Undercover as a hotel cleaner in Ireland: ‘Lifting the heavy mattress, I cry tears of rage and exhaustion’
Saša Uhlová
Some American bird did it in “Nickled and Dimed”. Then Polly T did it here. I’m sure I’ve seen an update here of Polly’s attempt. And now this?
Can we not gain originality in telling us all how terrible capitalism is?
That’s nothing, Sasa love – try being a pager salesgirl in Lebanon!
Wow, being a migrant cleaner in a foreign country at the age of 45 doesn’t pay well.
Who knew?
I actually stumbled across ‘Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain’ by La Toynbee which my Murphy assisting relative brought for me as a present.
Despite my misgivings I would thoroughly recommend it as an account of the experience. Obviously the policy prescriptions are utter garbage and simply involve increasing levels of tax for ever diminishing return but there’s actually some interesting observations.
I think I saw a story on Al Jazeera of indentured North Korean Labour being used abroad for no cost, or of Slavery in the Middle East – I wonder if any Guardian or NYT journalist is brave enough to go down those particular rabbit holes.
Julia – I heard sales are booming.
To be fair, the mattresses in their utopia will be far thinner and much easier to turn.
“Can we not gain originality in telling us all how terrible capitalism is?”
One of my favourite Donald Barthelme short stories:
http://www.jessamyn.com/barth/capitalism.html
V_P: «…which my Murphy assisting relative brought for me as a present. »
Whatever did you do to him that he should hate you so much?
If you’re looking to for difficult & unpleasant jobs you can do a lot better than hotel maid – roofers, construction workers, picking vegetables, etc.
Every Guardianista needs a schtick, and hers is:
Who keeps Europe’s wealthy west going? Underpaid, invisible migrants from its east
But they’re not invisible and they don’t “keep Europe going”. All they do is keep unskilled wages artificially low in Western Europe, and the cost of housing artificially high, while stealing opportunities from local young people and the unemployed.
took on three of the jobs shunned by western workers
There are no jobs “shunned” by Western workers. Western workers are shunning living 10 adults to a house just to make minimum wage.
Marxists used to know this stuff.
Slovakian journalist can’t understand she is contributing to the problems she is writing about. The Irish hotel is paying these wages & providing these working conditions because people will come to Ireland & do the jobs. If Ireland banned foreign workers, the hotel would have to pay higher wages with better conditions to get Irish staff. So the answer’s simply don’t go to Ireland & work under these terms.
It’s obvious from the article, she may not like the conditions of employment but other people are content to accept them. She would rather they didn’t have jobs?
I was going to say “Julia wins the thread”, but then Steve went one better.
Yes, CJNerd, I concur!
Marxists used to know this stuff.
Here’s a genuine query; when and why did lefties stop giving two shits about the indigenous working class in their countries and start prioritising the wants of literally any foreigner, even the ones who openly hate the nation they’ve just arrived in?
My theory with Labour and the left in the UK was that they never forgave the working classes for voting for Thatcher and so no punishment is enough: towns ruined, children raped, wages slashed, no harm is too much.
That doesn’t apply to Ireland or France or Italy though.
1953 would be a good suggestion, with this from notorious commie Bertolt Brecht:
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work [quotas]. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Marius,
“Here’s a genuine query; when and why did lefties stop giving two shits about the indigenous working class in their countries and start prioritising the wants of literally any foreigner, even the ones who openly hate the nation they’ve just arrived in?”
OK… here’s my hypothesis on this:
Back in the old days, people didn’t have a whole lot of labour mobility. So a way to improve your pay and conditions was to join a trade union. Because changing jobs was hard.
So the factory workers and mill workers joined unions and the Labour Party became the political force for the unionised work force, to improve their lives.
Around the late 1970s, you start to get more car ownership. So more people have labour mobility. If they don’t like working at XYZ Mill, they can go drive across town to work at ABC Mill. At which point, why do you need to hand money to a trade union in the hope of getting more pay, when you can just leave?
So working class union membership (factories and mills) declines. And this didn’t just happen in the UK, it happened everywhere. Everyone mentions Thatcher, but Thatcher didn’t cause a decline in unions in the USA and France. Go to warehouses in Nottinghamshire or printers in Swindon, you’ll be lucky to find a union member.
Now, what are Labour going to do? A whole lot of revenue and organisers disappear. They go off and find anyone who they can get. People pissed off with the status quo and desperate for representation. So, gays, some ethnic minorities, pedophiles. Anything to boost membership. To add to state monopolies like the civil service, health and railways.
At which point, Labour are no longer representing blokes with flat caps and whippets but middle class social workers and weirdos. The emphasis on women’s rights is because most union members are now women. And it took the old working class a while to realise it. But they are getting it now. Which is why you have Reform taking a lot of second places in the North of England in the left behind parts.
@Marius
Don’t forget that the Left’s leading lights are and have always been overwhelmingly bourgeois. They’re middle-class theorists of independent (read taxpayer-supported) means, busy defining what the common man ought to want. They’ve never got over the historical fact that the common man doesn’t actually want what he ought to want but instead wants . The common man wants a bourgeois lifestyle, but if possible at someone else’s expense.
Finally the posh lefties realised that the Common Man was a lost cause, so they needed other downtrodden classes to save, and promptly invented some. Of course, these downtrodden classes also want to lead bourgeois lives and increasingly they do, at the Western white male’s expense.
Formatting got messed up. That should read: “They’ve never got over the historical fact that the common man doesn’t actually want what he ought to want but instead wants stuff.
And I should add, this is why the modern metropolitan lefty has entirely forsaken the flat cap and is unashamedly bourgeois. I live in a posh bit of North London and am entirely surrounded by them. I’m drowning in a sea of lefty millionaires, almost all of them directly or indirectly state-funded.
“The next evening, I meet Sará in the back yard. She is totally down, saying she should have stayed in Slovakia and worked for €4 an hour there, rather than put up with what she has to do here in Ireland.”
Home beckons, Sara.
Why is she lifting the mattress?
You just need to lift the edge a little bit to get the sheet under. Is her problem really that she doesn’t know what she’s doing and so doing it all wrong?
Nitwit finds out she’s not suited for jobs capitalism has gently steered her away from. Blames capitalism.
CJ, Julia – x
Marius – Wat Tyler did nothing wrong.
Funny you should mention Wat Tyler. Puzzled heads among our betters are wondering how he managed a revolt without social media.
“Here’s a genuine query; when and why did lefties stop giving two shits about the indigenous working class in their countries and start prioritising the wants of literally any foreigner, even the ones who openly hate the nation they’ve just arrived in?”
As others have pointed out, when the middle classes took over the Left. The middle classes have always hated the working classes (or maybe more accurately feared them), so once they had all the controls in their grasp the working classes were always going to be toast. Importing a new immigrant class and creating a welfare class of people dependent on the State for survival was crucial to give the New Left an electoral base. I first noticed in the 90s, Major vs Blair. Blair was the archetypal middle class man, private school, university etc etc representing the party of the working man, Major, the left school at 16 with few qualifications and worked his way up man was representing the party of the privileged middle classes. They had effectively swapped places. Thats when I first realised something had changed.
Great question from @Western Bloke and interesting responses.
mmm, yes. Life for unskilled labour has always basically been crap, from 2000 BC from 0 BC to now, and always for the same reason. Massive oversupply compared with limited demand.