Would you feel comfortable paying someone to write the greeting cards you give to your loved ones, or toilet training your child, or pretending to be a new friend to your elderly father by taking him on outings, and when he dies, paying someone else to scatter his ashes for you in a tasteful, emotionally managed, purchased ritual?
In Australia, professional dual-income families and those with high disposable incomes are familiar with the outsourcing of cleaning, cooking, shopping, dog walking or children’s birthday parties. Yet, we still seem a long way from the trend among high-income people in the US of employing mainly Third World women as live-in domestics or even wet nurses, and male stewards of the household called “major-domos” who are responsible for coordinating all day-to-day activities concerning the family.
These services are all listed proudly on the A+Household Staffing Agency: Certified Household Staffing and can be seen as part of the long and undistinguished history of the rich paying the poor to do onerous, physical household tasks. However, the buying and selling of emotional services such as friendship, love, neighbourliness, and care is a somewhat different kind of consumption.
American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild documents this further extension of market relations into our emotional lives in her new and unsettling book The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times. She interviews the people who sell their emotional labour and work for “Rent-a-Grandma”, “Rent-a-Mom” or “Rent a Friend”, a service offering to provide someone with whom you can eat dinner, meet for a coffee or go on trips. The online entrepreneur who developed the idea of advertising “friendship for hire”, recognised and then marketed the wide need in contemporary society for “entanglement-free support.”
The ability to purchase relief (or release) from strong emotional entanglement is a particular feature of the outsourcing of care in America. Hochschild interviews a woman troubled by her feelings of disappointment, loss and frustration when looking after her father with Alzheimer’s disease. When she pays someone else to do it, she is released from these feelings and can see herself once again as a “good daughter”.
In another example, a household manager identified a key role in her enormously demanding job as one of transferring sympathy to people who felt anxious, neglected or distressed. According to Hochschild, the employer, Norma, had “effectively purchased the right to keep her distance from anyone who might have unnerved, irritated, or upset her. Unwittingly, Norma has outsourced sympathy itself”.
The paradox here is that the desire for “entanglement-free support” is often expressed in a language of love, care and attachment. For emotional outsourcing to function smoothly, it must be perceived to be so much more than just a financial arrangement. While, in moments of clarity, hired caregivers might be described by those purchasing their services as being “worth a million dollars”, more often, nannies, housekeepers, life-coaches, baby whisperers, elder-carers, rented friends and human surrogates are portrayed as selfless, naturally caring, genuinely loving, as sharing a precious gift or as being “part of the family”. Moreover, many of those employed in these relationships also describe themselves in similar terms.
The uncomfortable mixture of market and non-market dimensions in these relationships means that those employed to nurture, support and care for others are themselves unsupported and vulnerable to exploitation. In the US context, work conditions are often unprotected and economic arrangements are informal. The dire experiences of some live-in domestics in the US and theUK has even led to domestic work being included in definitions of what is being called a “new slavery”.
What of Australia in this troubling scenario? Will we find ourselves outsourcing more of our family life or personal struggles in an effort to become “entanglement-free”? Our labour laws may protect us against this trend. Even for those who desire to have (or indeed have) live-in household caregivers, wages and conditions, however inadequate, are still largely regulated.
Until recently, we may also have had more faith in public institutions and social support. Privatising the need for care is usually not the first solution to a problem of human vulnerability, illness or dependency. I remember my shock some years ago when reading Kate Jennings’Moral Hazard. Set in New York in the early 2000s, Jennings documents having to employ a “private aide” for her husband who was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. Without the aide, a Jamaican woman, Jennings could not be sure that he would be properly fed, bathed, sheets washed and nappy changed let alone cared for in a much wider, humane way.
We have suffered similar cuts to public funding, shrinking support to aged-care and an increase in the privatisation of services as in the US. This has already led to an outsourcing of care of the most vulnerable. Ever been to an Australian nursing home lately? Jennings’ experience does not seem as remote as it once did.
As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild argue, like other neo-liberal societies, where “care is produced less and consumed more” are we facing a “care-deficit”.
It is difficult to determine the broader social implications of “subcontracting out” our most intimate, challenging and complex emotions. Among the many risks, is the possibility that in outsourcing “feelings” to others, we may lose an ability to feel for others and the line between what can and cannot be marketed becomes even more blurred.
Dale Bloom
Analyst
"Will we find ourselves outsourcing more of our family life or personal struggles in an effort to become “entanglement-free”?
We have such a system and there are calls to expand it, and have the public fund it.
