SPECTATOR
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THE SERVANT PROBLEM
In November of 1938, one Beatrice Webb wrote the following entry in her diary:
Unless she minds her manners, I am afraid she and Jean must go, and I must get two Austrian or Czech servants. British women are no longer suited to domestic service in private houses, especially in the country . . . the plain truth is that the structure of the old upper- and middle-class home is no longer practicable.. .
Mrs Webb, considered ultra left-wing in her own time and a passionate believer in Soviet communism, was witnessing the passing of a set of employment traditions. She wrote those lines in the years before the war, the last time when it was still prac- tical for upper-middle class people, let alone middle-class people, to have servants — and the last time when it was possible to discuss the subject without embarrassment. These days, servants cannot be discussed in polite British society. This is a pity, because a discussion of servants is something which might help provide the solution to a British problem, one which is equally unmention- able: that of the permanent disappearance of jobs for unskilled workers.
This week, the OECD pointed out, to all who did not know already (such as the Labour Party), that British employment Policy is one of the best in Europe. By sup- porting more flexible wage levels and work- ing hours, the Government has allowed British companies the freedom to hire rung people, and people whose productiv- ity does not make them worth paying a rel- atively high, standard minimum wage. Yet even greater flexibility does not solve the problem altogether. Unemployment in Britain continues to hover just below 10 per cent. This means that there are now hun- dreds of thousands of people who cannot reasonably expect to have jobs, ever again — not only because of laziness or a cyclical downturn, but because the nature of the economy has changed. Unskilled factory Jobs are moving to the developing world; no one in Britain will work for Asian wages, and it would not be good for British society if they did.
The answer is not protectionism, trade wars, and an end to economic growth, whatever Sir James Goldsmith says. The answer is to return to an older unemploy- ment structure. If factory jobs are disap- pearing, why not put unskilled workers to tasks which they once did very well? Mak- ing it easier for the working middle classes to hire domestic servants is a more intelli- gent solution to the problem of long-term unemployment.
This is not an idea derived from a longing to return to the past, but a practical solu- tion, particularly for working women, who by some measures now work harder than men. Not long ago, a Spectator article cal- culated that £30,000 per year was required just to pay the salary and tax of a nanny, putting that luxury well out of the average person's range. Obviously, the many women who cannot find a place for their children in state day-care systems, and can- not afford this kind of money are making do, but not always happily: in Britain, near- ly a million children, one survey told us ear- lier this year, are regularly left home alone by their working parents.
In order to help solve the crisis of unem- ployment and to help working mothers at the same time, governments must get used to the idea of reducing or waiving the heavy national insurance taxes which are now imposed on those who employ nannies, childminders, cooks and cleaners. In any other business, employers can count wages as a business cost: domestic servants, who are not counted as a business cost, are actu- ally taxed much more heavily than other employees. In Denmark, where people are less emotional about these things, the gov- ernment has already begun subsidising businesses which provide domestic services, in order to help middle-class families and to reduce unemployment, which hovers above 12 per cent.
Most of the technical arguments against tax breaks for domestic servants could be overcome. It ought to be possible, for example, to calculate the loss to the budget from such tax breaks, and adjust it so that it does not exceed the amount spent support- ing the unemployed. Most people prefer to do things legally; part of the loss in taxes would also be made up for by people who would register the existence of their illegal employees for the first time.
The social problem, is the larger one: it is the thought of the taxpayers subsidising vast country houses filled with cooks and cooks' assistants in the manner of Upstairs, Downstairs which makes the idea seem unpalatable to many. But perhaps servants could be organised into private companies, hired out for the day; perhaps we could call them something else — say, domestic assis- tants. Certainly it would not take long for the newly employed to find that it is more pleasant to take care of children than to work in fast-food restaurants. The idea has logic: everyone knows that the state is not wealthy enough to buy either the attentive childcare that most women want, or omnipotent enough to employ the unem- ployed. It is time to dispense with old snob- beries and stereotypes, and get people back to work.
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