I'm surprised to hear that it is impolite to not have a housekeeper if you are an expat. To which places are you referring?
Nowadays, the spirit still lives on somewhat in the fact that we have free public scenic hiking trails through what looks like very expensive private property. When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy, and so it did.
I believe Vietnam still has a similar system, too, in that the government will calculate how much jobs a foreign company needs to create, based on their annual revenue. It's one of the reasons why Korean milk tea shops tend to be crammed full with 10-20 schoolgirl employees.
The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces.
I personally find these habitual rights an interesting expression of positive freedom, laws and customs limiting the power of those that have a lot of it (i.e., property owners) to monopolise and exploit, thus creating a public good. I think we should have more of it, especially in the physical but also the digital realm.
Particularly, the concept of adversarial interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... is connected, it would be a different world of Google, Facebook and any other platform were obligated to make their internal APIs and documentation available at cost+a legislated profit margin do anyone can be compatible with them.
This is like saying France and the US both have freedom of speech. Technically true but the difference in how strong the laws are between Nordic countries and England is enormous.
You wrote: <<Technically true but the difference in how strong the laws are between Nordic countries and England is enormous.>>
I am sure you were thinking of a specific example when you wrote this post! Can you share it? It would be nice to learn.
Because animals are easily stolen, cultures around animals as food, tend to consider weapon ownership essential, and tend to think highly of self defense and whatnot.
These same cultures also tend to believe strongly in "hospitality", in the sense that if you have guests you need to take care of them and whatnot, because you might need to be someone guest too.
Meanwhile plant-based cultures tend instead to favor things like schedules, calendars, seasons, festivals and so on, because this is what essential to their food instead, meanwhile it doesn't matter if someone is strolling in your land when it is not harvest season, the person won't steal your food.
Very generally, England allows a right to cross property on foot. But, that doesn't include camping, cycling, etc. The list of allowances is relatively short and exceptions relatively long.
Scotland allows all a lot more freedom to roam, including cycling and camping. I don't recall exactly how it's codified, but it's approximately a default right to access, with limited exceptions (close proximity to homes, farms with active lambing, estates during hunting season, stuff like that).
This is not because Norwegians are civic minded altruists and Singaporeans selfish jerks. It mostly reflects what is practical.
This isn't just a saying, but a part of the constitution (Article 14, http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.ht... )
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
-- Hilaire Belloc
Here in Massachusetts, our trespassing laws only apply to "improved" land. So you are free to transit any wilderness areas, even if they are privately owned, and even if "no trespassing" signs are posted. Of course, nobody knows this or follows it. People regularly call the police, who are just as ignorant on the law, because people are on their land.
This may sound naive, but I had legitimately never considered that it's a valid and useful way to spread my opportunities through the community.
Because the better way to spread opportunity is to use that money to pay for poorer people to get an education so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people.
...and then a data scientist with an advanced degree spends the day hand-crafting SQL to root-cause a customer complaint after Bezos sends a one-byte email, "?"...
(EDIT: I may have focused on one aspect of the parent's point at the expense of the other, clarified below).
Is there any question that a housekeeper is better off if they were able to spend their time studying or training for something that offers a higher probability of earning higher incomes?
Or should society continue to perpetuate the relative socioeconomic class you are born into by having you spend your time washing other people’s clothes and homes?
(EDIT: That said, upward economic mobility is always desirable and education is essential to achieving it. It's an escape from poverty, but it's not a foolproof escape from hierarchy).
The two concerns are linked. You only see widespread personal drivers and housekeepers and gardeners in less developed countries with many very poor people. Reducing the stratification by redistributing wealth via taxes and an education system is preferable mechanism of spreading opportunity.
The societies telesilla and Blahah are referring to are not ones where a housekeeper works 40 hour weeks Mon to Fri and gets PTO and has time to get a law degree in the evenings.
These places have housekeepers and drivers because they are not fortunate to be born in a society with enough of a public education system that allows them to escape that fate, even if it is just being an accountant for a rich person, at least they get vacations and decent work hours and schedules.
