by Sarah Jaffe
It remained hard for her, though, to be public about her own situation. At one of the basic income workshops, she and her collaborator, Stella, made badges to wear on the bright red jumpsuits they donned. “I made a badge that said, ‘Universal credit survivor.’ It was actually quite a difficult thing to put online and to be like, ‘I’m telling everybody that I claim benefits.’” But, she said, she also felt, “This shouldn’t be. I need to be able to be bold about it and say, ‘There is no shame in this.’” She challenged the notion that she should feel ashamed of her life. “What is contributing to society better? Is it working at Wetherspoon’s or is it raising the next generation and making sure that your child is securely attached and happy?”
Malone’s organizing work—allowing people space to tell their stories without shame and articulating solutions that would eliminate that shame—kept her going, even if it, too, might never be recognized as real work. “Nobody really wants to be, ‘Pity me!’ But we still need to create a space where people explore the barriers that they are facing.”
When the coronavirus hit, Malone was just about to start a new job—her first office job since Nola’s birth. The job, a creative project on London’s historic queer community, would entail a lot of research, and so they wanted her to start right away. But then she came down with a cough. And then the lockdown was called and she had to figure out how to do her new job from home. “I was immediately trying to cope with being on my own, having a really busy work schedule, and then being really public facing a big queer audience that I haven’t met before.”
She’d grown comfortable running meetings in a room where people could connect with one another, but Zoom calls were more difficult. It’s been lonely and stressful at times, she said. She missed having a significant other. When her ex was the only person she saw in person besides her daughter, it heightened the strain, negotiating a co-parenting relationship with someone who no longer provided the same kind of care for her. “You need people that love you and like you and want to listen to your opinion, not somebody who has already marginalized you,” she said.
Working from home during lockdown had its own stresses—she may not have needed to pay for child care, but she worried that she was not able to devote as much time to Nola as she wanted. She found herself comparing herself to her upstairs neighbors, whose child—a little older than Nola, but a year ahead in school—was reading and writing. Some people in lockdown, she noted, were able to lavish their children with attention, while others found their working hours eating up family time. Would a basic income have prevented this anxiety, she wondered. “Could I decide, ‘Actually, my day is better spent making a slide for my daughter and that is what me and my kid need right now’?”
As an art practice during isolation, Malone had started doing video interviews with women about objects in their homes, and many of them, she said, had talked about their mothers, their grandmothers, and the work they did. “The small-scale stuff is where you actually build the biggest relationships with the people in your life,” she said, “and they remember you when you’re just cooking or you’re just chatting or you’re just doing the constant low-level care.” She added, “It is the thing that is making us human and the people that are teaching us to be human. This is so undervalued, but it’s the most important thing in the world.”
With a basic income—something that has attracted more and more attention during the pandemic—she saw “massive transformative potential.” It could take away the worry about money and allow her to spend time with her daughter. “It would allow us to focus on things that are better for us as humans,” she said. “We would be more creative and we would be able to think more about the stuff that actually matters.”
CHAPTER 2
JUST LIKE ONE OF THE FAMILY
Domestic Work
MILA IS HAVING A GRABBY PHASE. SHE IS WRAPPING HER TINY SIX-month-old fingers around Adela Seally’s cheek when I first meet her. Seally closes her eyes to protect them from tiny fingernails and smiles, giving the baby more cheek to cling to. Mila presses her own baby cheeks against Seally’s and grins big.1
Seally is Mila’s nanny. Before Mila was born, she cared for Mila’s older sister Ava until she was old enough to go to school. “I was part time for a bit,” Seally explained, “but we still had our little thing going on. She used to take dance classes, and when she had her performances she would insist that I come. When she was moving up from preschool to kindergarten, she wanted me to be there to see her perform on stage.”
With the birth of Mila, Seally was back at the family’s house—a pleasant stand-alone home with a wraparound porch in New Rochelle, New York, about an hour’s bus ride from where Seally lives in the Bronx—five days a week, from nine o’clock in the morning until four, five, or sometimes six in the evening. Most of the six years she’s spent as a professional nanny have been with Ava and Mila’s family. When she began work, she said, it was the family’s first time having a nanny as well as her first time being one. “I just knew I was going to go into work and get paid. I didn’t know anything about benefits or working hours and all of that. We were just learning as we went along.”
Despite the learning curve, she has a good relationship with the family, one that is evident when her employer stops by to cuddle Mila before heading off to pick up the older girls (Ava and Mila have an older sister, Donna) from school. But it is the girls who make her light up. She beams when she sings to Mila; of Ava, she said, “We just clicked from when she saw me the first time.” Every child is different, she explained—she has seven of her own, and she worked as a preschool teacher before coming to New York from St. Lucia. As a baby, Ava had gained a reputation in the neighborhood for crying a lot. When Seally took her for a walk through the neighborhood, to the park or the library, Seally said, “parents or nannies would come up to me and say, ‘Isn’t that the crying baby? She used to cry all the time.’ But she wasn’t doing it with me for some reason.”
