It seems to me that it’s more about employing child-labor-by-proxy, and indeed, if one would not hire a 9-year-old child to garden, one might very well (and very reasonably) be troubled to have hired someone who has hired a 9-year-old to garden.

Paying more is certainly a first step, but paying more probably isn’t going to get that 9-year-old off wheelbarrow duty, so it doesn’t seem like a palliative to the actual problem.

Paying more might enable the mother to afford child care, which would get the 9-year-old off wheelbarrow duty.

On the other hand, I don’t think that being uncomfortable watching your hired gardener force her 9 year old to work while your similarly-aged children play alongside her is necessarily “servant guilt”.  I’m not sure what the right approach is, but that just feels wrong, to me. 

The woman who cleans our office brings her 8 year old daughter to work when school is out, and if I ever saw that little girl being pressured into working (in any more than a tokenistic way) I would be pretty upset about it.  Even though I’m fully OK with the idea of hiring an office cleaner and having her come in during our work day (though she does have to work around us, which is probably annoying for her).

Our cleaner’s daughter, btw, is allowed to play while she’s at work with her mom.

I don’t know, Amanda.  I mean, the question is clearly about the daughter, not whether it’s OK to hire a gardener and at what wages.  $13 an hour is hardly enough to get good childcare for 3 kids (it’s about what I make, and there’s no way I can even afford to HAVE a kid, let alone put 3 kids in daycare or summer programs or whatever).

Though I’ll agree it’s telling that the woman’s first impulse was to fire the woman for some trumped up reason.

Americans have problems with servants because after the Great Depression, only upper-class families had servants, so they don’t know how to treat them.  I’m reminded of the story about a pianist who went to a reception at a prominent music lover’s house in the early ‘60s.

The pianist’s wife told him, “They have a lot of money.”

“How do you know that?”

“They have color TV and white servants.”

My cousin in North Texas has a nurse come to look after her husband a few times a week, and when I’m talking on the phone she tell me she had company, and I tell her, “She’s not company, she’s the hired help.”

Interesting reaction the woman had, as until the Industrial Revolution, that’s how most children learned, by working with their parent(s) on the job.  I remember reading how 4 year-olds would be carrying chopped wood for the house for their pioneer parents when the family was homesteading out in the middle of nowhere. The 9-year-old pushing the wheelbarrow doing what children have done throughout most of human history.  These liberals and their new fangled ideas!

I have to agree with Chet in that the issue is more “child labour guilt” than “servant guilt” (not that this doesn’t mean that having minimum wage be actually livable is a bad idea!), and the column suggests some good ways to address it:

I especially liked the thought of getting the homeowner’s kids to invite the girl to play with them instead, but I was struck by the thought that people who use phrases like “honest work” might also suggest getting the 11-year old to take the odd shift with the wheelbarrow to help out.

Bringing your kids to work to save on child care shouldn’t be the privilege of middle class office workers with awesome bosses.

Except that the woman’s problem isn’t that her gardener is bringing her kids to work, but that she expects her nine year old to work.  And I think it’s pretty disingenuous to pretend that the 9 year old’s only options are working or sitting around bored.  (Though I agree that the woman’s ire should be focused on her kids not inviting the girl to play, not the mother giving her something to do - unless of course the mother is forcing her to work.)

Again, if it were “child labor guilt,” the woman wouldn’t be bringing her own kids into the equation. She didn’t say she was uncomfortable that the gardener had the 9-year-old work at all, that the work the kid was doing seemed too much for a 9-year-old, that she was concerned she might get in legal trouble if somebody thought she was ‘hiring’ the 9-year-old, etc. And the fact that the gardener’s twin preschoolers are coming along to the job makes it pretty clear this isn’t an issue of child labor, but child care. The preschoolers aren’t going to be doing anything except making it harder for Mom to do her job.

“This makes me uncomfortable because her kid has to work and mine get to play, so I want to get rid of her in a way that doesn’t make me acknowledge that” pretty much sums up the whole letter.

I do agree that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a kid helping their parents in an age-appropriate way (i.e. they’re not overworked or using dangerous tools, and they’re not missing their education). It’s funny that the letter-writer didn’t think “Shit, I have two perfectly able kids that age, why don’t I fire the gardener and make them pull weeds?”

Sorry, but anyone who says it’s child labor guilt is being disingenuous.

The gardener is not forcing her child to work. She’s relating. She can’t leave her kid home, there is direct racism and classism saying the kid would be presumptuous, taking her life into her own hands (think the mom freaked out before, I guarantee it would be more if the dirty brown kid was trying to “force” her way into equal interactions with the white kids) if she was to go up and play with the boys. As such, it’s a way to help the mom out as her mom is underpaid and usually in those jobs overworked as well as white people expect a rather large and quick amount of work against brown help as it “looks bad” to have them hanging around working at the normal pace of any white manual laborer.

Left with that fact, the kid ends up helping, bonding with mom, entertaining herself by being useful in the same way that kids will get recruited in a family project to repaint the house or move a bookshelf.

But to claim with a straight face that of course it was child abuse and right to deprive someone who already requires the good graces of an employer to care for the kid of an income because there’s a brown kid entertaining herself in a non-threatening manner is idiotic and considering the well-publicized attitudes to brown people in this country, lying.

