I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
> This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen.
Live in housekeepers are very common indeed in Singapore. However, majority of Singapore lives in Housing Development Board flats that do not have any separate entrance into kitchen.
I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.
I grew up with servants (in Subsaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Those things are a symptom of an undeveloped economy. It harkens back to a time of less development where there were more hands than jobs and much of the labor was manual. Not to excuse the practice in modern times but go back a few generations and that was the reality of the world -everywhere.
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
Logically-speaking, poverty can't exist without inequality. It's a condition of "want" that requires others to "have".
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
No. Poverty is not relative to what others have. Poverty is relative to baseline needs. So poverty absolutely can exist without inequality.
Inequality has no moral characteristics. It is not "insidious." The fact that disparate effort and disparate circumstance lead to disparate outcomes is just that; a simple cold fact.
That some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others is a moral issue. But again, this is orthogonal to disparity of outcome. Or do you claim poor people never steal from other poor people, or that rich people never steal from other rich people?
That's incorrect. The baseline need that poverty is calculated relative to is itself calculated relative to local conditions. Because inequality drives those local conditions, poverty cannot exist without it.
Your post is proof of the insidiousness of inequality. It allows for outcomes to be warped by the presence or lack of aggregated capital, without presenting a direct attack on outcomes. As long as you are able to limit the contextual scope, you are able to claim a "just world", even when clear injustice is extant.
It is then important to insist that the scope stay broad enough to involve all related implications.
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." This suggests that there is a functional relationship between the size of power imbalances and the amount of corruption that exists. It is not that some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others; it is that inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
> Because inequality drives those local conditions...
That is not in evidence. You may be thinking of inflationary pressures causing the poverty income level to be adjusted upward. This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
> "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is an aphorism, not a universal truth, and holds zero moral weight. You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
> ...inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
No. This is envy as evidence. It doesn't work that way. Your use of the word "inordinate" is also meaningless from an economic or policy stance. Who decides what is inordinate? What qualifies a level as inordinate?
There is only one equilibrium state with full equality: vacuum. In an economic sense this is where zero exchange of value occurs. It is system-death.
In a just world, you keep what you earn. You reap what you sow. When someone powerful steps out of line you punish them. If they do not, there is no reason to punish them. Pre-punishment because "they probably will" is propaganda from the dictator. We don't want that.
What if some people are just bad at doing things for themselves? We have a society, communities, families... ...because humans are truly pitiful on their own. (Said with a sad smile.)
Consider that you just haven't found something useful for me to do.
If it's too much for you, I guess you could stop. If wouldn't be your fault if I couldn't keep things together.
>This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
Incorrect. Inequality increases the pool of wealth with which "haves" may bid up the prices of commodities, real property, and services. And they do, effectively increasing demand. Transitively, inequality drives inflation, i.e., local conditions.
>That is an aphorism, not a universal truth
You might want to revisit the definition of "aphorism". (It generally includes the word "truth".)
>You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
And have another: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Implicit is that you will hammer nails. Property is intrinsically tied with action. Held power is to be wielded, even when it's not warranted; the only way not to is to give it up.
>This is envy as evidence.
I would love to understand this obsession with envy among the elite. If I take your gun and immediately throw it into the ocean, was that envy?
It's funny to me that you deride a "system-zero" world and then immediately champion a "just world". They're the same thing. And though you may believe in it, I never said I did.
The practical solution to a world with increasing (wealth) inequality is to decrease it. It will never reach zero. That's not the point. It's to affect the balance of power so that when someone powerful steps out of line, it is possible to punish them; so that things earned can be kept (and so that he definition of "earn" may be reasonable itself); so that we're not forced to consider the farce of referring to a reaction to someone's previously-accumulated wealth as "pre-punishment."
> Inequality increases the pool of wealth with which "haves" may bid up the prices of commodities, real property, and services. And they do, effectively increasing demand. Transitively, inequality drives inflation, i.e., local conditions.
Impossible if there's competition between producers and it's at world scale.
> What if some people are just bad at doing things for themselves?
Tyrannies begin with those kind of ideas.
And inflation is a General increase in prices, not the increase of a specific good.
There's poverty without inequality. In some primitive tribes everyone was poor. When natural adverse conditions hit some regions, also poverty was widespread.
