Wages for Hospitality Work
Why do we expect service workers—some of the lowest-paid workers in our society—to perform their jobs with a smile? What would happen if hospitality was something we paid for instead?
The final project for my Gender and Women’s Studies course is writing a manifesto. (Funnily enough, a manifesto is how Boss Barista started: I saw Jasper, my former co-host, read a feminist coffee manifesto at an event in 2016 and knew I needed to meet them.)
My manifesto is a quasi-literature review, including analyzing feminist and scholar Silvia Federici’s 1974 short book, “Wages Against Housework.” Her landmark work calls for women to be paid for their domestic labor.
She opens the piece with these lines:
“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions … but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.
More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.
Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.”
Federici argues that because domestic labor is unpaid, it has become socialized as a “natural trait” for women—that they perform domestic labor not explicitly because of patriarchal structures but because “they like it” and are naturally “better at it.” Furthermore, because domestic labor has become coded as a way to show and perform love, women perform it as a demonstration of care for their families—and those who don’t, therefore, must not love their families enough.
I’ve thought a lot about what we’re asked to do for the sake of “love.” I’ve also wondered if these dynamics exist in coffee—and I believe they do. I’d argue we can draw parallels between Federici’s work and how we view the performance of hospitality in the service sector.
Federici’s breakdown of how domestic labor has become weaponized against women mimics how we view the labor of hospitality in service work. We view it as something that cannot be taught, a natural trait and assumed responsibility in most low-wage jobs. Hospitality is given without extra compensation because people “love their work.” And that opens the door for exploitation.
No Love Lost
Right after the opening lines above, Federici makes clear that her argument is not just interested in getting wages for housework, but in examining why domestic labor has been devalued and made invisible in the first place—despite the fact that our society runs on unpaid work performed in the home. “To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society,” she writes.
Federici argues that housework is not only something that typically falls on women (Federici’s argument relies on the assumption that women do most, if not all, of the domestic labor in homes, and she speaks about gender as a binary, not because she’s making a binary argument, but rather speaking about societal trends and attitudes) to perform, but that it has become internalized as a task that women are naturally better at—and that’s not by accident. “Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged,” she writes.
In other words, for our current form of capitalism to work, domestic labor needs to be performed for free—but the people performing it must not question or challenge the conditions under which they perform this labor. The easiest way to do that is to craft societal expectations that the people whose labor is to be exploited—women, in this case—are innately better at tasks like cleaning the house, preparing food, doing laundry, and child-rearing.
Not only are women socialized into performing this work for free because they’re “better at it,” but such domestic labor has become a warped representation of love. “Men are able to accept our services and take pleasure in them because they presume that housework is easy for us, that we enjoy it because we do it for their love,” she writes. “Only when men see our work as work—our love as work—and most important our determination to refuse both, will they change their attitude towards us.”
Housework and Service Work
Federici’s argument doesn’t exactly map onto service work because those workers are given a wage. She acknowledges that all workers, under capitalism, are exploited to some extent, but trading your labor for wages is at least engaging in some sort of exchange, however unequal. “To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live,” she writes.
However, service workers are some of the lowest-paid people in our ecosystem, and their labor is both mocked as simplistic and unskilled yet vital to a functioning society, much like housework. We could not function without the people who stock our shelves, run our gas stations, or bus our tables. And yet we feel comfortable not only making these jobs as financially precarious as possible—most service workers don’t have benefits or stable salaries, and depend on the whims of a manager to schedule their shifts—but routinely downplaying their value.
We see this crop up in the U.S.’s cyclical debates about raising the minimum wage. Federally, the U.S. minimum wage is $7.25, which hasn’t changed since 2009 despite the cost of living increasing 150% since then. (If the minimum wage changed to meet inflation, it’d be $10.84 today.) Even back in 2009, the minimum wage wasn’t much to celebrate. That year, the living wage in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, was $11.21 an hour (defined by the city of Madison as the wage you need to make 110% of the poverty line). And that was before Madison became one of the fastest-growing cities in the state.
Many states and municipalities have since raised their minimum wage above the federal limit. Still, routine arguments against raising the minimum wage are predicated on devaluing the work performed by the people most likely to receive it. For some, there’s nothing more insulting than a “kid paid to flip burgers” making a living wage.
Federici argues that, despite the inherent exploitation of waged work in capitalism, wages help draw a line. “But exploited as you might be, you are not that work,” she writes. “Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can get.”
