When Ehrenreich begins her journey as a cleaning lady, she talks about the idea of distrust between the homeowners and the cleaning crew. She writes, “Ted encourages us to imagine that we are under surveillance at all time in each house… Owners set traps for us,” (93). To me this is a troubling dilemma. From the perspective of people who clean the houses, this is an insult and makes it seem like these “privileged” homeowners are out to get them. However, on the other hand, it is hard for the homeowners to grant all their trust in someone they don’t know. The harsh reality is that things do get stolen, but it is hard to stop these incidents from happening without casting distrust over everyone.
This idea also connects back to our class discussion on Monday when we talked about the managers of the restaurants monitoring the worker’s behavior for anything suspicious. In my opinion, I feel like it is hard to maintain a positive self image when everyone is doubting you.
To what extent is Barbara conducting her own surveillance of the working class? She’s writing this book about her experiences going undercover with low-wage workers, and as we’ve already talked about in class, she doesn’t really tell them what she’s doing. The way I see it, Barbara has spied on these people, taken their stories, and made (presumably) millions of dollars off of their struggles without giving them anything in return. Not only is that surveillance, but it’s exploitation!
Nate, I don’t necessarily think that telling the stories of minimum wage stories in a novel is exploitation. Although she certainly profits from this book, she is illuminating some important ideas and information to an audience that needs to hear it. Perhaps there is no way of solving the problem of home-owners being afraid of house-cleaners stealing from them, but this book can attempt to at least bring home-owners awareness of the fact that house-cleaners are poorly treated and even just treating them better and respecting how difficult there job is would probably be a significant improvement. I do think this book will achieve something meaningful, and it is not just exploitation.