Bot going to dig through the thread to find the post about India but I wanted to comment that in the India episode of Entitlement Whores International the morons are shown an absolutely beautiful house, and the reason they turned it down was because there was a secondary house on the property with a family living there, essentially servants that carried with the property.
Granted I do not know how it is set up in India, but I would have had no problem owning a house that came with family retainers. I am sure that the wages were very reasonable, and that they had been on the property long enough to be very familiar with the neighborhood, where to get the best meats and produce, and the foibles of the house mechanicals.
mrAru and I would have had no issue dealing with servants, I grew up around family retainers and he grew up on a grape ranch [as we jokingly call it] where his uncle had ranch hands. [I will note for people that think this is outragous, Marie is buried in the family plot 2 spaces over from my pair of spaces. My grandparents other servants had made their own funeral arrangements. Marie had been with the family since 1923.]
I saw a quote once attributed to Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976). “I never thought I would be rich enough to own a motor car or too poor to hire a servant.”
They also had to supervise the servants – not a full-time job, but a job that takes a non-trivial amount of time to do properly. For example, you’d want to discuss with the cook what should be served at the meals, based on what might be in season, and who you would have as guests, and also based on the household budget. You’d also need to keep an eye on them to make sure they weren’t stealing from you.
That’s something I noticed in the Sherlock Holmes stories, too. Except that one of the things that makes Holmes so much more successful than other detectives is that he actually recognizes that the servants are people, too, and isn’t too proud to associate with and befriend them.
Here’s how I sometimes look at it: We still have people serving us, we just don’t interact with them as directly. Service is outsourced. Instead of paying people to come to our homes and cook for us and clean up after us, we pay the people who work at McDonald’s or Applebee’s, or at the Campbell’s Soup factory or the Swanson frozen dinner plant, to cook for us. This is not necessarily an improvement, for them or for us.
Why would anyone want to do their own housework if they could hire someone to do it for a low price? Labor saving devices probably cut down the number of servants per household, though. With them, most households could function with one person working full time to maintain the household to modern standards. Without them , you need either more people, or to lower the standards or both.
Same question really. Did labor-saving products become cheap enough that they made it uneconomical to hire servants? Or did the expense of keeping servants create a market for a cheap replacement like labor-saving products?
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was responding to your point about India. Even with all the modern labor saving devices ( dishwashers, vacuum , clothes washers and dryers) why would I want to operate them myself if I can hire someone else to do it cheaply? I don’t think that the labor saving devices replaced servants, exactly.The number of servants decreased, and the relationship between servant and employer certainly changed, but servants still exist - not only as full- time, live-in or not maids and housekeepers but also as the twice a week “cleaning lady” who works for different households and services like Merry Maids.
I guess my main question was “Servants used to be common. Then they became rare. What caused this change?”
One possibility is the development of labor-saving products that made servants less necessary. But was it a cause or an effect?
For example, maybe servants became rare because the development of the steamship made it possible for poor people to emigrate out of Britain and this dried up the source of cheap domestic servants. Or maybe the growth of trade unionism and the increase of factory wages diverted potential servants into industrial jobs. Or maybe the discovery of germ theory made employers want to minimize their family’s exposure to the lower classes.
Not everybody. But according to this website by the creators of the PBS Series Edwardian House, many did have servants, including people of whom we would not expect it today based on their circumstances. IIRC if you click on my link you’ll land on “schoolmaster”, who likely has three live-in servants. Go one “step” down and you get to “Clerk”, which probably takes in jobs that correspond to a wide variety of modern office jobs, and you still have a couple of servants who come in during the day.
I think the point that BrainGlutton was making is that Lewis was ignoring the servants themselves in his claim. If a schoolmaster had three live-in servants, then there were four people living in that household and three of them didn’t have servants.
Interesting editorial in today’s StarTribune (Minneapolis) newspaper. The author mentions something called “Baumol’s Cost Disease”, in which industries with inflexible labor productivity (such as musicians in an orchestra) tend to have ever-expanding labor costs simply because productivity gains in other sectors of the economy leave those industries proportionally more labor-intensive. So Little Nemo may have been on to something when he mentioned competition from other employment sectors: basically, it’s a waste of a worker to have them be a house servant unless they can’t do anything else.
This practice is still extremely common in India. My in-laws have a servant that lives with them. One day she showed me how she collects coconuts, then grates them by hand, then simmers the pulp, then rings it out–all to get a few cups of coconut milk for that night’s curry, took about 4 hours. The next day she’d do it again. The whole time I kept thinking, “but that sells for $.89 in the store.”
My personal wag is that it has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with class structure. Her mother had been their servant, and if she has daughters they’ll be servants. Same thing for Victorian era England, servants beget servants. If you a born [unlucky] and raised to believe that you aren’t meant to be more than a servant, that’s exactly what will happen. Some day you can marry one of the stable hands and your children will grow up to be either servants or stable hands. And that’s okay because there were worse jobs to have.
What people fail to realize is that the US represented a break from that strangle hold. Yet somehow we’ve come full circle and recreated a class structure where poor begets poor, and rich begets rich.
It’s not actually rare, I think we just shifted it all around. The translation from Victorian era to today would be a landlord that owns a bunch of rental properties. People pay him rent, but to make that money they go out and work. So one of them is a cook and another waitress, instead of working in his house, they work in a dinner that he goes to.
The nature of being a servant was that you got room and board in exchange for your labour. If you had a room over your garage that you could rent out for $X per month, and also pay for childcare, you could instead hire a nanny and allow her to live their rent free. She gets housing, you get labour.
In the end, like the coconut story, it’s not very efficient. You’re better off sending your kids to a day care where one person looks after multiple children. And instead rent the garage at market rate.
Don’t forget the impact of war, particularly World War I. Millions of men (including servants) go off to fight. Millions die, leaving their families subsisting on a widow’s pension. Suddenly, millions of middle-class British, French, German and Austrian families can’t even afford to feed their servants. Soon, all the maids become shopgirls and all the gardeners take the factory jobs that are now vacant because the factory workers died at Verdun.
I think you’re trying to force the relationship between modern landlords and tenants into a pigeonhole marked “manorialism”. Even though manorialism was the antecedent of present day leasehold tenure, the tenant of today does not follow the role of a manorial tenant, except for having to provide some kind of consideration to the owner for the privilege of possessing the property. The most important difference is that a typical tenant today is usually a social, if not financial, equal of his landlord.
I agree, however, that the work of servants has been shifted around and is largely out of sight; if you buy a Big Mac, low wage workers prepared and assembled the ingredients for you and thus performed a role your servant might have done for you a century or two ago. But like the Baronet said…if they didn’t serve you they wouldn’t have a job.
What you describe here is slavery. Servants did always receive wages for their work, didn’t they?
One of the things I read was that wages were often token sums. The writer said that a low-level servant’s weekly wages would be enough to buy a single meal in a pub.
It’s still not slavery even room & board made up 100% of the servants wages. For it to be slavery the servants would have to not have the legal freedom to quit and try to find another job elsewhere. If the master have send the police after a runaway maid she’s a slave, if all he can do is refuse her a refence or severance pay she is not a slave.