Outsourcing housework – is this possible as a queerfeminist?
Continuation/repeat of the 2017 workshop “the cleaning lady principle”
It is often negotiated as a matter of morality whether we as feminists and/or lefties do the housework (cleaning, laundry, ironing or care) ourselves, in addition to waged labour, or whether we pay somebody or leave the work unpaid for somebody else to do.
In the workshop on “the cleaning lady principle”, we engaged with this topic last year and talked a lot about different needs concerning cleanliness in shared houses and partnerships. We also talked about the “bad conscience” when the work remains undone.
This year, I propose to continue and deepen the topic.
Apart from matters of justice that are perceived or can be discussed, the whole issue of housework also has a materialist foundation: what structures make it possible or necessary to delegate housework to others, paid or not? Or to take it on for others, in exchange for money or unpaid?
What were the actual demands of the feminist campaign “paid housework” in 1972 and why haven’t they been met in the new service relations? What could good conditions for housework look like?
The workshop is to be a mixture of giving an overview of the current situation of cleaning staff and domestic help (focusing on the new labour market in Germany), of looking back at the wages for household campaign and interrogating our queerfeminist selves on the issue of work load.