The hegemony of the mop

Almost a fifth of the households in Moscow and St. Petersburg regularly turn to the services of hired workers, even with an average income level. Most often, they need help around the house, as well as looking after the elderly and children. In most cases, Russian women from the same region of residence are hired to do this work. A study by HSE and RANEPA specialists shows that female wage labor for households, which is commonly considered a secondary form of employment, is an important part of urban economies.

Almost one-fifth of households in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with mostly average income, use female wage labor in the household. Yulia Florinskaya, Nikita Mkrtchyan and Marina Kartseva (employees of the Higher School of Economics and the RANEPA) come to this conclusion in the article “Women as hired workers in the households of Moscow and St. Petersburg”, published in the scientific journal “Woman in Russian Society” (No. 2 for 2022 ).

The study, which for the first time in Russian practice determined the scale of such a phenomenon as wage labor in households of large metropolitan areas of Russia, was based on a survey of residents of these cities who, over the past three years, hired other people for a fee for jobs that are routinely performed in such households by family members. The survey involved 3.8 thousand people, their phone numbers were selected using a random systematic stratified sample. The results of the work are unusual: although in the minds of Russians a housekeeper, a domestic servant, and in general, hired personnel in a household is associated with a high family income, the work of migrants and is rare, in reality in Moscow and St. such work is mainly residents of the two capitals.

First of all, for the two largest cities in Russia, hiring third parties in the household to perform any work is a mass practice. According to the results of the survey, the services of women workers were in demand in 17% of households. Formally, men are attracted to households much more – the fact is that respondents were asked about involvement in household affairs on a paid basis, including for such types of work as repairs, where men predominated (28% of households from the respondents involved male hands in households) . Among the “household work” there were also “female” specializations, which in the ordinary mind are not classified as “domestic servants” – this is primarily tutoring. In any case, 17% of Moscow and St. Petersburg families used female hired labor in households, excluding tutoring and repairs – about 7-8%: even with this amendment, the phenomenon goes beyond “elite consumption for the few rich.”

This also shows that, according to the survey data, the majority of households (61%) that used the services of women workers estimated their income as average: when answering the standard question (used, among other things, in the Rosstat questionnaires) about their size, they indicated that they had enough money for food, clothing and household appliances. 23% of respondents rated their incomes as high – in particular, sufficient to buy a car or more, and 16% – as low, since they only have enough for food. Thus, hired domestic workers are the lot of the middle class rather than the profitable elite.

The prevalence among domestic workers of foreigners or at least labor migrants from other regions of Russia is also greatly exaggerated. The survey showed that almost two-thirds (64%) of households that buy women’s services in the household employ women permanently residing in Moscow or St. Petersburg, in the same city where they live. In only 14% of households in the two cities, the hired woman was a Russian woman from another region, and in 16% she was a citizen of another state (no breakdown by citizenship is provided). Meanwhile, this is well known to households and is clearly discussed within it: only 6% of the respondents who deal with domestic servants turned out to be unaware of whether she is a Muscovite, a nonresident or a foreign citizen.

Of course, residents of their own region were most often involved by households as tutors, among internal migrants this type of employment was 2.5 times less common, and among foreign migrants it was practically absent. At the same time, domestic work was twice as frequent for foreign women as for Russian women, both local and migrant. However, domestic servants in the strict sense of the term, that is, those who do “housework” (cleaning, washing, cooking, caring for and looking after children), are in most cases still Muscovites and St. Petersburg women; residents of Krasnoyarsk and Samarkand are in the minority. The authors suggest that children are a “sensitive” area for households, and here local women have an advantage compared to migrants: households “trust” them less often (an alternative definition – this choice is a consequence of the phobias of a significant part of the middle class towards migrants, who, in among the middle class, at least in Moscow, it is publicly accepted to deny – the authors of the work avoid).

For only one specialization, residents of other regions and countries are preferable – for migrants, both internal and especially foreign, employment as nurses turned out to be significant, and the share of this employment among foreign women is three times higher than among women from their own region. Florinskaya, Mkrtchyan and Kartseva describe a rather important social phenomenon: migrant nurses ask for their work, which is in demand in all sectors of society, significantly less than Russian citizens, and for most relatively poor households, the use of their labor has no alternative – to “pull” a Muscovite nurse they just can’t. But to carry out repair work, local women and migrant women were involved with approximately the same frequency: wallpaper pasted by a Ukrainian woman could not be distinguished from wallpaper pasted by a Petersburg woman, even for a specialist.

Finally, wage labor in households is exclusively informal: most often, households hired female workers with the help of recommendations from their acquaintances or relatives (63%), more than two-thirds of households did not enter into any contracts when hiring female workers. The xenophobia of Muscovites is exaggerated: foreign women workers lived in a household in a third of cases (2.4% of households provided housing for residents of their region, 18.8% for migrants from the Russian Federation).

The wary attitude of Russians towards working in the households of hired employees is more of a late Soviet legacy. After the relatively common middle-class tradition of using “servants” in large cities of the USSR disappeared at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, the term has been somewhat offensive since the 1960s, being replaced by euphemisms like “coming woman”, right up to the present time. The restoration of the practice is expected, while, as the study shows, this phenomenon (if only because of its scale) is an important, albeit underestimated, part of the modern urban economy of Russian megacities.

Anastasia Manuylova, Dmitry Butrin