Ask yourself if the gardener would have risked an even earlier dismissal if the kid was “running around” the house (it’s trained to steal stuff!!!), had tried to force itself into the boy’s games (my kids are under threat, feeling uncomfortable), or had just sat in a spot (oh that poor bored child, doesn’t the help even care, oh god it’s gong to steal stuff, etc…). It’s a no-win solution and to pretend it isn’t that way is to create a means not to look at the class and race reality that the poor gardener and her child have to walk across just to get a crappy minimum wage servant position under a neurotic housewife.

So yeah, everyone crying child labor like it’s a real argument. Shut the fuck up and genuinely put yourself in that position and then think about it again.

“This makes me uncomfortable because her kid has to work and mine get to play, so I want to get rid of her in a way that doesn’t make me acknowledge that” pretty much sums up the whole letter.

Oh, I agree that the letter was couched in typical suburban “white middle class guilt”, of the kind that is completely useless and tied more to the narcissism of the speaker than any real concern for the well being of another person. 

It also has echoes of Mommy Wars - the gardner has her child engaged in a useful task which may someday impart skills (or at least work ethic, confidence at a job well done, and the like) to the child, while the narrator allows her children unstructured play which may or may not be of the “good for you” type.  So the mother feels guilty, and because she has superior status and direct power over the gardener, she simply fires her so as not to contemplate her own parenting decisions. 

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the question asked was what to do about the fact that the gardener makes her 9 year old work rather than allowing her to play.

The gardener is not forcing her child to work.

We don’t know that from the letter.  And because the question is about what to do about the fact that the gardener has her 9 year old working (presumably not “helping” with token tasks for something to do, but working), it’s hard to argue that, really, this has NOTHING to do with the working 9 year old and EVERYTHING to do with how the letter-writer is a racist/classist ass. 

Though I agree that the letter-writer is a classist ass (nothing was said about the race of the gardener or her children) for coming up with a trumped up reason to fire the woman, in the name of being “concerned” about her daughter.  But that’s not the same thing as trying to say that her concern about a working 9 year old means that she’s a classist ass.  If I saw our office cleaner’s 8 year old schlepping around cleaning supplies, I would be pretty pissed about it.  Just as I’d be pissed if the payroll accountant, who also brings his kids to work sometimes, had them doing his job all summer.

As such, it’s a way to help the mom out as her mom is underpaid and usually in those jobs overworked as well as white people expect a rather large and quick amount of work against brown help as it “looks bad” to have them hanging around working at the normal pace of any white manual laborer.

Wow, thanks for explaining, in a succinct way, exactly what Americans who have servant guilt issues are afraid others might think of them if they hire outside help…

Seriously, I think it’s a bit much to assume that this woman is some sort of Simon Legree who is causing the gardener to require the help of the child to get the work done in an appropriately Stepin Fetchit manner.  You’re reading a hell of a lot into the letter that just isn’t there.

BTW, I think Cohen gave some really, really good advice, especially about the questioner helping out by giving advice about affordable childcare alternatives.  Or, really, I think the absolute best answer that anyone could give is, “hey, why not volunteer to pay to put her kids in some sort of mutually agreeable childcare?”  Especially for the 9 year old in question—there are a lot of great summer programs for kids that age in even the most insular towns.  Why not sponsor the fees for her to attend a day camp or some other age-appropriate summer activity based on her interests?

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the question asked was what to do about the fact that the gardener makes her 9 year old work rather than allowing her to play.

No, the question asked was whether the writer should deal with her discomfort by asking the woman not to have her daughter work, or by firing her outright. 

Unless by “your office” you mean that you’re a business owner and you directly employ the office cleaner, you’re not in the same situation as this woman. She isn’t writing about the gardener who does the flower beds at her place of work. She is the employer. And her employee is not only having her nine-year-old do work with her, she’s bringing her small children to work with her.

This stinks of narcissistic classicism thinly veiled as child labor guilt. She is uncomfortable because she is forced to watch a 9yr old child work while her kids play. Still, she can’t bring herself to have that kid play with hers. So she cooks up a reason to fire the gardener. This isn’t servant guilt by a long shot.

And BTW, paying someone 13/hr is definitely not enough for them to afford even a babysitter; at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree that everyone should be paid the ULW.

I think it is a dumb reason for firing someone, but an honestly uncomfortable situation. She doesn’t want to see the little girl working, not because she’s afraid that she’ll be accused of hiring a 9-year-old, but because she doesn’t feel it is an appropriate age to be working. She could, and I know this is a wacky crazy idea, but talk to the mother about it - “Hey, you did a great job with the azaleas, but I was thinking, would -daughter’s name- like to do her homework inside/play with my boys/whatever-not-work?” and then if it becomes “there’s a lot of work you want done and I need help” adjust it accordingly, you know, come in twice a week instead of trying to cram all the gardening into one day. Or maybe it is just she does want her daughter to learn about gardening and leave the situation alone.

I don’t think it even needs to be as formal as an after-school program, even an informal “does -daughter’s name- want to watch a movie/build a fort/whatever with my kids or some other child I know?” would be enough if the issue is that the daughter is bored. I think alluding that she’d outraged if the daughter joined in soccer is dumb, I think she’d be much more comfortable with it.

