Are home health aides the new "staff"?
I never had "staff" growing up; we would hire a cleaner for the day if we were having a party that night (maybe), but the idea of people working in my house was the stuff of soap operas and period pieces to me. Even now my wife and I make roughly the median DC household wage, but obviously that goes a lot farther in India (though less far in Mumbai than you might think), particularly when we get government housing. So we've hired two people, a driver and a housekeeper. The driver doesn't bother me at all: there's absolutely no way I'm driving left-handed stick on the left side of the road in Mumbai any time soon (the worst part: the pedals aren't reversed, meaning I have to mentally reverse the muscle memory of my upper body while leaving the muscle memory of my lower body intact), and I need to get from point A to point B. Hiring a housekeeper still seems weird to me, but we can afford to pay her half again the local rate so it's a win-win, I guess -- it's still just weird to have somebody in the house most of the day.
My mother-in-law also has "staff", a housekeeper/cook during the day and a health aide for her ailing uncle at night. She is a naturalized US citizen but she moved back to Calcutta because her pension goes a lot farther there. But that got me thinking.
My grandfather recently passed away; my uncle was taking care of him out on his farm in west Texas. During the last bit (once it was clear that it probably was "the last bit"
he had three home health aids there (not all at once; in 12 hour shifts IIRC). My remaining grandmother also has a full time home health aide staff (she has very bad arthritis and has trouble moving around on her own).
The Department of Labor has projected that the number of home health aides will nearly double in the next decade. This is interesting to me because this will be the first time in a century or so that it will start being normal for middle class families to have people working in their homes again. There is a problem that not enough people are willing to do the grueling work required of a home health aide at the shitty pay those jobs usually offer, but presumably wages will eventually rise to fill the need people won't be able to avoid. (Keep in mind it was only this year that the minimum wage law applied to home health aides, and that won't even kick in until 2015.)
Anyways, having people work in your house is very unnerving for this Gen-X'er. They know what kind of underwear you wear, and what you eat, and where you sleep, and where you keep your stuff. And there's a vulnerability that can breed resentment; fights get reported to her friends, she has to worry that any time I lose something she'll get accused of stealing it, etc. We know more about each other's personal lives than two people in an employer/employee relationship really should, and in her business reputation and word of mouth are everything, which gives me more leverage over her than is right. This is all the more true when you're not just talking about doing laundry and washing dishes, but holding people while they have diarrhea all over the place -- home health aides necessarily have an extremely intimate relationship with their employers.
Virginia Woolfe famously fired all of her servants and learned to cook and do laundry herself. At the time, it was a refreshing change of pace for the upper class to be "self-reliant" (as they saw it). But then again it was also only possible because of labor-saving devices like refrigerators and indoor plumbing. And, as the mass working class appeared and couldn't afford servants in the first place (but could afford the appliances), the upstairs-downstairs dynamic largely disappeared. (I hate to quote Downton, but as the Countess asks, "If aristocrats do not employ the villagers, what's the point in having us around?" Economists at the start of the 20th century were troubled by "the servants problem": how can all these new middle class people possibly have good lives when there are no longer enough poor people to work as servants for them? Seems quaint now, of course, but it was a different world back then.
So, the household staff and accompanying upstairs/downstairs dynamic was relegated to the fantastically wealthy, costume period dramas, and the occasional expat like me or my mother in law. But if there are going to be 4 million home health aides working in 2020, having "staff" is going to be normal or at least not exceptional for the middle class (at least until someone invents the home health aide robot). Is that a good or bad thing? I can see an argument either way:
Bad: obviously, poorly paid and physically demanding jobs are bad enough without constantly being reminded of what you don't have and being socially stigmatized for doing that work. Reinforcing the inequality that already exists by having everyone live it out 24/7 can't be good either (and remember, the social inequalities 100 years ago were self-fulfilling vicious cycles in a lot of ways, which is one of the reasons Woolf, et al, wanted to be done with the whole thing).
Good: OTOH, I could see the argument that spending time with people of different economic backgrounds could be very good. If the rich kids grow up seeing that not everybody gets to have awesome stuff like they do, they might appreciate it more. Or how I help my housekeeper's kids with English (that's probably sui generis, but there are also probably parallels). Maybe that's naive. And, again, though HHA jobs are generally poorly paid, they are in fact jobs, and a lot of people need jobs -- if the 2015 wage hike is a start, rather than the end, this could be a good way to get more of the economy back into wages.
I don't know. Maybe I'm over-using my crystal ball here, but I really do think having employees in the household as a regular thing over the next few decades as the baby boom ages is going to be a pretty big change to the economy, and I'm curious what effects other people think it may have.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and I am far from poor - probably because I don't waste money on shit I do not need 
and since I detest chit chatting on a phone I do not need many minutes