Seally dresses comfortably for work—today, she’s wearing an orange T-shirt emblazoned with “Care in Action” and skinny jeans, her long black twists pulled back out of reach of Mila’s grabbing fingers. Most of her day is spent sprawled on the floor playing with Mila, whose toys include a fluffy white stuffed bunny that sings and laughs a child’s laugh straight out of a horror movie, though it delights the baby. There are also various gadgets that light up and play music when buttons are pushed. Seally names the colors for Mila as she pushes the buttons, and Mila obliges with an occasional shriek of glee. She takes special pleasure in making noise, Seally said, when her older sisters are around, as if to say, “I may not be the oldest, but I can be the loudest!”
In between Ava and Mila, Seally cared for another baby whose family lived in Queens. She adored him as well, but it was stressful, she said, because he had several serious allergies. “I had to be really careful with him when we would go to the park, or if we hung out with other kids. It is always on your mind. Even if you are CPR certified, that’s one thing you have that you never really want to use.”
When she returned to care for Mila, she explained, she was able to negotiate a better contract than she’d had previously. “You hear stories about how there is no promotion within nanny work, but I would say there is. You can negotiate for something better than what you had. Maybe it might be monetary—more pay—but it also might mean you get more vacation with pay or more sick or personal days.”
Seally always knew she wanted to work with children. Before it was her full-time job, even when she was young, she would care for others’ children. She recalled being part of a drama club, and writing plays for the children in the community to do. She had her own first child young, while she was still in St. Lucia, and after a couple of years at home with her child she became a preschool teacher. “That, for me, was in itself fun. It is learning through play. You get to release that little inner child that should be in all of us.”
Seally’s older children were her prim
ary job for much of their youth. She was a deeply involved parent, going to school activities, trips, workshops, and parent association meetings. It was, she said, her way of giving back to her community. Now that she’s working full time, her youngest son—he’s ten—misses out on some of that, though she makes sure to still get time off for parent-teacher conferences. “Sometimes, the challenge is you have to leave your child and go take care of somebody else’s child and you miss out on your child as much as they miss out.” Some of the families, she said, have cameras in the home (just try a Google search for “Nanny cam” and count the results) that allow them to relive milestones they missed—first words said to a caregiver rather than a parent, first steps taken to the nanny’s arms—but she has no such luxury at home. There have been times when her child has been ill and she has had to leave him with someone else in order to be there for the charges she is paid to care for. “That in itself can really take a toll. It makes you feel guilty,” she said. There’s also the reality, particularly for New York City nannies—who often live far from the wealthier families they work for—of long commutes that add to the workday, even if they’re not technically spent on the clock.
On a typical day, Seally wakes up at 6:30 a.m.—though, she laughed, she often hits the snooze button for ten minutes. She starts the coffee maker, wakes up her kids, and makes sure they’re getting ready for school before she leaves to catch her bus. Once at work, she feeds the baby, and if it’s nice out, she takes her for a walk in the stroller or maybe on the bus up to the library, where there are children’s programs and a playground. Mila naps for short periods of time, but she resists sleeping—Seally and I watch her eyelids droop several times, but she rights herself and lets out an indignant wail when Seally attempts to lay her down, then a piercing shriek straight into Seally’s ear when she picks her back up. The best way to get her to sleep, Seally explains, is to put her in the stroller and walk her in little circles in the living room, or rock her back and forth until she nods off. Nanny work is constant and demanding, requiring a thousand tiny decisions about how to proceed, how to soothe, amuse, and teach the baby for long hours alone all day.
Other forms of domestic work didn’t suit Seally so well. She tried housecleaning for a while, but found it frustrating and repetitive. “I remember once cleaning for somebody in Manhattan and whenever I was done, she would come back and ask me to do it over.” A clogged drain meant hours of extra scrubbing. “It is a very tough job. I don’t think I am cut out for that part of domestic work.”
Caring for children has had its bothersome sides, too. Employers, she says, sometimes come home to undo the hard work the nanny has done, of setting routines for the children or enforcing rules that the parents have asked for but then cheerily ignore when they are home with their kids. “Then, [the children] see you as the bad guy. When you are not on the same page with the parents it can be really frustrating.” She has also found it disheartening when they don’t treat her as a skilled worker who has professional experience with children. “They see you as just the nanny,” she said, and don’t always trust her knowledge about when the best time is to introduce solid foods, or some other change. “Then, they struggle with that situation and take the child to a doctor, and then they come back and tell you the doctor said the same thing you said before.”