That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system. I don't think you would consider equal and just that every person could influence justice. The problem is the justice system.
If everyone is poor, there's no poverty, just an ubiquitous state of subsistence. Poverty is always relative to some existing state of abundance.
>That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system
It's a weakness of any system with overbearing inequality. Equal societies don't face this issue to the same extent because those wronged can mount an equal defense or offense as those doing the wrong, at which point righteousness should prevail.
You redefined the word poverty there, that's not the common or dictionary definition.
Even with wealth equality, as long as there's scarcity, some people would try to gain advantages over others with means different than money: e.g advantageous connections with others, deception, etc.
There's corruption among poor people, and rich people also steal from other rich people.
An utopic idea of equality blocks the capacity of observing how things work.
>You redefined the word poverty there, that's not the common or dictionary definition.
He says, without citation.
>Even with wealth equality, as long as there's scarcity, some people would try to gain advantages over others with means different than money
No one says that wealth equality leads to an absolutely equal society; that's a straw man. What is incontrovertibly true, and empirically proven to be so, is that societies that are more equal in terms of wealth are less unequal socially, and see fewer negative outcomes that can be attributed to any disparity that does exist, wealth or otherwise. This is because we are talking about effects directly downstream of resource allocation, and monetary wealth is the primary way resources are denominated. Maybe if commodities were priced directly in Twitter follower count or bench press, you'd have a point.
The poor and rich are not equally corrupt (again, something shown empirically).
The terrible labor laws exist because of the inequality. The people with servants write the laws and, in their magnaminity, don't let the servants vote.
They steal from those they have the power to steal from. Power is measured as a delta from a baseline. If corruption requires power, it requires inequality.
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can use power for evil? A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person. A smarter person has more power than a dumber one. And it's impossible for the smarter one to lend intelligence to another, and to the stronger one to give muscles to the weaker one. And in spite of this, many humans behave compassionately and respect laws.
Inequality is a big factor. Story says the woman in this case felt she was compensated. Like feeling 'lucky' to enjoy (some) perks of living in a rich household. If that family had been as poor as her (or her mother), that stops being true. Then it becomes hard to keep a slave from walking away without resorting to violence.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolated from outside).
Point is there's a lot of space between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Yes poverty is a factor. But inequality too - it helps to create [the powerless vs the powerful] situations. Even if those on the bottom may not qualify as poor.
> Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
Would you say USA is a developed country, considering for example Los Angeles slums? And there's a bigger inequality between Elon musk and a well paid software developer than between a poor person in a developing country and a rich politician from that country.
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can exploit? You are not using the definition of exploitation from the dictionaries. A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person. A smarter and less smart person too.
So, exploitation doesn't seem to be related exclusively to wealth inequality. It's a moral thing, not a matter of wealth differences.
A simple narrative of "us-good VS them-bad" is reductionistic.
probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
This is probably the same line of thought the families involved in the story have had.
Yet, the end result is still quite similar to slavery. Why do you suppose the servants stay, instead of living a life of their own? I think you’ll find the answer there.
There is a world of difference between paying someone who is free to leave, and basically fake adopting a child who you keep uneducated so that they don’t even know how to leave while forcing them to work without any pay.
Are you saying if they were simply paid slightly more money and forced to seek their own food and shelter in whatever abject conditions they could afford, like minimum-wage and rural workers in most first-world countries, they would be better off? Or do you have more insightful suggestions? “Pay more” is always the easy answer people go with, especially while not wanting to pay more for anything, so I’m excited to hear a fresh and unique take on poverty.
I'd say certainly not. The key aspect of the story is that the woman entered in service of the family as a very young child. That makes all the difference.
Thanks for your perspective. I do wonder if this arrangement is usually not as bad as some people are implying. Though on the other hand, the line between this sort of thing and something that can reasonably be called slavery can be quite fuzzy.
This used to be quite common in Chile as well. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore, but it was very interesting to see the synergy some families built after decades of cohabiting with a "service person" (don't really know what word to use). I met a lot of people that widely regarded their service lady as a mother, they were pretty much raised with them around, so the bonds run deep. I have no doubt some times the compensation might not exactly be the best, but I have met quite a lot of people that are well happy with this arrangement.