Nor is the "high-growth" tech sector, which is notorious for long hours and de-facto little time off. The money might be good, but the lifestyle can be miserable.
You're working for billionaires instead of millionaires, but you're still in a situation where a "?" from the top means you've got to hustle.
One has weekends and holidays, can send their kids to fancy schools, go on international vacations, choose to retire by 40, has access to great healthcare, choose to work a different profession or their hobby or whatever they want.
The poster you replied to was very clearly limiting the scope of their comparison to the "so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people" standard you gave originally. Listing any number of other differences is orthogonal to the point they are making.
"Step 1: Everyone gets a Ph.D.
Step 2: Meals cook themselves!"
(I suppose we could all live on MREs?)
Knowledge isn't zero-sum, but credentials are. Educating everyone doesn't make "menial" jobs go away. Better, really, to recognize some of those jobs as more important, and be willing to pay for them.
Also, there are gains from trade, and economies of scale. The time to cook two meals is less than double the time to cook one. And the person who specializes in it is probably better at it than the person who specializes in some other thing. When things are working correctly, these gains are then distributed across society by exchange.
It is obvious that a society with widespread use of personal drivers/housekeepers/nannies is simply one with a wider income/wealth gap.
One option is to spend multiple generations slowing bringing the housekeepers kids up the ladder with the housekeeper’s meager savings, and then their kids, and so on. Or we can cut the crap, and redistribute wealth more quickly and directly via a public education/training system.
You give people opportunities to do many more things than menial labor, then that allows the price for menial labor to rise so that it is not done by the “lower” socioeconomic rungs.
I know quite a few households in the $200k+ income, and no one has a driver, everyone does their own laundry, and only a few have a house cleaner come by every couple weeks.
I compare that to the American suburban experience, where most people who do manual work are considered too flakey to deal with directly, most tasks are nowhere near enough to count as a full time job, and everything is handled via companies led by people who code-switch. If I need a roofer or a landscaper, I will find few companies led by a mexican, or even someone with mexican ancestry, but their workers are almost assured to be: There's layers of isolation on top of layers of isolation, so you aren't building a relationship with your roofer, your handyman, or your housekeeper. The intermediaries make all of that work exchange have a very different nature.
On top of that, barring a small number of neighborhoods, there's a good chance you'll never see one of those workers outside of the contract, because the housing they can afford, and the housing they can afford, are so far apart you have few reasons to frequent the same establishments. So while places where more people live together might make it easier to see how different social classes are, in the US we might have a larger social distance, but completely hidden by housing. It's not just that the rich American can take their kids to a private school: It's that the way things are set up, the public schools for many a rich American will have few families who aren't rich in the first place, just via suburban zoning.
It's as if different social classes were happy to coexist in many other places, but in the US, they loathe each other, and can only interact via intermediaries.
Is it possible that the US is big enough and rich enough that it allows different social classes to not have to co exist, whereas in many other places, they have no choice but to co exist due to lack of land and other wealth?
In some places that don't have supermarkets the process of buying groceries for a whole family is much more time consuming and labor intensive. For example, you get vegetables from one market, you go to another place if you want chicken and wait while they literally kill it in front of you, chop it up and put it in a plastic bag.
Everything comes from its own decentralized market and requires a lot more time/effort to buy on an ongoing basis.
Shopping and the process of buying all the supplies for a household is not nearly as convenient as going to Costco or similar in north america.
Often the role of cook is combined with general duties of procuring household supplies, handling things like the local electrical bill, hiring laborers for household repair and maintenance, etc.
Grocery shopping is a huge effort compared to the US. Also, with smaller homes, kitchens, and smaller fridges, you have to go grocery shopping multiple times a week.
Cars and Gasoline are also heavily taxed. Even "rich" families will typically only have one basic car, so you need a driver to drop someone off at work, come home to take somebody to the various grocery stores, etc.
Over the last 10-15 years as job and educational opportunities have improved, more and and more of the people I know complain that it's harder to find "good" domestic help. Lots of people who would typically go into basic construction jobs or domestic help jobs are finding other opportunities. Basically, what is going on in the US right now.
