The Globe and Mail June 23, 2001
You wouldn't wish it on a dog
In the plush precincts of Los Angeles, every household has its nanny,
and every home its dog. Guess which one is better off? As Doug Saunders
reports, Beverly Hills canines lounge in comfort, matching their supermodel
and movie-mogul owners perk for perk. It's the human beings who clean up
after them - and who care for children, make meals, tend gardens and
generally keep these 21st-century lifestyles going - that are treated like
animals
By Doug Saunders
A week in the life
The nanny
Salary: $200
Rent: $50
Food: $50
Medical: No insurance or coverage
Transportation: City bus
Amount sent home to El Salvador: $50 or more
The dog
Boarding: $490
Walking: $200
Food: $50 (incl. treats)
Medical: $25 vet fees (when healthy)
Grooming: $100 per session
Other services available: psychiatrist, masseuse, spa, antidepressants,
human
sleeping companions
Transportation: Car or limo
The core of our culture rests in a handful of neighbourhoods along the
foothills of the Santa Monica mountains. We all know their names: Beverly
Hills, Bel Air, the Hollywood Hills, Glendale, Pacific Palisades, Malibu.
And we know the handiwork of their residents: Almost all of the cinema and
television consumed in North America is made here, transmitting an
ever-changing set of ideas about how to eat, drink, dress, fornicate and
construct your private life.
If you drive through these lush streets today, though, you won't see any of
the wealthy residents, famous or otherwise, except through the tinted
window of an occasional passing German car. On the sidewalks, you will find
only two life forms: Dogs, well-bred, at the hands of professional walkers;
and brown-skinned people, either men tending to gardens, pools and houses,
or women strolling about with white-skinned infants between rounds of
housecleaning.
Dogs and domestics: These are the bit parts of prosperity. In this famous
quarter of Los Angeles, there is a new domestic balance of power. Rising
economic tides have delivered a high-maintenance, domineering kind of pet,
and a shrinking world has created a low-cost, highly displaced kind of
servant.
Nanny-housekeeper wages in L.A. are so low -- $200 (U.S.) a week is fairly
standard -- that the better-off nannies often employ nannies of their own.
And, of course, they draw no benefits. Their bosses' dogs, on the other
hand, enjoy vacations at $70-a-day dog resorts, treats bought from
specialty bakeries and generous health care.
According to census data, the number of gardeners and domestic workers
working in Los Angeles (the North American leader for this type of work)
doubled between 1980 and 1990, while the amount Americans spend to coddle
and care for their pets has risen to nearly $40-billion. And while most of
us have hardly begun to notice the global changes in our own lives, they
are experienced profoundly by the lesser members of our households.
ROSA Rosa Diaz began her week just after dawn on Tuesday morning. It has
been 10 months since she made the journey from El Salvador, a struggling
corner of the Third World, to Los Angeles, a florid centre of the First.
Each Tuesday morning, it is as if she is making the whole trip over again.
She spends her weekends in Pico-Union, a parched neighbourhood in downtown
Los Angeles that looks like it has been placed in the wrong continent.
Flimsy stucco buildings, no vegetation save the occasional dusty palm.
Sidewalks are lined with the trappings of central America: shops selling
tortillas and pupusas, communion-dress rental stores, women quietly
offering fruit slices and contraband clothing, men in black cowboy hats. In
the midst of this, on the third floor of a dirty pink building with small
windows, Rosa awakes at 5:30 in the tidy two-room apartment she shares with
three other women, only one of whom lives here all week.
Rosa is 26, and she has the soft Mayan features and graceful humour common
to many Salvadorans. "It's still very strange that I'm doing a job like
this," she says in quiet Spanish as she waits for the bus with dozen other
women. "I once thought that I would end up having a domestic worker, but
now I am one."
In San Salvador, her family had once been reasonably comfortable: Her
father a factory supervisor, who, before his untimely death in 1996, wanted
all four of his children, including his oldest daughter Rosa, to go to
university. Instead, like thousands of other Central Americans ravaged by
political, economic and natural disasters, she went to America. She has
left behind her husband, whom she married a few months before she left; he
is waiting to join her when she gets her papers (she has a good chance,
since the United States allowed many Salvadoran illegals to get work visas
after this year's devastating earthquake). In the 21st century, immigration
is more often than not led by women, and domestic jobs have become bottom
rung on the immigrant ladder.
