What dictionary is Gaby Hinsliff (The forelock-tugging has gone, but most of us still depend on servants, 24 October) using? The Shorter Oxford defines a servant as “A personal or domestic attendant; a person employed in a house to perform various household duties according to the orders and requirements of his or her employer”. To claim that anyone who is “paid to perform duties on your behalf” is a servant invites great confusion. As one of those time-poor, (relatively) cash-rich professionals, yes, I pay someone (yes, a woman; yes, an immigrant) to clean my house.
This is a very different arrangement from that which my parents and I experienced “below stairs” in a very, very minor country house in the 70s and 80s. We lived in a tied cottage on the estate, we drove around in an estate car that was the estate’s car, and so on.
For people living and working as true servants, to be dismissed or to resign is to be almost immediately homeless and stripped of the basic mechanisms of modern life. Your employer’s whims and fancies govern your life in a myriad of ways: imagine having to negotiate with your boss whether or not you can install a new bathroom in the house you live in.
I depend on my cleaner more than she does on me. I accommodate changes to her schedule if her regular time becomes inconvenient. I recently gave her a pay rise. I do this because she is reliable, trustworthy and effective. I pay for her time and I want to go on doing so because of the value I receive in return, so I am motivated to be a good … not master, not employer, not boss, but a good client.
Keith Braithwaite
Beckenham, Kent
• With regard to Aisha Gani’s report (Whitehall cleaners gather outside HMRC to campaign for living wage, 17 October) and Polly Toynbee’s article (Low pay is breaking Britain’s public finances: the evidence can’t be denied, 23 October), the Living Wage campaign is doing a good job to raise wages for the low-paid. However, it does nothing to address the army of domestic help with no job security, no benefits, no pay rises and no legal redress.
The casual acceptance of black-market domestic help – often by people who champion ethical causes, attack zero-hours contracts, and are conscious in their purchase of products but not services – is also preventing the development of more ethical business models.
It is time to address this paradox whereby ethical consumers are not ethical employers.
I am a sociology teacher and my wife runs a domestic cleaning business. As such we are astonished that JaneJeffersonCleaning.com is the only domestic cleaning company to be recognised by the Living Wage Foundation.
We hope this letter provokes further analysis of the structural constraints that prevent our society from being the just one that it should be.
Dan and Jennifer O’Donnell
London