And yet, there are aspects of service work that can’t be shrugged off so easily. While service workers get paid, there’s often more expected of their labor, specifically the bestowing of hospitality. Despite receiving some of the lowest wages in society, service workers are frequently asked to perform extra labor. Just last year, I wrote about the old idiom, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” and the idea of employers trying to own the time of low-wage workers rather than their labor.
But it goes further than that. Workers are often expected to show just how much they fucking love their jobs by smiling, being courteous, and cultivating customer experiences. The grind of service work is fetishized (a notable recent example is the FX show “The Bear,” which delves into the often-unseen dynamics behind running a restaurant) as a labor of love. That performance of love is seen as a justification for low wages in turn. It’s an expectation that’s essentially built into service work, without there being any tangible compensation in the form of higher wages.
Let’s be clear: I’m not advocating to throw away hospitality and strip service work to its bare bones—that’s certainly not what Federici is arguing for, either, when she speaks of how housework is undervalued. She does not imagine a world where the labor of domestic work is made as simple as possible, because that denies how important it is. Hospitality is equally important—but the answer to its persistent undervaluing isn’t as simple as just paying people more.
‘A Natural at Hospitality’
Federici’s argument doesn’t end at demanding wages for housework. Instead, she lays bare how the broader dynamics of housework function in our society—giving it a wage is just a mechanism for rendering it visible. “To demand wages for housework is to make it visible that our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function, and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society,” she writes.
One of the reasons I wrote this piece is because I had a conversation with someone years ago about whether or not hospitality could be taught. I argued that it could, like any other skill. My colleague disagreed, claiming that some people have more of a knack for hospitality than others.
The true answer is probably somewhere in the middle. I’m sure some people take to service and hospitality work in a way that suggests they’re naturally better suited to it, and I’m sure others would never consider service work. Federici also believes that people would divide themselves along these lines, but she instead urges those harmed by patriarchy to think of themselves as housewives, no matter if they perform domestic labor or not. “We might not serve one man, but we are all in a servant relation with respect to the whole male world,” she writes.
I’d still argue that hospitality can be taught. Assuming it’s an innate skill feels akin to the argument that women are by nature better at domestic labor. Not only is hospitality an act we demand beyond the normal confines of service work, but we also admonish people who don’t perform it to our satisfaction. “If you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, your abnormality,” writes Federici of housewives who don’t like housework.
Furthermore, it isn’t about creating a divide between people who love hospitality and service work and those who don’t; it’s more about appropriately valuing the people who perform low-wage work. To be blunt, that’s more of us than we might care to reckon with.
You’ve probably seen the argument that, at any given moment, most people are closer to financial insecurity than they ever will be to becoming a billionaire. Federici talks about the groups of women who imagine themselves “beyond” housework, liberated from traditional patriarchal standards for one reason or another. But she also argues that our struggle is tied together, and that those who don’t perform housework but still live under the thumb of patriarchy have much more reason to align themselves with housewives than with the cis men who extract their labor. The same could be said for workers who trade their labor for wages.
Assuming you’re “beyond” the struggle of service workers is false, therefore—and assuming that hospitality is something innate allows us to place less—or no—value on it. It’s why we can get so indignant about paying service workers a fair wage, while simultaneously demanding—and even holding part of their wages ransom, in the form of tips—that they perform hospitality to our standard.
So yes, workers should be paid a premium for being friendly and providing hospitality, just as they would be if they acquired any other skill that makes them better at their jobs. But, as Federici writes, it’s not about reducing the skill to a wage. Assuming a simple equation of “hospitality = higher wages” misses the point, and flattens this issue into a straightforward one about financial leverage. “It is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us,” as Federici says.
For Federici, a demand for wages for housework would be to make housework visible and give women agency. It also attempts to dismantle the systems under which capitalism works: If there’s no free labor in the home, how does society keep going? What would we have to reshuffle and take apart to make this work?
“Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class,” she notes. She also argues that housework already produces capital: It’s what fuels our economy and makes paid labor possible for others. We just seem to expect that labor for free from housewives.
The pitfalls of service work and the expectation of hospitality don’t quite follow the same beats, and Federici directly argues that wages for housework cannot be equated to other wage struggles. However, she has much to teach us about how labor gets socialized and removed from public consumption while still fueling every moment of our lives. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between how we, in the same breath, devalue certain kinds of work while deeming it essential and necessary.
So yes, let’s think about how to pay people who perform service work more. But let’s also examine how other kinds of work, beyond domestic labor, are removed from the social gaze—and what this obfuscation actually serves in the long term.