Rosa has loaded her backpack with the foods that her job doesn't offer:
Salvadoran tamales, a tub of rice and vegetables fried in lard, some
leftover sweet potatoes that she and her roommates made for lunch with
friends on Sunday. She packs an English textbook, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez
novel in English, and some magazines devoted to telenovelas,the Spanish
soap operas. By 7 a.m., she will have finished the long weekly bus trip to
a very different Los Angeles, just inside the imposing gates of Bel Air.
Here, surrounded by a jungle of palms, bougainvilleas and bird-of-paradise
plants, she waits by a coffee wagon, with a dozen other women from
Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador, to be picked up by her
employer for her week's stay.
CUSTER Custer's day begins at 7 a.m. sharp, when he and the other dogs are
awakened in their wide, comfortable private pens. Gradually, they saunter
into a grassy yard, to the sound of a bubbling fountain, for their morning
constitutional. There is a koi pond nearby, teeming with the colourful
Japanese fish, and carefully tended flower beds. Dogs are not usually too
fussy about scenery, but you can tell they are mellowed by the shady
landscaping and rolling valleys here in the Malibu Hills. A few sprawling
villas pepper the skyline, and a lot of grassy, open space, filled with
horse-riding trails and wilderness.
Custer is a golden retriever, one of two owned by Jay Wolpert, a successful
Hollywood screenwriter. While Wolpert is away, Custer and his fellow
retriever Locksley stay here at the Canyon View Ranch, a canine spa,
boarding retreat and training centre that advertises itself as "a country
club for dogs."
Its owners, Joe Timko and Randy Porter, were TV-industry figures who
developed a ken for dog training, and a desire for better canine services.
To stay at Canyon View and receive its training sessions, owners of dogs
like Custer pay $70 a day, or almost $500 a week.
"There was nothing like this available, and people had to put their dogs in
noisy places in industrial neighbourhoods," Timko says. "Now, people are
trying to copy it, but they're not coming close."
When Custer is at home, in the Hollywood Hills, his life is at the centre
of the household's activities: meals of gourmet dog food tailored to his
delicate digestive system, daily drives along Mulholland Drive to the
Laurel Canyon dog park, where the show-business elite give their pets long
walks through stunning scenery, often after dressing them in the city's
latest dog fashions and grooming them, at considerable expense, at one of
the exclusive parlours along Santa Monica Boulevard's dog-care strip.
Whenever Wolpert, 59, leaves town for business or vacation, he first makes
the hour-long drive deep into the hills to drop off the dogs.
Many of Custer's playmates at Canyon View are dogs belonging to show-biz
owners, who have led the way in bettering their pets' lives. Custer has
probably met Daisy, the Jack Russell terrier belonging to the singer Lou
Rawls, and the bouvier des flandres belonging to the actor Christopher
Lloyd, who has his dogs picked up and dropped off in a liveried stretch
limo.
Hollywood figures like to drop by the spa to see the dogs cavorting in
plush surroundings. Nobody seems bothered by the price. "It's like getting
your kid into a private school," says the comedian Sinbad, whose two pugs
are regular guests.
ROSA Rosa is a live-in domestic worker, although her employers don't call
her that -- like most people with nannies, they wouldn't think of
themselves as employers. Most wealthy people don't consider themselves
members of the upper class, and don't like to think of servants as
servants. She is simply "Rosa, who takes care of the kids," or "the girl
who cleans the house."
Five days a week, Tuesday to Saturday, Rosa lives in the back bedroom of a
five-bedroom Cape Cod-style house belonging to a television executive and
his wife, where she does almost all the cleaning and other chores; feeds,
bathes and takes care of the daughters, aged 2 and 3; and keeps an eye on
the 11-year-old son. The hours are very long, from just after dawn, when
the girls awake and the parents leave, to late evening, when she is
expected to put the kids to bed and monitor them through the night when the
parents are away, as they often are.
For this, Rosa is paid $225 a week, up from the $200 she made until March.
