Domestic Service

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DOMESTIC SERVICE.

ROLE AND CONDITIONS OF WORK
UNIONS AND IMMIGRATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Even though they were regarded with suspicion, domestic servants were an indispensable element in the households of the triumphant nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. The affluent middle classes, who had enjoyed a spectacular rise thanks to widespread industrialization and urbanization, became increasingly vocal in their demand for an abundant domestic workforce. Initially, domestic service was assimilated within the larger category of the proletariat, but it came to constitute a separate sector as legislation assigned workers to more clearly defined categories. During the twentieth century, the rate of feminization in this sector increased until women constituted 80 to 95 percent of the domestic work-force in some European countries. From the late nineteenth century onward, the declining status of domestic service became a cause for general concern, and in response constant attempts were made to maintain the volume of the sector's workforce by increasing its professionalization or by turning to an immigrant workforce from more and more distant countries. Complaints of a crisis in the availability of domestic servants became a commonplace topic of conversation among bourgeois housewives in many nations.

ROLE AND CONDITIONS OF WORK

Although the crisis in domestic service was an international phenomenon, the number of women entering into service remained high. In 1920, servants in Switzerland accounted for 14 percent of women in the workforce; in Germany in 1925, 11 percent of working women were domestic servants. During the Depression of the 1930s, the scarcity of domestic servants was felt even more acutely on the Continent. When in response to the economic crisis governments sought to limit women's work through both persuasion and coercion, household and domestic employment were exempted from the measures.

The demand for servants rose as new social categories acquired wealth. The upper middle classes and the aristocracy were no longer the only potential employers, and the emergence of a massive class of employers only increased the demand for domestic servants. Prior to the widespread adoption of the automobile as a status symbol, the domestic servant was valued as an external sign of wealth by a class that sought to separate itself from its working-class origins.

Various solutions were proposed to remedy the relative penury of servants. In the nineteenth century these were initiated primarily by individuals and in the twentieth by governments. During the 1920s, girls became less willing to enter domestic service, for a variety of reasons. Among these, the inferior social status of the occupation ranked high, followed by working conditions, including long working hours and the lack of comfort and leisure, and psychological and social factors, such as isolation from one's family, the lack of hope for improvement of one's situation, and the limited prospects for marriage. Although numerous surveys documented the reasons girls were unwilling to enter domestic service, solutions were hard to find. One remedy was sought at the level of semantic symbolism. It was felt that the vocabulary of domestic service, heavily fraught with disparaging connotations, must change. The words maid and servant were replaced by euphemisms such as domestic worker or, more elegantly, lady's help, or in French employée de maison or auxiliaire ménagère, and in German Hausgehilfin.

Domestic workers were, almost as a matter of course, excluded from the legal benefits to which other workers were entitled, including working contracts in Belgium in 1900 and industrial law in England and Poland in 1928. In countries where domestic work was included in the general laws protecting workers (for example, Spain in 1931), domestic employees were still generally excluded from laws that specified working and resting hours. Some exceptions must be noted, however. In Switzerland, a 1920 law on working hours imposing nine-hour periods of rest applied equally to domestic employees and to other workers. A 1918 Czech law specified daily and weekly rest periods. Throughout the period between the two world wars, recurring attempts were made on the Continent to regulate domestic work by means of public law, but they were rarely successful. In Belgium, five different bills were submitted, but none was approved. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did legislation specifically regulating domestic service appear (in Belgium, for example, in 1970).

UNIONS AND IMMIGRATION

One attempt to make domestic work more attractive was the provision of vocational training for girls of rural or working-class origins. Throughout Europe, initiatives were taken to develop the teaching of domestic economy and household skills. But although in the nineteenth century the very idea of a society without servants was inconceivable except to a few visionaries, in the first few decades of the twentieth century the scarcity of domestic help came to be accepted, albeit grudgingly. The idea of scientific work management, already well implanted in the United States, played a key role in this awareness and thus the development of scientific domestic engineering, introduced in Europe by the Americans Lilian Gilbreth and Christine Frederick and taken over by the French Paulette Bernège and the German Erna Mayer, ran parallel to the scarcity of domestic workers.

Domestic service remained a solitary and unstructured form of employment, making it difficult to organize. Only a few unions emerged: in Finland, domestic employees' unions were first organized in 1900 and were grouped into a federation in 1905. Similar unions appeared in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, and Lithuania.

The primary response to the shortage of domestic servants was to draw on an immigrant workforce. Legislation on immigration, although generally restrictive with regard to the workforce as a whole, displayed greater leniency for this category of workers. In Switzerland in 1928, 28 percent of domestic servants were immigrants, compared with 13 percent in other occupations. As a result, the statistics in some large cities show more female than male immigrants. With time, the areas from which domestic workers were recruited grew. Initially, southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal) supplied domestic workers for northern countries. So, later, did Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria), and numbers rose steeply after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the extension of the European Union's borders. But recruitment spread well beyond the European continent as Filipino and Peruvian servants came to be in high demand.

In the early twenty-first century, attempts to evade new laws governing domestic work caused domestic work to become increasingly clandestine, giving rise to the emergence of a substantial blackmarket economy in Europe. The phenomenon is universally acknowledged but impossible to assess statistically. Both national and European authorities are trying to combat this underground economy by various means (see Resolution of the European Parliament on the Normalization of Domestic Work in the Informal Economy, 30 November 2000), but despite their attempts concern over domestic slavery is growing. An uncountable number of servants are locked away in their employers' homes, where they are subjected to catastrophic conditions, including systematic confiscation of their passports upon their arrival, painful working and living conditions, sequestration, and physical violence—conditions against which these modern-day slaves are totally unprotected. In response, the Council of Europe in June 2001 encouraged the governments of member states to severely repress this new form of the slave trade.