There’s no mention of how much the gardener was being paid.  So why the assumption that she was being payed peanuts?  I’ve yet to see any self-employed “servant” make less than $10-15 an hour, and often up to $20, which fits into the Universal Living Wage quite well.

I’ve yet to see any self-employed “servant” make less than $10-15 an hour, and often up to $20

We’re talking about domestic chores, not you and your friends writing code freelance.

Nobody appears to be saying, Cerberus, that of course it’s right and proper to fire someone for having their kids help them at work: you’re attacking (and quite harshly so, I think) an argument that isn’t being raised. All we’re saying (or at least, all I’m saying), is that the mother is expressing a different kind of guilt in her letter than Amanda’s entry (or your post) suggests she is.

If there’s a problem with characterising it that way, it’s in failing to read between the lines to the degree you did. There are all manner of reasons to be uncomfortable with this situation, and it’s not necessary for anyone to jump immediately to the worst one. The most we can accuse her of is ignorance and self-absorption: there simply isn’t evidence for more.

The Opoponax and Tenya are on the right track to actually addressing the problem that presents itself. If the (hypothetical, since the actual one is no longer in the situation. mother has some deep-seated class issues preventing her from pursuing those alternatives, then we can break out the pitchforks and torches.

And if the daughter is working, she deserves to be paid too.

This is a symptom of our diverging society. The slaves are making the master feel guilty. Her ‘idle rich’ spawn are playing and having a good time and the slave’s spawn are working.

I need to note, in case no one has read the article, that the woman made her not showing up a few times the basis for firing her, and her daughter.

You see, these people want the ability to control the economy, they want the golden parachutes and really don’t want to see the ‘little people’ getting the ‘golden shower’.

Yes, if the job paid enough, perhaps the mother could have sent her daughter to day care. Yes, it would be awkward to have your employee bring their kids with them. Yes, this should have been dealt with in the very first. No kids accompanying you doesn’t seem to be a bad rule, if the worker has an alternative to having the daughter staying at home alone or out in the streets.

Anyone else remember the articles of the busing of indigent people out of towns in Texas and California? They actively want to create the situation where people that aren’t as luck as they are at putting food on their families are kept farther than arms length. They don’t want to see them, don’t want to be approached by them and don’t want the occasional guilt feeling that might creap into their otherwise pristine and guilt free minds.

Still, the woman could have confronted the gardener and asked that the children not be brought with her to work in her yard. It seems reasonable because the owner of the property would be responsible for any injuries of either the mother or the kid. Which brings up a point that it the mother was home to observe all this and so were the kids than why weren’t the kids and mom more involved in taking care of their home. The idea that you have to hire to get things done is incredible. My father would have died first before having us not do the lawn maintenance. There was a pride in having a place that was yours and that you took care of. Now, it’s just part of the ‘user society’ apparently.

Telling the girl to play with her kids or setting her up to play on her own really seems like the most normal response to me.

It seems like the best response to me too, but if everyone instinctively knew the best response to any situation (and this might even be an unfamiliar situation: is there any evidence to suggest she’s a Cindy McCain with a six-digit budget for domestic servants?) , there wouldn’t be a need for columns like Cohen’s, would there? There are all sorts of people who don’t have complete understandings of how to treat others well - the question is whether these deficiencies are negligent or intentional. 

It’s clear enough that the mother hasn’t thought more about this that it’d take to produce the vague sense of discomfort she expresses, but that’s why she’s asking for advice. Ignorance is only a mortal sin when you refuse to address it. Perhaps she’ll know better for next time. Perhaps she did have nefarious motives and just wanted to look concerned for the sake of the audience of a national newspaper. But why assume malice when incompetence suffices?

Here, it’s predictable and sensible to focus on systemic causes for these deficiencies, because none of us likely know these people except as evidence and components of social systems. At the same time, we shouldn’t ignore individual evidence that suggests that we’re looking through the wrong frame.

And if the daughter is working, she deserves to be paid too.

Whoa whoa whoa. I’m not saying there are easy answers here, but straight-up sanctioning 9-year-old child labor isn’t it.

It’s not, repeat not okay for Employer to pay Child, because it’s not okay for Employer to employ Child, not in any way, not even a little bit. In this society, nine-year-olds don’t work for wages. (Except maybe child actors, for whom there are super-drastic rules.)

Now, Mom-Employee might not know this, or might not care, or might know and care but figure Employer-Mom will fire her if she doesn’t do the work of 1.2 people, or if she lets her kid interact with the other kids, or if she lets her kid sit in the car, etc.

But you know what? Neither Mom gets to debate how FLSA, child labor laws, wage & hour laws, etc. apply. If workers get to “choose” not to be subject to wage protection, safety laws, overtime rules, off-clocking, etc. then it’s as good as having no labor laws at all.

Employer-Mom should have been horrified that she was getting illegal labor from a 9-year-old (compensated or otherwise), and whatever Mom-Employee’s reasons were for doing it, she should have known better. Unfortunately neither Mom lives in a society that would have taught them that this kind of lawbreaking was in any way wrong, or actionable, or bigger than just the two of them. But it’s all those things in spades.

Yes, I pay her to clean my house and do my laundry.  But I like her, she likes us, my kids like her. She’s not quite a member of the family, since, you know, I pay her to work for me, but she’s not a faceless stranger either.  When the day comes that she doesn’t work for us anymore, I’m sure we’ll still keep in touch because she’s a human being.

