Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

Moreover, it is possible to allow a fixed sum for service, as $18 per month, out of which the employee may choose to have a small sum spent in hiring by the day some one to wash windows and clean verandas, or she may choose to economize her time and strength and do this work herself. In either case the financial outcome to the employer is the same, while either arrangement makes the employee a partner in the domestic company and gives her an active interest in its welfare.

It is possible to apply the principle in still other ways. If the general servant likes to cook but dislikes other parts of housework, she may contribute to the Woman’s Exchange and with part of the money received hire with her employer an assistant to come in a certain number of hours each day to care for the rooms, the silver and brass, and wait on the table. It is possible also to give the cook a certain amount of time for making articles to be sold at the Woman’s Exchange, the employer furnishing capital and implements of work and receiving a certain share in the profits. In employment bureaus it would be possible to give a certain percentage of the profits of the bureau to all employees who have kept their names on the books of the bureau and remained at least one year in the place found by them through its agency.

The ways indeed are numberless in which the principle of profit sharing can be applied; and if the ingenuity and fertility of resource possessed by so many employers were once turned in this direction, the good resulting would be incalculable.

Great as would be the gain for domestic service if this principle could be adopted in private families, the advantage would be if possible even greater could it be introduced into hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants, and also the dining-car, parlor-car, and sleeping-car service. In all hotels, restaurants, and public institutions the waste is enormous—perhaps proportionately greater than in private families, largely because as a rule the superintendents of such establishments are also employees on wages. Ignorance is often the chief cause of waste, and the best corrective of this ignorance is the experience gained through profit sharing.

But the greatest advantage of profit sharing in restaurants and hotels, dining-cars and sleeping-cars, is that through it the feeing system could be abolished. In all such business enterprises where the feeing system is established there is in effect a combination of the general public and the employees of the establishments against the proprietors of them. Such is the case because the feeing system prevents the proprietors from receiving a fair amount of patronage unless each employee is feed for performing the service he ought freely to give and for which he will presumably be paid by his employer. The money profit in all these establishments depends largely on the good service rendered by the employees, and thus it would be possible to divide a positive profit as well as a negative saving. The feeing system, if it prevails in any branch of personal service, drags down with it in the social and industrial scale every other branch of the service. The substitution of profit sharing in hotels and restaurants and in the dining-car and sleeping-car service for the system of fees so increasingly prevalent would do more than any other one thing to remove the social stigma from domestic service and make of all such employees self-respecting men and women.

It may be urged against the proposition to introduce profit sharing into domestic service that few employees are of such stability of character as to warrant making the experiment. But the great desideratum is to introduce into the service some principle that will develop the best qualities of those already in it, that will sift out the worthless and compel them to undertake unskilled labor, that will draw from other occupations, where they are less needed, able persons whose natural tastes and abilities would attract them to this. M. Levasseur is quoted as saying that of one hundred firms that begin business, ten per cent succeed, fifty per cent “vegetate,” and forty per cent go into bankruptcy. The statement characterizes with possibly sufficient accuracy the result in the case of the establishment of a corresponding number of households. Could an industrial partnership be formed between employer and employee, with the agreement to divide, not positive profits, but negative savings, something might be done to save the forty per cent who now give up housekeeping and go into the bankruptcy of hotels and boarding houses, and also to lessen the fifty per cent who “vegetate” through the employment in the household of obsolete industrial methods.

It may also be said that profit sharing appeals to a selfish motive and therefore is objectionable. But much of the waste and extravagance in the household comes from ignorance; profit sharing is one way of teaching the value of raw materials. The comfortable theory is often entertained that to be born poor is to be born with a knowledge of all household affairs. As a matter of fact, there is doubtless far more waste and extravagance in the households of the poor than in those of the rich. But extravagance is in reality a relative term; “tenderloin steak for breakfast and rump roast for dinner,” which may be simple fare in the household of the employer, becomes an impossible luxury to the employee in such a family when she goes to a home of her own. Profit sharing would be of value in the household not because it would appeal to a selfish motive, but because it would teach the value of materials used and incidentally do something to prevent this prevalent waste and extravagance.

Neither of these objections to profit sharing holds in the face of all that can be said in its favor. The general arguments for it are many. It is usually assumed that the interests of the employer and those of the employee are antagonistic. The introduction of profit sharing could easily prove that this assumption in domestic service is wrong, as it has already made similar proof in other occupations. If the employers of other forms of labor find themselves relieved of much of the worry and friction that have previously resulted from the mutual relation of employer and employee, it would seem reasonable to expect a like result in the household. If it has been found elsewhere that the extra services called out, and the manner in which they are called out, constitute an invaluable educational discipline, and promote zeal, efficiency, and economy, a similar result might be looked for here. If other employees have learned through it to be careful of their methods of work, punctual in the performance of their duties, and economical in the use of materials; if it has become “a moral educator, and substituted harmony and mutual good-will for distrust and contention in the relations of employer and employee,” then, indeed, may it not be considered, not as a panacea, but as one measure among many that may be of help in lessening some of the serious difficulties that now attend domestic service?

At the present time a public discussion of domestic service meets with little else but jest and ridicule, while in private life the social stigma is cast on all engaged in it, as is the case in no other occupation. To attempt to dignify labor by saying, “we must dignify labor,” savors of the old problem of trying to raise one’s self by the boot-straps. No concrete method by which this is to be done is ever suggested, and until some plan is adopted by which the personal dignity and independence of the employee is recognized, and his industrial and financial independence is secured, domestic service will continue to be under the industrial and social ban. When this improved condition is brought about, there will be established what Professor Jevons considers the best of all trade-unions—that between the employer and employee.

It must be frankly said that the plan of adopting profit sharing in the household is a theoretical one; and to say it is “mere theory” is often considered an unanswerable argument with which to meet every new proposition. But theory lies at the basis of all successful action; difficulties have come in household service often because it has been conducted without theory—in a short-sighted, haphazard, hand-to-mouth fashion. It is known, however, that the experiment has been tried successfully in a private family, and this perhaps saves the proposition from the charge of being only theory. It has been tried by Mrs. X, a university graduate, after one and a half years’ experience in housekeeping. The experiment was made in a college town where the cost of provisions was rather above than below the average. The family comprised four adults, including the Irish maid rather above the average in intelligence and ambition. The plan provided for an allowance of $40 a month for living expenses, including groceries, meats, fish, poultry, butter, milk, cream, ice, candles, kerosene oil, and incidental expenses. The last included breakage and the replacement of worn-out kitchen utensils. The best materials of all kinds were purchased, and practically nothing was ever thrown away. The food was simple but abundant. The co-operation between employer and maid consisted on the part of the employer in planning the menu, especially the making up of left-over materials, the pricing of all articles in the market, and keeping the accounts accurately; the maid gave all orders and carried them out. The profit sharing consisted in dividing equally between employer and maid whatever had been saved at the end of the month out of the $40 allowed for running expenses. The results of four months’ experiment were as follows: