The Other

For many years I have deliberated the ethics of hiring someone to clean my house.   With a mother who takes immense pride in her home yet believes it’s a plain waste of money to outsource cleaning, I grew up believing that only the very richest people had cleaners.

Thembi Ndlovu, South Africa (www.ianvancoller.com)

My early travels to Asia and Africa added some depth to my understanding of ‘maid culture’, as I quickly observed the ubiquity of domestic help across the middle and upper classes.  My kneejerk reaction to seeing so many maids in homes was abhorrence.  It seemed to sum up all that was wrong with the world, with privileged people continuing to amass wealth and to prosper off the back of the disadvantaged poor, forced to take any work available, accept low pay, enjoy next-to-no rights and commonly be separated from their own children in the process.  The recent American film Mammoth captured this irony of globalisation, telling the story of a family in New York employing a Filipino lady as a live-in nanny.  While the young professional couple effectively outsource the bringing up of their child in order to work more to fund their affluence, their nanny is separated from her own two children in her quest to earn a decent income and provide for their future.

Chezile Twala, South Africa (www.ianvancoller.com)

Perhaps what shocked me the most was seeing how good people doing amazing things abroad also play into this dual economy, with foreign aid and development workers commonly hiring domestic workers and/or nannies, quite simply because of the cheap-as-chips labour.  Surely, I pondered at the time, if all these ‘humanitarians’ could just pay their staff more money and guarantee them similar rights to what they themselves enjoyed (such as sick leave and superannuation), these communities would ultimately be a whole lot better off and perhaps may not need so much foreign assistance in the first place.

Irene Maleke, South Africa (www.ianvancoller.com)

But age is mellowing me out a bit and I now see a lot more ‘grey area’ than I did before.  I’ve come across many examples of friends and family abroad who employ a maid and in the process, invest significantly in helping that person and their family, whether it be through sponsoring the worker’s children’s education or paying for life-saving medication and treatments.  I’ve also accepted that for many domestic workers, this work represents their only real employment option and particularly for ‘illegal’ migrants in developing countries, is an opportunity for them to work and live in a relatively safe environment.

Zanele Ndlovu, South Africa (www.ianvancoller.com)

In Australia, while cleaning and domestic help is still one of the lowest paid forms of work, it’s possible to make a half-decent living.  After having a baby and returning to part time work, I finally bit the bullet this year and hired cleaners to come and do the kind of things that we just weren’t doing often enough like mopping floors and vacuuming.  A young migrant couple clean our place fortnightly; they work really hard, have recently themselves bought a house and are making a good life for themselves.  As they are employed through an agency, we pay a little bit more, but at least know that they have some employment rights and benefits. There are also some great innovative social enterprises in Victoria which provide migrants with employment opportunities as cleaners including AMES and the ASRC.

Agnes Kelekegile, South Africa (www.ianvancoller.com)

About the photos:

Interior Relations is a series focused specifically on the lives of domestic workers—nannies and maids — who in the words of photographer Ian Van Coller – seemingly embody the daily reproduction of apartheid-era relations in South Africa today. “This portrait series explores the deep fault lines between the country’s public democratic ideals and the ongoing racial and economic inequality more than a decade after apartheid’s end. The institution of domestic service, so engrained in South African culture, is a complex arena of interaction that brings individuals together who would otherwise stand on opposite sides of an enormous gulf in ethnicity, culture, education and poverty into an intensely intimate, personal and sometimes awkward interdependence. These “relationships” hold unique potential for transformation in a society that was previously so conflicted, in part because black and white South Africans have led such separate lives.”

“On a trip home to visit my family in South Africa in 2005, I was struck by the general persistence of domestic workers being employed in the homes of most white South Africans. There are more than 1.5 million black South Africans who still serve as maids, nannies and gardeners in wealthy and middle-class white households. New laws regulating the domestic service industry ensure that employees receive decent wages and are not exploited by having to work unreasonably long hours. These and other government protections have changed the working conditions, as well as the attitudes toward domestic service as fewer South Africans can afford live-in help, and more women prefer to maintain their own residence, apart from the family or families that they work for. Yet in this immediate post-Apartheid era, there remain few employment opportunities for many black South African women aside from domestic work. And with a fifty-percent unemployment rate, domestic service fills a critical need for women seeking to support their families.”

www.ianvancoller.com