This is a middling, industry-standard wage in Los Angeles: A few lucky
live-ins make as much as $450 or $500 (if they speak English, have
immigration papers or own a car), while at least two of the women on Rosa's
bus were making $150 a week, a rate that can be found advertised most weeks
in the Los Angeles Times. Rosa knows women who started last year at $80 to
$100 a week, rates often paid by other Latin Americans who know how
desperate their compatriots can be. And even lower salaries have been
reported, since there are no longer any real standards for domestic pay.
"When you first get here, it sounds like good money," she says. "You have
no idea, because even $50 a week would be a very good salary back at home.
So you take what you can find." Like most women, she got her job through
word-of-mouth contacts, rather than through an agency. Although there are
officially labour regulations and a minimum wage, they are almost never
observed, as domestic bosses don't realize labour law applies to them.
Rosa's wages supposedly include room and board, but this means little: Few
houses in L.A., or most modern cities, have separate, private servant's
quarters. A separate bathroom (which Rosa has) is common, but kitchens must
be shared with the employer family -- usually an awkward situation.
Adequate food is rarely provided, and, of course, these live-ins usually
have to pay rent for their weekend quarters. (Rosa's share of her rent is
$200 a month.)
The current wages provide a bare subsistence living, and most domestics,
including Rosa, send hundreds of dollars a month back home. These
remittances from U.S. emigres, known as migra-dollars, currently total more
than $2-billion annually, making them El Salvador's leading form of foreign
aid.
Troubles in Central America and Mexico have driven down the cost of
domestic labour dramatically, to the point that even Americans who consider
themselves far from wealthy can afford live-in servants. Los Angeles, the
major entry-point city of English North America, is in the forefront here.
Observers say that it isn't uncommon nowadays for factory workers in L.A.
to have live-in nanny-housecleaners; people in small L.A. apartments often
have live-ins, who in some cases share a bedroom with the children.
And, in a telling development, it is now possible to find better-paid
nannies who have their own live-in nannies, because it is almost impossible
to take care of others' children while raising your own.
Last week, the non-profit Human Rights Watch released a study, titled
Hidden in the Home, of the domestic workers who are brought into the United
States on special visas for diplomatic employees. Their median wage, it
found, is $2.14 an hour, and their median workday is 14 hours long. And
this is a better-off class of nanny. Very few of the 80,000 to 100,000
live-in domestics in Los Angeles, including Rosa, have citizenship papers.
The only people you'll find with fully legal domestics here are those who
think they might run for public office some day.
CUSTER After his morning meal, Custer is led out to the ranch's main
training-and-play yard, for a series of activities the dogs clearly look
forward to. An employee is paid to work in the play area all day and keep
the dogs entertained by throwing balls and hosting games. In small groups
or individually, the dogs are led out for intensive training sessions
lasting 20 to 45 minutes, twice a day.
At the centre of the yard is Canyon View's most famous feature, the
bone-shaped in-ground swimming pool, in which the dogs eagerly romp. A
bone-shaped fountain sits next to it. Up on a hill is an elaborate play
structure, which the older dogs shade themselves beneath; a nearby tree is
rigged to provide a fine mist of cool water, to cool down play-heated dogs.
It is a delightful scene of canine happiness, free from barks and boredom.
The dogs must first pass a consultation session, and demonstrate their
sociability with other dogs. After all, this isn't for everyone.
"They really do lead pretty good lives," Wolpert says of his retrievers.
"It costs a little more, but it means that when we go away we can truly
have a vacation without guilt. Just ask the dogs -- you can tell how
excited they are when they come here."
ROSA By mid-afternoon, Rosa has slipped into her usual sense of numbing
tedium. The girls are asleep, the mess is under control, and she has
nothing to do but wait. When the girls were awake, she took them to a park,
where she could talk with fellow Latina women, but most of the time she is
out of contact with other adults.
It will get worse when the parents arrive home tonight, and Rosa is
expected to disappear into the background. Although the mother speaks
passable Spanish, they have never engaged in conversation, beyond staccato
commands. Like most domestics, she is never invited to eat with the family.
"I think they're embarrassed that I'm here," she says.