Caren, you’re really making Amanda’s point. You mention that you pay someone to do housekeeping for you, but then follow it up with a rush of explanation about how you’re friends and she’s not just hired help. Why did you feel the need to explain all that? “I hire a housekeeper and I pay her a fair wage for her work” is really all that’s important. Would it really matter if she were a faceless stranger, or if she didn’t like your kids much?

PinkyLeftBrain, fuck off. Not everybody is capable of doing everything around the house they’d like to do. I have clients who are dying slow deaths and it tears them up that they have to get a neighbor, or pay the kid down the street, to do simple household tasks they could have done a year ago. I know single moms who have kids to feed and have bigger priorities than pride in their own yardwork. If you want to talk about class issues, fine, but nobody is interested in your nostalgia about the nobility of drudgery.

The homeowner ought to make her kids also serve as auxillary labor - as stated above, the current situation reeks of “we’re too good to do that sort of work”.  At nine, my happy ass spent many a Saturday afternoon pushing a lawnmower (actually being pulled mercilesssly across the lawn by some mechanized beast with an idling speed of 4000mph), picking veggies all summer long, and dealing with sugar cane in the fall.  And they paid me squat, since it was all family.  Personally, the solution would be to go to the woman and say “These two moppets are your extra help.  Don’t run them ragged, but don’t take any lip from them either.  You’re pay won’t go down, so don’t worry.  If you have nothing for them to do, just send them and your daughter over to the other side of the yard to play.”  If nothing else, the owner’s kids will learn a few useful skills and have some appreciation for how much labor goes into doing the work, so they won’t screw any possible laborers down the line.  Oh, and I’d pay the girl something for what she does , just like I’d pay neighborhood kids to mow my lawn (and slip the moppets a few bucks, so that everything is fair) - of course, I also pay my lawn guy ~$25/hr (he asked for $10/hr), because I remember what it was like as a kid and wouldn’t do for less than that myself

It’s funny that the letter-writer didn’t think “Shit, I have two perfectly able kids that age, why don’t I fire the gardener and make them pull weeds?”

I thought this as well—sounds like it’d be good and healthy for those kids to get their hands dirty, yes?  I mean, when I was that age, I helped out in the garden and had other outdoor chores—certainly not a full day’s work, but it was part of keeping the household running, so I did it.  One kid can pull a lot of weeds in an hour, let me tell you.

I was recently housesitting for a friend of mine, and she and her partner have their house cleaned every week, so the cleaners came in while I was there.  I don’t mind admitting it made me uncomfortable—certainly not in the “you’re going to steal my stuff!” way but in the “I’m not sure how to handle this interaction” way.  (It was also weird because, you know, it wasn’t my house.)

It seems to me that it’s more about employing child-labor-by-proxy, and indeed, if one would not hire a 9-year-old child to garden, one might very well (and very reasonably) be troubled to have hired someone who has hired a 9-year-old to garden.

Oh, I disagree. This woman is teaching her nine-year-old a valuable skill. I don’t think having her help in the mothers’s labor will cause that kid any privation.

The better way to alleviate “servant guilt” is for the employer to have her own boys help in the garden as well, or/and to offer the child an honorarium for helping.

Hubby and I pay day labourers to help us with the house sometimes - $20 an hour plus paid lunch and coffee breaks (along with food and coffee). We hire through a non-profit that covers workers compensation insurance as part of the service, so the employees are protected. We provide all necessary safety equipment, including an industrial first aid kit, gloves, and fire extinguisher.

A happy, well-fed, safe worker is a productive worker; and we don’t feel in the least bit guilty.

The idea that you have to hire to get things done is incredible.

Um, unless you’re disabled = then you pretty much have to hire out sometimes; and if you work, you have to pay out of pocket (in other words, no government assistance for hiring day labour.)

Employer-Mom should have been horrified that she was getting illegal labor from a 9-year-old (compensated or otherwise), and whatever Mom-Employee’s reasons were for doing it, she should have known better.

Gimme a break, Matt. Children, and especially girls, are pressed into labouring for their families all the time. A nine-year-old is almost old enough to babysit her siblings when her parents go out.

The gardener brings her kids to work in order to save on daycare, and has the oldest one helping her. That’s not the same as having a nine-year-old carpet weaver chained to his machine for 12 hours a day, so stop pretending it is. The fact you can’t make that basic distinction is proof that you’re missing the forest for the trees.

That was a disturbing column.  Not that unexpected, but it’s pretty bald-faced.

Look, that questioner is, first and foremost, concerned about her self-image as righteous and not an exploiter.  It seems obvious that what was objectionable about the whole situation was that it put paid to the lies that upper class people hold dearly about how what they have, they deserve by dint of hard work.  The Laborer works, her child works, and when those preschoolers get older, they will work as hard as their elders.  Meanwhile, the questioner’s own kids gets to play.

Also, some of the responses here…well, they kinda suck, and I’m with mythago.  Dudes (ettes, whatever), children work in this world, and they work because if they don’t, the whole family doesn’t get to eat.  That hard working mother was almost certainly all about instilling a work ethic that will stand her kid in good standing in a world that’s pretty much out to get them for all its worth.  Also, this whole good bad binary thing provokes image-concious behavior from other people in the questioner’s situation and thereby make the situation worse.  I’d simply want to be nonjudmental in this situation, whether from outside the situation or if I was in this situation, and act with compassion in thought.  No pitchforks, no torches.

