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I'm not sure that distinction works. First because you are paying for the time people have spent creating those goods as well as the raw materials. Second because, although in principle all jobs in which work is exchanged for cash are equally exploitative, in fact this is not the case. For example, the laws protectin your employment are probably a lot more well-defined than the laws protecting hers, and you have a lot more recourse if you feel you are being exploited unfairly - what redress would your maid be able to obtain if you deciced to chuck her out? How far would the money you give her go if it were asked to support a legal case against you rather than a family in the Philipines?
Another and interlinked question is probably about the relationship of corporate and private capital. Your job pays you for your time (and knowledge, and expertise etc), because at some point Mr. X could no longer manage every aspect of his business, so hired other people, who hired other people, who hired other people, who ultimately hired you. You have skills either that the other people do not have, that the other people do not have the time to address to every requirement, or that the other people can spend more time doing things that will earn the business more money than your skills do. It's a pretty structured system.
Which is where focus comes in. If you are positing a straight system whereby the hour you would spend cleaning instead becomes an hour where you earn 50p (to use the primary school maths book rules) and your cleaner/maid takes 5p, then it makes financial sense for you to do that. Likewise, if you are working late, it may make more sense to order a pizza than to go home, prepare food and eat it. In both cases, a straight choice is being made between doing something and paying somebody else to do it for you while you do something more lucrative. The next step might be to pay somebody to do something for you while you do something more fun - say, you watch telly or go clubbing while your cleaner/maid canges the cat litter tray. In an abstract sense, this is probably a bit like the fact that you like running water, but you don't want the hassle of running a mill, so you pay a service provider to pipe water to your home. In a more concrete sense, however, you are still paying another person who lives in your flat to take over the care of your flat because you can afford to and they can't afford not to.
On one level, that'ws just capitalism. On another, however, I'd suggest that arguing that all relationship are not only in principle but in practice equally exploitative may be somewhat exculpatory. |
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