"You're inside and you're enclosed. It gives you a desperate feeling," says
Meruim, 25, a fellow Salvadoran who lives in Rosa's neighbourhood. Meruim
worked as a live-in last year for $200 a week before escaping to the more
lucrative and sociable world of contract house-cleaning, where she works
for a women-run cooperative. "This is harder work, but at least I get to
spend time with other people, and go home at night," she says.
Meruim found her live-in job especially depressing because she has a
university degree in public administration from San Salvador, but her
employers refused to speak to her in anything but the most perfunctory and
patronizing tones. A great many domestic workers today have at least some
postsecondary education, an indication of the enormous chasm of opportunity
between first- and third-world economies.
"This is part of a new worldwide pattern: women who are from relatively
educated, if not affluent, backgrounds, often with their own domestic
workers, who find themselves in poverty and working as domestics
themselves," says Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, a sociology professor at the
University of Southern California. She has just published Domestica, a
major study of domestic workers in the better-off communities of L.A. She
interviewed and surveyed 221 women working in houses, and her research was
no doubt aided by her own background: Her mother was a Chilean emigré who
worked as a household servant, and she herself, as an L.A. professional,
has employed Latin American nannies and housekeepers.
Despite this experience, she was shocked to find that the No. 1 complaint
among domestics is not that they are denied a minimum wage and benefits,
but that they aren't treated like members of the family. In good measure,
this is because the new generation of domestics tend to be relatively
educated women with aspirations of their own, who want to think of
themselves as not servants but equals.
"In one sense, the women won't change -- it's a situation where you have
employers who don't identify as employers, and many women who do this work
don't identify themselves as employees. I had not set out to find that. It
ran contrary to what I believed," she says.
The North American myth of a classless society has made the master-servant
relationship awkward and cold. Both parties would rather the grim disparity
did not exist, and live in a constant state of denial, unable to either
bridge the gap or formalize it.
One of the nannies interviewed by Hondagneu-Sotelo is Mirabel Centeno, a
Guatemalan woman who began working as a live-in in 1989, cleaning a 23-room
house for $80 a week. On her first day in the house, she noticed the
Beethoven the senora had on her CD player. "They had Richard Clayderman on
and I recognized it, and when I said that, she stopped in her tracks, her
jaw fell open, and she just stared at me," Centeno remembers. But the
employer did not discuss it, and never mentioned music again. Apparently,
it just did not compute.
Thirty-five years ago, almost all the women working as domestics would have
been black, riding buses in from L.A.'s southern neighbourhoods. The
civil-rights movement put a quick end to that: By the mid-1970s, no
self-respecting African-American woman would allow her daughter to become a
servant, even if it paid more than other jobs. The price of household
labour shot upward, giving rise to a key cliche of the era: "It's hard to
find good help these days."
That plaint was answered in the early 1980s, with the collapse of the
Mexican economy. The Latin-American domestic tidal wave began. Between 1970
and 1990, the percentage of black women working as domestics fell from 35
per cent to four per cent, while Latin-American women increased their
representation in this business from 9 per cent to 68 per cent.
By the end of the 1990s, though, many Mexican women had followed in black
mothers' footsteps, and made sure their daughters would never work in
someone's house. "When you ride the buses, you never meet domestics from
East L.A. [the established Mexican-American barrio]. People who live there
just don't do that work any more," says Anayansi Prado, who is directing a
documentary, Maid in America,about the lives of domestics. Today, fewer
than half of domestic workers, by most estimates, are Mexican.
Central Americans have taken over the "good help" role, expanding the
popularity of household servants to levels not seen in 50 years, but just
ask them if they intend to keep playing the part. "Are you kidding? If I'm
still doing this job when I'm 30, I'd rather go jump in front of this bus,"
says Rosa. She hopes to get more education, find a better-paying job that
lets her go home at night, and raise children of her own, who will
certainly not do household work.
"None of the Latina immigrants I interviewed had aspired to the job, none
want their daughters to do it, and the younger ones hope to leave the
occupation altogether in a few years," Hondagneu-Sotelo says. "They do take
pride in their work, and they are extremely proud of what their earnings
enable them to accomplish for their families. Yet they are not proud to be
domestic workers."