Lastly, I’m one of those people about which other people makes these kind of decisions.  Unilateral decision-making is attractive to a certain kind of asshole, no matter what the surface rationale.

Amanda has correctly identified the key issue. This is not about whether the letter writer was employing a minor, or whether she should have instructed the gardener not to let her child pull weeds, or whether she should have suggested a more appropriate childcare arrangement. This is about class. The employer’s kids have leisure time, while the poor girl has to work.

Back when I lived with my mother in Houston, I used to help her clean houses on the weekends rather than sit around reading or playing while she was working. This was not because she was forcing her 7-year-old child to wipe down a wooden counter or tables. Rather, it was the difference between leaving at 3:00 and leaving at 5:00.

This is about class, not child labor.

One simple problem here is that Jane seems to have gotten two people to work for one wage. 

I have no clue how effective the 9 year old’s labor is in this case.  Getting her into the soccer action, as suggested by various people, would solve a variety of problems.

Am I the only one wondering why, if it’s a child care issue, the nine-year-old isn’t watching her siblings rather than working for her mom? 

There’s a huge amount of information that we’re not getting here.  For all we know, the gardener is having her daughter hauling 50-pound sacks of manure around which, yeah, I would be uncomfortable being witness to and wonder if I should let the gardener go if she has no problem putting her child in dangerous situations, especially if she’s doing it in front of my own children. 

I’m pretty amazed at the people on here who seem to think that the answer to the problem is to fire the gardener and do all the work yourself.  Because putting the gardener out of a job is, like, totally the solution to the class problem presented.

Am I the only one wondering why, if it’s a child care issue, the nine-year-old isn’t watching her siblings rather than working for her mom?

A nine-year-old being left with sole responsibility for the care of two preschoolers? No, I admit it really didn’t occur to me that would be a good choice.

Let’s put this in market-speak-ese for Dana: If the homeowner felt that she could make upwards of $13/hour with the time she would otherwise have spent gardening, then the hiree is definitely “justifying” that $13/hour wage. (That is, if I could be making $50/hr spending an hour at my job, I have a net benefit of $37/hr for paying somebody to garden rather than doing it myself.) If the letter-writer feels that her time is worth less than $13/hr, then indeed it is worth more for her to fire the gardener and do it herself.

Devil’s Advocate beat me to the bit about being disabled.  Even supervising able-bodied kids as they do the work is exhausting when you have to manage a disability.

Also, the “do it your own damn self” crowd seems to be very judgmental of a woman who might just be sick and tired of having to do her husband’s share of the yardwork on top of her sixty odd hours a week of housework and has decided to take the best of a lot of bad options.

The idea that children should be exempt from labor is one of those pretty middle class illusions that this woman wasn’t comfortable with having been shattered.  In six more years, that little girl is probably going to be jockying a register at McDonalds as well as picking up a good portion of the childcare for the younger kids while this woman’s boys are working on their soccer scholarships for college.  Whatever concern this woman might have had for a 9 year old girl doing moderate manual labor, it certainly didn’t come from having to do much work in her own childhood.  People who have grown up on farms have had to work a lot harder starting at a much younger age.  The woman hired to do the gardening might very well feel it’s good for her own girl to get used to working, not having any of those pretty little fantasies about her kids playing their way to adulthood like the spoiled brats of the middle and upper classes.

What if the person hired isn’t producing enough to justify the $13/hour that you claim constitutes the universal living wage?  Wouldn’t that mean that, unless an employee is productive enough to justify the ULW, he must remain unemployed?

This is the mystery that is at the heart of the American-style capitalistic system.  Simply put:  there is not enough work out there to employ the entire population.  Rather than all people being employed and wages being distributed such that everyone can at least get by in some fashion, a subset of all people are employed and the rest are given temporary token relief to prevent them from organizing an outright rebellion.  Those who are unemployable at a living wage are further cordoned off from the rest of society so that the remaining employed masses can believe that they got theirs fairly and that the invisible unemployable must somehow be inhumanly lazy.  Though anyone would admit that shooting in the head someone with an IQ under 50 is murder, allowing them to starve to death unless their family puts forth a herculean effort to save them is perfectly acceptable.

I used to work in my family’s property tax collection business. Sometimes I got paid, like when it was state mailing time. But property survey duty was free labor. Had to ride around for hours to make sure there wasn’t anything going on that wasn’t in the building permits. To this day at the county tax office there are scans of notecards written in my nine year old hand that say: “slab, frame, for sale, for sale, for sale, slab, frame, frame, frame, abandoned, frame, frame, slab.”

Seriously, pay the gardener a little more. Let the kid work some but also make some other opportunities available for the kid. Spring for swimming lessions. There are lots of cheap summer summer prorams out there. Broaden the kid’s life. She should broaden her own kids’ lives. Enroll them in a cheap summer program. Let them experience class difference and not grow up to be assholes about it. I am shocked by the class disdain I see in the area I work in. It is not too far from where I grew up. We weren’t like that back in the day. There were a few preppies and rich kids, but they were kept in their place. Kicker, punk, and Southern proto-grunge were the fashions of the day. Many of us had families hitting hard times in the oil-bust, and the rust belters still kept moving down here. Some of the more priviledged oil-boom kids were eating government cheese. Few dared to make fun of another’s poverty.