Children, though, are her life’s work. It’s the little differences in the behavior of children that fascinate Seally. She advises the parents she works for not to compare their children to each other, not to expect that because it was a certain way with Ava, that Mila will like the same things or progress at the same rate. Ava was an independent child who liked to figure things out for herself, though she wanted her caregiver where she could see her in case she needed help—in that way she was different from most of the children Seally had cared for, who often wanted her to be hands-on.
“For me, taking care of Ava was really fulfilling, although I had to leave [my own children] behind and go to somebody else,” she said. “I love to see them grow, discover, be curious and achieve their milestones and do a complete puzzle or something on their own and be very excited about completing it. I like to see the look on their face when they start walking and make a few steps and walk across the room without falling, or tying their shoelaces on their own. Even if I have kids of my own, still every time you see a child, a baby, growing and learning how to walk, or saying their first word, it still makes you feel so happy and fulfilled just to see the progress.”
Seally’s commitment was tested when the coronavirus pandemic came to New York. “I chose to become a live-in. I was thinking that it would be safer staying over for the week instead of taking public transportation or doing Uber or Lyft.” She began spending Monday through Friday at her employers’ home with their children; her employers pick her up Monday morning and drop her off Friday so she doesn’t have to take public transit.
Her employers have mostly been working at home during the pandemic, so Seally’s job is to keep the children occupied during the day. “They had a very busy schedule outside of their home, so for them it is a little more difficult because there are no after-school activities.” Their father helps the older children with their schoolwork when he’s done working, so most of her focus is on the smaller ones.
Seally had been lucky, she said, in that no one close to her had died of the virus. But all around her people were sick, as the Bronx was one of the hardest-hit places in the entire country. And spending most of the week at her employers’ meant it was even trickier for her to balance her responsibility for her own children and the ones she was paid to care for. “The teenagers can be tricky,” she said. “Sometimes we have been going for little walks here and there, but not an everyday thing. Pretty much they are inside all the time so that, in itself, can be a challenge.” She worried about them with online schooling: Were they doing their work? “I always think, ‘If I was home, I would be on top of them to do it more.’ At least I call and say, ‘Make sure you do your work.’”
Nannies and other domestic workers, she noted, have a hard time maintaining social-distancing protocols at work. “We just take precautions, wear our protective gear, especially because of the close proximity with the kids. You wear masks when you are in close proximity to other people. You make sure you wash your hands.”
But the pandemic had underscored something that Seally already knew all too well: “If domestic workers don’t show up for work, then the majority of the workforce can’t show up for work,” she said. “I love my work because my work is the silk thread that holds society together, making all other work possible.”
THE HOME HAS BEEN A WORKPLACE FOR AS LONG AS THERE HAVE BEEN homes; for only slightly less long, homes have also been workplaces for those who don’t live in them. The lines of work and non-work are blurred constantly in the home, and this happens even when there are wages involved.
Scholars Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas came up with the term “intimate labor” to describe the range of work that entails closeness with others. That work can include knowledge of personal information as well as bodily contact and touch. Sometimes it involves having another person’s life in your hands; other times the stakes are lower. But what all intimate labor has in common is that it brushes up against the line between what we think should be done for love and what we think should be done for money.2
Such “separate spheres” thinking is based in the ideology of the home that crystallized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Atop that is built the idea that the home and workplace are not just separate but “hostile worlds”: that any contact between them will corrupt both, introducing messy feelings into the workplace and unnecessary greed into the home. It assumes that care that is paid for—like Seally’s—cannot also be genuine, and that paying for work done out of love will somehow serve to take the love away.3
What intimate labors of various kinds also have in common is that they are expected to be the province of a certai
n kind of worker—almost always female, working class, and very often racialized as outsiders. This is especially true of what we call domestic work—the cooking and cleaning and caring work done in the home by paid or coerced non-family members. It has long been the most common form of employment for women—in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, one-third of the female population worked as domestics, and even after the Industrial Revolution, domestic servants in fact made up the single largest group of working people. The coercion, low pay, and lack of respect for these workers is often covered up with an essentialist narrative that certain people are “naturally” better at domestic labor. For much of history that has included immigrant workers—the Irish in England, for example—and in the United States, it is a history that is deeply rooted in slavery.4
Such ideas about race and domestic work have their roots in the Enlightenment-era splits between mind and body, man and nature, human and animal. Closeness to dirt and to bodies rendered one too close to nature for comfort, and so the ruling classes preferred that such work be done by groups of people they considered closer to animals. This principle applied to women generally and particularly to racialized people and outsiders. The tradition of using slaves for domestic work goes back to the ancient world, where the women on the losing side of war or conflict were regularly enslaved to work in the homes of the victors. Indentured servants, paying their way from Europe to the United States by selling the rights to their labor for a term of years, often did housework before the turn to chattel slavery. When the people who would create the thing we now call the United States began kidnapping African people and enslaving them, the narrative they constructed to justify their actions was that these people were racially destined to do such dirty work, whether on the farm or in the home.5