Its called "day care", or some now call it "child care" as it can extend well into the night.
anna boyle
Home Care expert
Outsourcing is a latest trend and its famous, but elderly care is a sensitive issue and care should be taken while thinking about outsourcing for senior care.
I am in favor of this until its a business with emotions too.
http://www.carefortheelderly.ie/
Colin MacGillivray
Retired architect
The article expounds the Australia and New Zealand cultural obligation to "do it yourself".
I was amazed when living in Auckland when a lawyer friend who had missed 6 weekends golf told me he had been painting his house. Why on earth didn't he pay someone else to do it? Why work at $15 per hour tasks when you can earn $100 per hour after tax at your own trade? It is almost ethically wrong and certainly antisocial not to employ someone else who needs work to do it.
It's exactly the same with any household tasks including care of relatives. What is the difference between paying a nursing home and employing a nurse to live in your home and pay the nurse directly? (It could be cheaper.) Aussies and NZers are just squeamish about the whole business of home help and are possibly unique in the world in their distaste for paying others to do chores.
Phil Dolan
Viticulturist
Colin, I guess you're not aware of the buzz your mate would get every time he comes home and sees his house and feels the warmth of achievement. He painted it. So he missed some golf. Wow.
Jim KABLE
teacher
Over the past seven years my wife has worked in Home Care Services - and my goodness - exploitation rampant at her "salary" of $18/hour. Exploitation of the service to the recipient - when family members living within the household do nothing - there is a carer to clean the kitchen, do the washing (and hang it out) clean the bathroomS!!! She comes from a former professional background and is at her professional best in this job - but has stories which make my hair (stubble in my old age) curl - of her own exploitation - as well as the way in which the false 'bonhomie' of "carer" relationships spill into the questionable. And my wife cares for her own elderly mother - who lives in her own home nearby!
Mat Hardy
Lecturer in Middle East Studies at Deakin University
"Would you feel comfortable paying someone to write the greeting cards you give to your loved ones"
I remember 20 years ago as a backpacker in Turkey staying at a hostel somewhere in Cappadocia. The owner's teenage son made good pocket money hand-writing out postcards to the mums and dads of the Anzac youths too busy drinking and 'romancing' each other to bother. He was in effect a professional provider of written emotional services and something of a canny businessman to boot.
marianne doczi
logged in via Twitter
It is good to see this issue being addressed as the outsourcing of emotional care is both one of the paradoxes of modern living and one of the major sources of job growth, and the latter will continue to be as families age and births are delayed. It creates a complexity whereby we have a care-less society and a love-more economy.
So many of the jobs and professions in demand require empathy, emotional support, suppression of personal wishes to those of employer, patience, uncritical regard…
Read moreEmma Anderson
Artist and Science Junkie
There are many gray areas in this issue that may need to be addressed, and I'm not just talking about people's hair colour :P
I'm going to speak of the example of wet nurses and put to you that they aren't just a bourgeoise throwback. They're as old as the hills. Some women simply can't produce enough milk. Some women die during childbirth. Some have to work eighteen hour days and sometimes their sisters or neighbours don't, so the role is taken for them. Not new. What's new is paying for…
Read moreJulie Stephens
Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Victoria University
You are correct Emma to point to the many Catch 22's involved in the conflict between 'work' and 'care', particularly around the care of children, the elderly and dementia care. For me, the issues you identify raise really significant social questions. However, the answers are never clear cut or easy. I know this, not only from reading the literature but also from personal experience of trying to care for (and bring in services to care for) a frail, elderly mother. In the area of elder care, it is as though any decision you make, feels wrong. You mention supply and demand but these are market terms. Can we resist our most complex and perhaps troubling feelings being turned into marketable commodities or outsourced to someone else?
Alleli Aspili
SSG Specialist
Maybe they can just stick to what people are used to (outsourcing electronic records, etc.) or go the other way ‘round. Outsourcing has influenced a lot of business operations today and I’ve actually thought that it would go further than this. Let’s look forward on the results of outsourcing “care” in this industry now.
Alleli Aspili from Infinit Outsourcing, Inc. (http://www.infinit-o.com)
Dean Ashby
Company Owner at Ezestore Storage Sydney
I first heard about this when I went to Sydney recently for a vacation. I have friends who have aging members of their household and friends who are just alone most of the time, who are very mobile because of their work, i.e. they travel most of the time. It was rather sad for me that they actually would like to avail of this kind of service – renting care without the emotional entanglement. To me, I likened it to having storage of emotions that they could just get anytime without having any emotional investment. If I were in their shoes, I would be very sad, as there is no human and emotional connection. The other party is paid to be emotionally connected with me, but never empathize with my situation or me.