Sadly it seems that many of us didn’t retain what we learned as teens. McCain would be toast otherwise. And don’t let’s get our hopes up, this is still Mcain’s election to lose, though he seems to be doing all he can to make that the case.

It seems obvious that what was objectionable about the whole situation was that it put paid to the lies that upper class people hold dearly about how what they have, they deserve by dint of hard work.  The Laborer works, her child works, and when those preschoolers get older, they will work as hard as their elders.  Meanwhile, the questioner’s own kids gets to play.

Oh, this is bullshit, plain and simple. 

Maybe it’s my middle class privilege showing, but no child should ever have to work for pay.  Never.  In fact, per Devil’s Advocate, I even wonder how moral it is to use one’s children as unpaid labor (though I think all children should be involved with maintaining their own living spaces and doing the basic household stuff).  No matter what class you come from, or what kind of money you come from.

I would also say that it’s unfair to read too much into the letter and assume that the people we’re talking about are the Hiltons.  The writer’s sons will work someday, and there’s no reason to think that she does not also work.  A lot of ordinary middle class people hire occasional household help; in fact a large proportion of those do so because both parents work long hours.

She should broaden her own kids’ lives. Enroll them in a cheap summer program.

Can I just confess that my absolute first thought upon reading the question was, “What the fuck are her kids doing dicking around the house all summer long, anyway?”  When I was a pwecious middwe cwass child, I was in day camp or gifted enrichment or tutoring, and my parents were at work.

Child labor? You mean preteens aren’t allowed to earn money with paper routes or lawn-moving babysitting any more? Gotta tell that to the 11-year-old down the block and the 13-year-old from the next town who did our lawn a couple summers ago. I’m in the “pay the kid” (which actually means “pay the mother half again as much or something similar) crowd, along with “take it out of the soccer-players’ allowance.”

“What the fuck are her kids doing dicking around the house all summer long, anyway?”

Jesus Old Man Chrysler. They’re playing once a week when the gardener is there. We have no idea from the letter if they spend their remaining time “dicking around” or whether this is their one day of respite from a dawn-to-dusk regimen of soccer practice and math-enrichment classes.

“Maybe it’s my middle class privilege showing, but no child should ever have to work for pay.  Never.”

Yes, yes it is showing.  I really can’t get over this, OMG! A 9-year-old child is working!!! hand-wringing.  Just to fill in some of the apparently very priviledged posters here, when your not a rich white kid growing up you often help out. A lot.  My sister and I did all the yard work every other weekend.  We also washed dishes, cleaned the bathrooms (scrubbing the toilets and bathtubs) vacuumed, laundrey, etc.  If we slacked we got in trouble.  If we did our work we got an allowance ($1 per week, then $5 when we turned 13).  It’s called not being a spoiled brat.

“Maybe it’s my middle class privilege showing, but no child should ever have to work for pay.  Never.”

No, its not middle class privilege

Child labor laws came about not out of some sentimental concern for children, but because you could pay 8 yr olds less to work in the mines and mills then an adult so the adult would lose his/her job

Whenever this topic comes up people pipe up about paper routes, lemonade stands, household chores/allowances, throwing the neighborhood kids a few bucks to shovel your snow, etc

But hiring a gardening service and finding 9 yr olds doing some of the work is way closer to the former then the latter

jefft452, the woman didn’t mean to hire the child as well, and if she observed the child being forced to do more than her physical capacity or subjected to verbal abuse by her mother, that’s when CPS gets called.

This is a socialist way of handling the issue:

CONFUCIUS. At what age do your people begin to work for the community?

BURGE-LUBIN. Three. They do certain things every day when they are
three. Just to break them in, you know. But they become self-supporting,
or nearly so, at thirteen.

CONFUCIUS. And at what age do they retire?

BARNABAS. Forty-three.

CONFUCIUS. That is, they do thirty years’ work; and they receive
maintenance and education, without working, for thirteen years of
childhood and thirty-five years of superannuation, forty-eight years
in all, for each thirty years’ work. The Archbishop has given you 260
years’ work, and has received only one education and no superannuation.
You therefore owe him over 300 years of leisure and nearly eight
educations. You are thus heavily in his debt. In other words, he has
effected an enormous national economy by living so long; and you, by
living only seventy-eight years, are profiting at his expense. He is the
benefactor: you are the thief. [_Half rising_] May I now withdraw and
return to my serious business, as my own span is comparatively short?

The Thing Happens, from Back to Methuselah, G.B. Shaw

Yeah, this is going to be another Breeder vs Non-Breeder class warfare thread, isn’t it?

Opoponax, My mother did not work as a child, I do not think, but my father certainly did, and all of his peers probably did as well, on account of being raised in an agricultural area.

*I* certainly worked for some cash by raking leaves, pulling weeds, digging pits, watersealing and painting porches just to get cash to waste on sports cards.  I didn’t get an allowance.  I’ve also, quite rarely, have helped my mother just a little bit in doing her job, for free.  I know contemperaries of mine who worked on a farm for his family and appretenced himself to an auto-mechanic later.  I’ve gone to hotels where the entire family helps out in running the place.  I’ve also seen some pretty young hispanic kids walking around with their parents as they do retaining wall and other construction business, and I doubt they didn’t make themselves useful.