CUSTER At 5, after an afternoon of training and play interrupted by
cool-down breaks in an air-conditioned room, Custer and the rest of the
dogs are led inside for their evening meal. This is no simple ritual. The
standard Canyon Ranch diet is top-of-the-line dog food, containing only
lamb and rice, but few of the clients stick to the standard.
"We get every kind of special food request you can imagine, and then some,"
says Timko. "We get vegetarian diets, and raw foods [a dietary movement in
which people, and apparently their pets, eat only uncooked fruits and
vegetables], and we get up to six supplements at a time that have to be
crushed and mixed up and blended. And some people want the food heated up."
Or garnished with the latest pet-food fad -- dog gravy.
Custer and Locksley are no exception. "The joy of golden retrievers is
their wonderful personalities, but the downside is that they are known for
their sensitive stomachs," says Wolpert. "We have them on a special diet,
and it costs us a pretty penny."
After dinner, sated with food and exhausted from a day of happy play, the
retrievers are ushered into their private pens, given freshly laundered
towels and blankets, and given another night of quiet sleep. Canyon View
Ranch eschews some of the gimmicks of other luxury dog services -- humans
paid to share a bed with company-starved dogs; video-screening sessions for
the animals -- but it does offer a standard of habitation that would
satisfy many humans.
Americans spend $29-billion annually on goods and services for their pets,
not including veterinarian bills, which make up an additional $11-billion.
These numbers have risen steeply in recent years, driven by the expanding
range of treats, toys and plush services people are willing to buy, and by
an increasingly anthropomorphic attitude toward domestic animals.
Wolpert concedes that he spends lavishly on his dogs, but he is far from
dog-centred by current L.A. standards. Aside from the Canyon View
extravagance and the diet, his dogs' indulgences are limited to monthly
trips to U-Wash Doggie in Hollywood (about $40 for a luxurious,
self-administered wash), and to medical expenses that would be the envy of
many American citizens -- up to $100 a month, even when the dogs are
healthy.
There is plenty more he could spend his money on: A sudden emergence of dog
bakeries, offering biscotti and bagels in canine flavours; psychiatric
services, complete with pet-antidepressant prescriptions; massage and
aromatherapy services that would please a non-fur-covered supermodel, and
that old L.A. favourite, the deluxe dog burial plot. Most of these
extravagances have spread to other cities, including in Canada: Almost
everywhere in North America, it seems, people have more money to spend on
their household friends, if not on household help.
ROSA As she rides the bus, Rosa pulls out photos of the girls she cares
for. Unlike the older son, whom she sees mostly as a mess-creating
nuisance, she speaks of the girls as if she were their mother, delighting
in a new word or facial expression, first steps, reactions to new and
undiscovered foods (last week, it was the thrill of the mango).
"I really hope I see these girls when they are older, because they are like
my children now," she says. "I will have to move to a better job in a year
or two, but I don't want to lose the girls. I love them. Not the house, but
the children."
Here is the terrible dilemma of today's domestic work: It is too degrading
and ill-paying to be a lifelong career for a literate young woman; on the
other hand, it can create emotional bonds like no other job. They are
false, of course, and when the job ends they are severed forever: Many L.A.
residents are horrified when their children throw tantrums over the loss of
a former nanny, especially if they are inexplicably fluent in Spanish and
demanding carné asada for lunch. Few consider how this must feel for the
departed Central American woman.
"This is especially tough for women taking care of young children -- they
express a longing," says Hondagneu-Sotelo. "The biggest complaint I hear by
far is that they never get to see the children again."
For Rosa, the transition will require a certain cold-heartedness. "When my
husband is here, I want to stop doing this work. I will do different work,
and go to school. I will have to say goodbye to the girls, and that will be
sad." She looks resigned, and puts away the pictures.
Across the aisle, another Central American woman pulls out a copy of the
Los Angeles Times. On the cover, as usual, is a story about the trial of a
California man charged with killing a woman's small white dog in an act of
road rage. The crime galvanized the community, after $175,000 was raised to
find the dog's killer. For weeks, front-page stories have decried the abuse
of animals.
A day before, the Human Rights Watch report had been released, decrying the
widespread physical abuse and economic mistreatment of thousands of
domestic workers in diplomatic households. Rosa would not have seen the
story, though -- it did not appear in any of the Los Angeles papers.
