Coping as a domestic helper

The standard of living and coping strategies of three minimum wage groups: domestic helpers, security guards and free zone workers was the topic of a recently released study. In a two-part series All Woman draws heavily on the study’s findings to look at how the groups cope. We start this week with domestic helpers.

Domestic helpers in Jamaica fall into three main categories: the residential or live-in helper, the non-residential weekly employed worker and the days worker (comes in once per week to do specified tasks.)

The researchers interviewed 207 domestic helpers – mostly women – and found that they seemed to experience the worse conditions of poverty of the three groups. They experienced a high degree of difficulty making ends meet and had to be very creative to survive. While many of them made more than the minimum wage, the study found, they still had a lot of problems coping.

Experiencing and withstanding hunger were common to all three groups but among domestic helpers the problem was not hunger per se but the type and quality of food.

When they cook their family’s dinner they may have to eat ‘pure tin mackerel’ or what the family leaves over from the day before.

Recycling dinner was another option where last night’s dinner becomes breakfast or lunch.

The most common form of coping strategies were some form of self-denial such as fasting or eating less.

Many included their children in this, often sending them to school without lunch. A lot of times more emphasis was placed on giving the children food that would ‘full di belly.’

“Don’t mek tea – too light, waste of time. Give them porridge. When they go school and drink water, cornmeal swell. Grate plantain and mix with cornmeal. You have to be skilful to live – don’t waste nothing,” one said in the study.

Good money management including investment in partner plans and purchasing judiciously were second coping options. They would purchase wholesale rather than retail items and buy downtown rather than uptown. In addition, they would use cheaper equivalents such as milk powder instead of milk.

Borrowing money was always another option that was frequently resorted to by many – if they could find friends or people with enough confidence in them to lend them.

According to the study even pilfering and other forms of cheating was also considered from time-to-time by some of those interviewed. A pack of rice here or some sugar there would not be missed, it was reasoned.

High on the list of problems the helpers related in the study however, was their relationship with employers.

Among domestic helpers employer-employee relationships are particularly important as they are personalised. Where relationships are good, some of the helpers said they would take less pay than they could get elsewhere:

“I would not leave my employer because since I have been there I have gotten a better offer. But suppose I leave, maybe I don’t like the person, or so. I may get better money but may not like the people. I rather stay and take what I am getting,” one recounted.

Some related many relationships built up over time with employers that resulted in a feeling of being treated as persons, equals even. Domestic helpers became friends, confidantes, surrogate mothers.

But others interviewed were of the opinion that domestic helpers were also particularly vulnerable to exacting and humiliating treatment from domestic employers. Cultural differences were often the source of poor relationships. For example, in the case of the expectation of some employers that helpers wash female underwear, which is a Jamaican taboo:

One helper relates a story of a married woman with three daughters who took off her underwear and put it in the clothes basket for the helper to wash it. “Out of order! I never wash it!” the helper said.

For a housewife to require a helper to wash female underwear is taken as a sign of contempt for the personhood of the helper.

Some helpers also found it particularly galling to be treated as ‘a person of lesser value’.

According to another her employers would spend anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 on their dogs but if she asked them for money they would maybe give you $2,000 and murmur about it. “Sometimes it’s like they value their dogs more than you,” she told researchers.

At times even children are sometimes abusive:

“I can remember the little boy go upon the kitchen counter and him sit down and start say ‘ugly, ugly gal.’ And him tek up him foot and go bam inna mi chest,” one helper recalled. “I feel it and water run out a mi eye, and I open mi hand and give him one lick pon him foot. Another morning him spit inna mi face.”

One of the qualities domestic helpers were critical of was meanness, a lack of generosity among employers, who they assessed could afford it. In this regard they preferred male head of households to female heads, some of whom they found excessively watchful and exacting – weighing the rice and flour that the helpers should cook, counting the number of meatballs, critical of the minutes late but mindless of the minutes early.

According to the study domestic helpers retained a sense of self to help them cope.

When the study was launched by the Planning Institute of Jamaica at the Hilton Hotel in Kingston last week some members of the audience made a plea for employers to treat their helpers more kindly.

The study was conducted by Dr Aldrie Henry-Lee and Dr Barry Chevannes at the University of the West Indies, Mary Clarke, Manager of the Social Planning Unit at the PIOJ and Sybil Ricketts, assistant director of the National Poverty Eradication Programme in the Office of the Prime Minister.

Next week: The coping strategies of security guards and Free Zone workers – their gripes and heartaches.