You see Opoponax, I see such child labor all around me, and I have always been almost upper middle class.  All I ever had to do was pay attention, and if you do that, you’ll see that children form a pretty large labor base even now in the informal economy.

I SIMPLY CANNOT BELIEVE how Dickensian this…advice-seeker is! Have we really come to this? Where the “solution” to having to “feel uncomfortable” about how hard a mother with three children is working is to FIRE her?!?!?

Jesus, all it takes is a teeny bit of compassion. A mother with three children, two of whom are VERY young, already has a full-time job: childcare. But, she is poor, possibly the only parent, so she has to work (at a backbreaking physical job. I know, because I AM a gardener). She must, apparently, bring her children with her (it might be why she is in this field of endeavor; there aren’t many where you CAN bring the kids). Her 9 year old is helping her. This is a woman who NEEDS THE MONEY, folks.

But the employer’s “discomfort” is seen by some as an OK excuse to DEPRIVE THE POOR WOMAN of WORK? OF THE MONEY SHE DESPERATELY NEEDS TO SURVIVE?

Let the poor woman do the work, and let her bring her kids, and let her keep her job, for crying out loud. THe privilege-quotient of some of you is really showing when you seem to think that there is some other mythical reality that this gardening lady can retreat to, where she will magically be handed enough money to survive.

If you love your mother and she is working her ass off, and you are 9, it is fairly normal to try to help her.

I occasionally did little odd jobs for my mother’s employer. i.e. my mother would have to stuff envelopes or sort mail or shred old files or convert microfilm and my sister and I would come to the office and be put to work on some of those tasks. We did have a day care situation, but sometimes that didn’t work out and off to the office we went.

I thought it was the coolest. thing. ever. We could have done homework or read a book or played quietly. But why do that stupid kid stuff when you could be a real worker. We did not get paid, but we learned our way around an office and office machines and learned about corporate life and in this case, mutual funds. It was a bonding time with mom and other adults. It was “apprenticeship-like.” And we thought it was great.

Now, in the gardener’s situation, we don’t know if this is the case or if the child is being forced to do real hard physical labor that makes her miserable and fatigued. But, I’d just like to throw out that that it might be the case that this class issue is also about cultural norms. Middle class white families tend to fill up their kid’s time with fun and play and camps and sports and that sort of thing. Many times, working class people of varying ethnic groups have more of a mentor/mentee relationship with their kids. The kids copy the parents and get a sense of pride in doing grown-up work and being useful.

We don’t know what the case is with this gardener, but that is not even the point. The point here is that when a problem arose that made the employer feel uncomfortable (and I agree, her own children’s playing wouldn’t have been a factor for her to mention if she were truly only concerned about the child labor issue), her first reaction was to fire the gardener to make the problem go away. There are many possible solutions as mentioned above, and that would have been the first step if she really wanted to reach across the employer/employee line and treat the person as a fellow equal in the world. By immediately turning to the “fire” option, she shows that this lowly person is just a utility to her that should stay invisible and not make her think too much about her own place in life.

Actually, the bit that stood out from the original letter to me was the phrasing “Her approximately 9-year-old daughter”. There wasn’t even enough conversation to establish how old the kid is? Isn’t that just basic small talk (do you have kids, how old are they, etc.)?

This issue is even more salient here in South Africa, a country with one of the worst GINI coefficients in the world (if not the worst GINI coefficient). The unemployment rate is running at something like 20%. When informal employment is considered unemployment, its up to around 40%.

So manual labor of any kind is incredibly cheap at market rates and its domestic servants are remarkably common in middle-income homes. For years I was loathe to employ anyone in my home simply because I had uncomfortable memories of Apartheid and my left-liberal instincts made me feel terrible about asking someone to clean up my home for me.

What swung me was the realisation that most of the people I was competing with in the skilled marketplace were paying people to basically do every single domestic chore for them, which is more of a competitive advantage than it might appear. That, plus the obvious fact that simply because of my discomfort at bossing someone around in my home, I was depriving someone of paying work.

So I starting paying a gardener to come in once a week (the rest of the week he works in other gardens round the neighbourhood) and a domestic worker to do my laundry and clean up, twice a week.

The first person I could find with a good reference was a 50-year-old woman being employed part-time by a friend. Now he’s got a good heart (he gave her bright young son a computer for his birthday, for instance), but from the experience I learned quite a lot about how thoroughly indoctrinated people are in the idea that market principles=moral principles.

Firstly, when I mentioned how much I intended to pay her, my friend begged me to halve it. When I asked him why, he said it was double the hourly rate he was paying her and it would cause “friction” for him if she inferred from my payments that he could afford more. Basically she knows he’s richer than me. Then we got into a long argument about market rate and real value of work not being the same thing. The “going rate” in this country is a slave-wage, which people only get away with because of high unemployment, and this guy buys himself new appliances every month, on top of having a host of expensive hobbies.

In the end I just said OK to shut him up (we work together too) and had a long chat with her where I told her his concerns and said please don’t start agitating for a raise with him or even tell him I’m paying you twice the normal rate.

