Cambridge resident Julia Moore likes her house to be blank and spends a lot of time keeping it that way: sweeping, vacuuming, scrubbing, and depressed. But as a full-time therapist and consultant, she says, she can’t do much. Therefore, Moore employs a housekeeper named Sharon.
“She comes in once a week and has been with us for 17 years,” Moore said.
In early March, just before what would have been 18 years, the risk of the coronavirus disrupted those weekly visits. Sharon, the housekeeper, who also lives in Cambridge, said she was no longer running. Its six regulars have canceled appointments for the foreseeable future. Sharon, who asked WGBH News not to disclose her last call, said running away from home doesn’t exist in her profession. If you’re at home, you’re not running.
But Moore and his longtime visitor are still paying him.
“And to the others, I communicate with them almost every day, but they never said anything about paying me,” he said.
Moore said she believes it is her duty to repay someone who has worked at her home for nearly two decades.
“I have a guaranteed income, so to speak, because I’m on a down payment and I feel like it’s pretty much the same with our housekeeper, which I essentially have on a down payment,” Moore said. “It’s a kind of social contract, whatever we do. She doesn’t have any kind of savings plan that you would have if you worked in a company. And I need to make sure it’s okay.
On social media, it was not difficult to locate other people who paid their housewives in the absence of work.
Karen Mapp, a professor at Harvard University’s School of Education, said her resolve was her education.
“My housewife has been going blank here for 14 years, and I’ve made the decision to keep paying him until he can come back,” Mapp said. “My mother, in particular, sought to help others. You know, I hear his voice saying, ‘You have a privilege. You still have a job. You still have a job. You get paid. So you have to take care of the other people who take care of you. ‘”
She added: “My housekeeper and the others have been looking after me for years. So it’s time for me to do what I can to take care of them. “
Colleen Graham of Nashua, N. H. , said the irony of her meticulous housekeeper coming to clean the counters would be the option of introducing a mysterious illness into her home. So Graham will pay him to stay out. She said she texted him a week ago and asked him not to come.
“I just don’t think it’s sensible to go home,” Graham said. to do this.
Graham’s housekeeper, Camilla, who is from Brazil, also asked that we not use her last name. She started her cleaning service 10 years ago and is struggling to earn a source of income in this crisis.
“I have about 42 houses that my team and I are cleaning, and I would say they pay us six or seven,” Camilla said. “And it’s been amazing, because I can’t paint from home. in.
According to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the majority of domestic workers in the Northeast are women of color, foreign-born and undocumented. Few are eligible for state and federal investments provided through the Paycheck Protection Program or government-backed small business loans. A 2017 survey through Alliance found that most spend more than a portion of their source of income on rent or mortgage, and almost none have paid for health problems or paid leave.
And this pandemic, Barboza said, “is definitely not doing well for them. “
Barboza produces a podcast in Portuguese called Faxima exclusively about the lives of Brazilian housewives in New England, whose number is estimated at more than 10,000. Barboza said he had been in contact with many of them.
“The first week they were home, some other people who used the agreement to pay. The time of the week not much. And now, the third week they’re home, the maximum number of [customers] don’t pay. “
And why them? This is a question some might ask. Why pay housewives, or anyone else, for paintings they don’t paint?Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University whose books on “moral reasoning” are among the world’s bestsellers, had an answer.
“That argument applies if we’re talking about a purely transactional date with a giant company,” he told WGBH News.
Sandel noted that if his gym closed or his flight was canceled because of the pandemic, he wouldn’t expect to pay for what he didn’t receive. But with a housekeeper, it’s very different, he says.
“This is not a purely transactional relationship. It is a user, typically, who is economically very vulnerable. So, I see that morally it is very different. And I think there’s a legal responsibility to keep paying for the home, even if because of the pandemic, that user isn’t offering the service.
But many other people who own spas, gyms and restaurants would possibly have had normal housewives, but now their source of income has vanished. For example, 62% of restaurateurs say they have closed their businesses due to the pandemic.
Camilla said she knew some of her clients had lost their jobs and couldn’t afford the laid-off domestic workers. She said, “That’s completely understandable, you know?”
“I’m very fortunate that my husband is still painting,” she said. “He paints for Market Basket. But the women who paint for me are not as lucky as I am. And what I’m looking to do is: I still have 3 houses that need us to go blank. And what I’m looking to do is send them to be covered. And that’s how I think I understand them.
Sharon, the cleaning girl in Cambridge, is now out of business altogether. She suffers from diabetes and said it makes her vulnerable to the coronavirus. Cleaning is now a more harmful profession.
“I think right now I’m going to settle down and stay with other people without worrying about it, because nothing is going the way we want it to,” Sharon said.
But she said she was grateful to Moore and other employers, clients and lifelong friends who continued as homemakers as the pandemic raged.
Correction: An earlier edition of this tale incorrectly stated how Sharon regularly cleans Julia Moore’s house. He does it once a week.
Phillip Martin is a senior investigative reporter at the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.
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