My Low Wage Life

Growing up, I never questioned where my next meal was going to come from or thought about whether or not I’d have a bed to sleep on—it was all just standard to me. We have gardeners and housekeepers maintain our home, inside and out. I thought that everyone lived like this until I was about ten and became aware that most people mowed their own lawns and vacuumed their own carpets. Even after the realization that although domestic help is mainstream in my town, in most places its not. I never thought about the wage that our gardeners or housekeepers were making. To me, they worked at my house just like my dad worked at his office, and they probably maintained a lifestyle similar to mine, with their own gardeners and housekeepers to keep things under control while they were at work. I have since learned that these people are generally underpaid, without so much as a thought to their lifestyle. Often, the humanity of the whole situation goes out the window—the domestic staff is willing to work for low wages, and because they are, they must be okay with it.

The summer after fifth grade, my family moved to a new house. When we moved, we kept our housekeepers because they agreed to drive the extra fifteen miles to our new house, but did not keep our gardener, as he did not know how to tend to the plants that were already in place at our new house. Before my parents could get the chance to seek out a new gardener, a man knocked on our door. He spoke no English, but communicated effectively through hand gestures and a few broken words. He was the gardener that maintained the property for the previous family. Later, we would come to find out his name is Juan. Fearing that we would hire someone else to maintain the property, he asked to continue working for us. My parents agreed to give him a chance.

Juan worked strange hours, often early in the morning or later in the evening. We first discounted his odd schedule as an attempt to avoid the mid-day heat. As summer and fall passed and we observed Juan still working early in the mornings or late at night in the winter, when it was bitterly cold, we became curious. It turned out he was also working full time at a vineyard, maintaining the roses on the ends of the rows of grapes. The money he made working for us and a few other families he sent back to Mexico, where he had a wife and two children, a son and a daughter about my age. This reality hit me pretty hard at an age where I was just becoming aware of economic differences.

Soon, my mom began offering Juan the clothes that my brother and I had outgrown. We began to communicate with Juan via a friend who would translate for us. Juan quickly became a trusted employee, who my mom made lunch for or served coffee when she saw him working, instead of the gardener who “came with the house.” I recognize now that this relationship is unusual. Most domestic help isn’t thought of as an equal, but an inferior, doing the work their employer doesn’t want to get their hands dirty doing. I learned that the low wage working world is generally apathetic to its laborers, like Juan, who really just want to get by and feed their families.