Cleaning and the work–life balance
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Abstract
This paper looks at work–life balance (WLB) from the perspective of housework, by adopting what I call a ‘cleaning lens’. This lens exposes several unarticulated assumptions or presuppositions that lie buried within the various WLB debates that straddle various disciplines and range from academic to practitioner literature. The promotion of some work–life practices by HR managers presupposes certain things about employees, their home-lives, families, preferences and the structures that enable and constrain these employees. These presuppositions, which may or may not be true, have real effects. That is, even if these presuppositions about employees do not reflect employees’ situations and desires, once they are acted upon by companies they shape employees’ options. For this reason alone it is worth exploring the presuppositions contained in the WLB literature. Thinking about cleaning highlights gendered and class-based presuppositions, and draws attention to the role of the welfare state in shaping interactions between home and work and the ability of citizens to move between home and work. Putting cleaning centre stage reveals how far an individual’s time constraints affect his or her choices, and how these choices are in turn affected by the organization of the society around them. Cleaning is chosen not only because it is one of the key activities that constitute part of the, usually, under-elaborated ‘life’ aspect of the WLB concept, but also because it is almost never discussed. This cleaning lens sidesteps, but does not completely do away with, analysis of the complexities of care work on one side and the issues of consumption on the other side. Studies of care or ‘love’ work often conflate the inter-personal elements of care work with the need to have a clean home but this is misleading for two reasons. First, caring might involve no housecleaning, so, for example, a father’s concern for his daughter might not necessitate him cleaning her home. Here the distinction between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ is useful (Hansen, 2005). When you care about someone you are concerned for someone’s well being, when you care for someone you take active steps to ensure their well being and comfort – even if you don’t particularly care about that person. Second, there can be house-cleaning that involves no other-caring. People who live alone still clean their homes. So caring and cleaning should not be taken as synonyms, and should not be lumped together as part of something called ‘life’.