Now, even at twice the normal rate cleaning up after yours truly is Hard Work (I’m a lazy slob at home and I have to admit to being even lazier knowing someone will be coming in in a day or two), so I’m happy for the domestic to just leave when she’s done. As a result, she usually races through everything in the morning and leaves early afternoon. But I still make some kind of effort to, you know, do my own dishes on days when she’s not there.

But recently a friend moved in with me and, on discovering that someone was cleaning up twice a week, immediately slipped into complete and utter slob mode.  On top of that he’s an incessant snacker. If I don’t make some effort to clean up after him, but the time she comes around after the weekend, every pot, pan, cup and plate in our cupboards is piled up in a precariously leaning tower in and around the sink. On top of that, he noticed that she gets done quite early sometimes and leaves at 3pm and immediately said he’s going to ask her if she can regularly cook basics like rice so that they’re readily available in the fridge whenever he wants to quickly whip up a snack.

I communicated my resistance to filling up her time simply because we could and explained that I have an understanding with her that I’m quite happy with, especially considering she’s a 50-year-old single mother, which precipitated an argument about people Doing An Honest Day’s Work for their salary.

Both of these guys are very liberal-minded guys who abhor bigotry, sexism, et al and pay lip service to the the understanding that the only idea labour is so cheap is because of our truly disgusting history as a country. So it amazes me how they are seemingly able to demand maximum productivity for minimum wage when their personal comfort is at stake. Its left me feeling very cynical about people spouting off all sorts of egalitarian principles without evidence of their actual commitment to said.

A tangential but relevant, I think, article I found linked from Ezra’s blog:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12tipping-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

“It is embarrassing to have another person wait on you,” the psychologist Ernest Dichter told a magazine reporter in 1960. “The need to pay, psychologically, for the guilt involved in the unequal relationship is so strong that very few are able to ignore it.”

Oh and, in the cited instance of a mother getting her child to assist her, I would simply provide her child with some former of entertainment and tell the mother I’m comfortable with her bringing her child to work but not comfortable with the child working. What’s so hard about that? I’ve seen lots of people do it.

Our cleaner’s daughter, btw, is allowed to play while she’s at work with her mom.

Speaking from the memory of being the kid who hung around while her mother (or other adults) worked, it might be hard to stop the kid from wanting to help, and feel superior to the lazyass kids around her who are not allowed to do adult stuff.

Hard to say if that’s the case here, or if the girl would prefer to do something else. One could ask, of course, but that might put the mother in a bad position.

when I was 9 I told my parents I did not need an allowance anymore and was going to earn my own money.  (I split duties with my older sister on a paper route, so I didn’t have sole responsibility.) I wanted to feel like I was helping my parents and my younger siblings.  The child may actually prefer to work with her mother.  I do not think a child working for pay is universally wrong.  I found it very empowering and responsible to earn money.

JoAnne - To me, this situation sounds like 2B, a kid helping with the family business.  But it could be 3 as well.  It would depend on how many hours at what intensity and how willingly the child worked.

mythago: The preschoolers aren’t going to be doing anything except making it harder for Mom to do her job.

If the gardener knew that she needed to spare her employer guilty feelings, she might have set the 9yo to mind the pre-schoolers. Depending on inclination, that’s harder work than gardening, but it does not look that way at first glance.

Deana: And if the daughter is working, she deserves to be paid too.

Basically, yes. But paying her defines what she does as “work” as opposed to “helping out” or “learning about gardening”, and if she’s too young to legally work, that opens the door to all kinds of unpleasantness.

LauraB: I don’t mind admitting it made me uncomfortable—[..]in the “I’m not sure how to handle this interaction” way.

Ask them “What’s the best place for me to be so I’m not in your way?”, then go there?

Paying more might enable the mother to afford child care, which would get the 9-year-old off wheelbarrow duty.

Would it? It’s equally likely that the mother would keep her unpaid child on the job and simply pocket the difference. A substantial number of parents view their children (perhaps not wrongly) as a source of unpaid labor.

This woman is teaching her nine-year-old a valuable skill. I don’t think having her help in the mothers’s labor will cause that kid any privation.

It doesn’t sound like she’s learning anything except that wheelbarrows are heavy. If this were about learning on the job, that’s one thing - though there still might be a concern about employing a child-by-proxy - but this seems to be more about a mother taking advantage of unpaid labor, like a bunch of parents do. I mean, let’s get real - the reason you were pushing a lawnmower while your dad kicked back with a cold one and watched the game wasn’t to educate you about the amazing world of turf building, it was because you could be made to do the job without being paid for it.

When I hear about this woman’s fairly-shameless use of her own 9-year-old child’s labor, combined with her apparent absenteeism, I’m not sure she comes out looking the Noble Humble Worker a lot of people are portraying her as. For my part I consider the safety of children more important that being on the right side of a class issue.

But the employer’s “discomfort” is seen by some as an OK excuse to DEPRIVE THE POOR WOMAN of WORK? OF THE MONEY SHE DESPERATELY NEEDS TO SURVIVE?

If she needed it that bad, why play fast and loose with actually showing up?

Chet: A substantial number of parents view their children (perhaps not wrongly) as a source of unpaid labor.

It does provide a useful lesson about the value of working out of the house and in some place where you get paid, and can leave in the evening.