What I meant to say is that those people who the locals consider not "expat" anymore, but "backpacker" instead, must really have fallen low.
The USA is exceptional because almost every visa that allows for work is considered an immigration visa (eg H1 leads to a greencard, eventually). But in other countries that is most definitely not true.
I came to the US as an expat, but became an immigrant.
If you tend to see racism behind every raised eyebrow, you can of course also see this terminology as racist.
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.My wife's parents worked in Kenya for a few years in the 70s and they where advised that having a maid and a nanny was expected.
(we are Swedish)
- rent a house
- hire a house guardian
- hire at last one maid
- hire a chauffeur if you own a car
It was also recommended than they come form the local neighborhood.
It was a social norm, and if you do not do it you can expect the local policemen to "fine you" every time you take the car, the food cost to be x5 the price (or more), and many other additional costs and life inconvenience than just made more easy and cheaper to just hire the people.
That said the work was real. A good chauffeur, will negotiate prices and bribes for you, and recommend you the good places. The house guardian was also your speaker with the neighborhood committee (with was in fact a government organization). (I will avoid the more complicated subject of the maid...)
This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.
There was a way to avoid all this: living in a flat in the city center and use taxis.
(For Addis Ababa this may not be true anymore because the city was changed a lot from the big shantytown it was then)
I'm really curious now. Why is the maid a more complicated subject?
I really hope that's not the case. But we (rich white people) don't exactly have a good track record in these types of situation. :(
Curiously, you said “rich white people” forgoing the one prejudice that actually does predict sexual exploitation - men!
The topic of race was already raised in the grandparent post, I quote (emphasis mine):
> I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to:
While I'm sure exploitation happens in most cultures I'm mostly familiar with it happening in white culture and given that context was already specified and my education being based on that context I decided to keep my reply specific to that context which I already knew.
Sorry if I offended anyone -- I just figured being a white male myself it was more offensive to drag other cultures into the discussion when they were previously outside the scope.
> Curiously, you said “rich white people” forgoing the one prejudice that actually does predict sexual exploitation - men!
I didn't need to specify men because that context was already defined in the post I was responding to. To quote the GP again:
> This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.
Frankly though, moaning about other cultures doing it too feels a little like trying to pull others down so we don't look so bad instead of acknowledging our own failings. Maybe that's an uncomfortable opinion for people to hear but as the saying goes "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".
I do not think that behavior is or was restricted to skin color.
Wow, nice generalization - do you get all your 'facts' from the movies?
Bare in mind I'm not suggesting an entire race is frequently abusing their maids to this day. What I'm saying is there is recorded history of it happening. You only have to dig through some of the abuses that happened during the slave trade to see evidence of this fact. So we do indeed have a bad track record in this regard. It might be an uncomfortable truth for some of us to hear but it doesn't make it any less true.
I hate to break it to you but rich white people are generally far less likely to be a sexual predation risk in these situations because they often have more to lose, have easier access to consenting parties, and come from countries that stigmatize that type of behavior to a much greater degree.
Honestly the "other cultures are just as bad" argument here strikes me just as poor as the "all lives matter" protest comment against the BLM movement:
> There is a difference between something being true and something being relevant.
source: eg https://relevantmagazine.com/current/the-problem-with-saying...
https://www.economist.com/baobab/2012/04/24/maid-in-ethiopia
https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/100650
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/10/national/u-n-of...
Japanese people can tell the difference between reality and cosplay.
That quote would look good in a meme.
Some of the maid where indeed expected to also do "night duties" if asked. It was not a racial power stuff. It's was more a problem with a sort of "cultural prostitution" witch was everywhere in Ethiopia. The maids where still primary maids and not prostitute, and to be fair, the same problem also did exist in Europe at the time of Agatha Christie (How many European maid had become pregnant and then fired ?).
I thinks than it's now worst than in the 90's because Ethiopia had sadly become a tourist sex place since then. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Ethiopia