, at first because productivity could not keep pace with the more mechanised sectors of the economy, and then because vacuum cleaners and washing machines and other electrical appliances reduced demand.
Today, however, there are Polish and South African nannies, Russian and Filipino cleaning ladies, Spanish and German au pairs, and websites devoted to linking domestics and potential employers. Rosie Cox's short book on the "servant problem" is about the seemingly dramatic recovery of an old-fashioned occupation in recent years, due to a combination of affluence in the industrial world and an elastic supply of unskilled female workers from what used to be called the Third World.
Of course, the globalisation of domestic service that Cox describes is not new; it dates back to when the "servant problem" in middle-class US was about "Bridget", the Irish domestic. There were many Bridgets and, strictly speaking, many more Marys. Between the Famine and the Great War about two million Irish women, mostly young and single, settled in the US, and became an indispensable presence in urban middle-class homes. Then as now, employers compared notes about their domestics. In Yankee caricature, "Bridget" was a hopeless cook and lazy cleaner, and prone to leave her employer in the lurch. She might answer the door by shouting through the keyhole, or, unused to stairs, descend them backwards; and, of course, she neglected her duties out of an "anxiety to attend church meetings". Whether the desperate housewives of yore were as "heartily sick of the Irish" as the stereotypes imply is doubtful. Times change, and today in Ireland the shoe is on the other foot. Middle-class Irish women today have more in common with those Yankee housekeepers than with Bridget.
Bridget's side of the story - the long hours, the lack of privacy, the petty indignities, the occasional sexual harassment, and the loneliness - still resonates, and it is the main focus of The Servant Problem. It is certainly worth highlighting. Yet the gradual absorption of Bridget into the American mainstream suggests that Cox is much too quick to dismiss the benefits of the system she describes. Today, unless the servant is an au pair, those benefits may not include bed and board in a healthy part of town; but for other categories of service, the wages can still exceed those of unskilled factory workers, and the opportunity to remit money home remains. Moreover, everything is relative. Although service continues to be a low-status occupation, it easily beats the alternative of remaining at home, just as being Bridget in the US was a much more attractive proposition than staying in Ireland.
The problem with The Servant Problem is not with where its sympathies lie - and they lie very much with the immigrant workers - but with its habit of substituting indignation for evidence. It offers no hard data on working conditions, or even on the numbers of workers involved, either as cleaners, live-in servants, or au pairs. Have wages been rising or falling? Surely the hours are fewer than half a century ago, not to mention the era of Bridget?
Arguing from one or two evocative case studies is not enough. Nor does the disproportionate amount of space devoted here to au pairs, a relatively privileged group in the hierarchy of domestic service, make sense. Cox's gloomy findings are based on interviews with an undisclosed number of employment agencies, domestic workers, and support groups, but there is no account of how subjects were selected (or rejected). We meet one employer whose attitude to the au pair is, "If you want a buddy-buddy family then we're not the family for you", and another who complains that her help ate her "Häagen-Dazs ice cream instead of the crap you got the children".
Two au pairs describe their work as "a life between slavery and luxury". Fine, but a little content analysis of all the evidence collected would help. And while the plight of workers compromised by immigration laws or restrictive contracts is usefully highlighted, the gullibility and vulnerability of servants in general is almost certainly exaggerated. The market for servants is characterised by effective informational networks, often based on word-of-mouth. History suggests that Bridget knew what to expect, and the persistence of the migration suggests that her expectations were met, by and large.
Rosie Cox ends with two inconsistent aspirations: (a) that the rich should do more of their own housework, and therefore do away with their need for servants, and (b) that service workers should be paid according to their "value" rather than their employer's income. The paradox is that the globalisation of service, although the product of a cruel and unequal world, probably helps make it a less unequal one.
Cormac Ó Gráda lectures in economics at UCD. His last book was Black '47 and Beyond (Princeton, 1999). Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socio-economic History (Princeton UP) and Ireland's Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Essays (UCD Press) are due this year.
The Servant Problem: Domestic Employment in a Global Economy. By Rosie Cox, IB Tauris, 163pp. £45