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Child cleaning at Foxtons Hampstead
The Hampstead branch of Foxtons where a girl was cleaning late at night. Photograph: Marcus Butler/Evening Standard Photograph: Marcus Butler/Evening Standard
The Hampstead branch of Foxtons where a girl was cleaning late at night. Photograph: Marcus Butler/Evening Standard Photograph: Marcus Butler/Evening Standard

Don’t blame the parents of the Foxtons child cleaner

This article is more than 9 years old

Corporations have a choice when it comes to choosing employees. Poor families may not have a choice in how they make ends meet

A few days ago, a photograph of a young girl apparently cleaning the offices of a London estate agent was published. “People across the UK have also taken to Twitter to express their disgust,” said one report. Taking to Twitter to express our disgust is what we do best. It is easy, costs nothing, can act as a proxy for having to think deeply about any issue and makes us feel superior in several ways.

Life is wonderfully, horribly complicated. Social media, on the other hand, works in binary code in more than one sense. Outrage, disgust and indignation are short, curt emotions; they are much simpler and shorter to express than empathy, understanding and compassion. They also get more “likes” or “RTs”. This all conspires to create an online community quick to anger and reluctant to change its mind when it turns out that anger was misdirected.

For the avoidance of doubt, I include myself in this critique. I almost took to Twitter to express my disgust when I saw that picture. I am certain I would have been as appalled as 140 characters would allow, but my phone battery died. This forced me to live with my disgust about something for longer than it takes to construct a tweet. It gave me thinking time.

My mother was a cleaner for much of my childhood, as a second job; actually, more like a third or fourth job. Provided I had done my homework, she would take me along with her and I would help. I wouldn’t have it any other way. We had fun. She quizzed me on various school subjects, while I helped her scrub a shower cubicle. I sang to her the latest song I had learned in class while we emptied bins. I learned to make beds with neat corners, fold sheets, mop properly, iron, dust, organise tasks in an efficient order. All of these things have been useful to me. Most importantly, it taught me to take pride in doing any job as well as I could.

The idea that I would have been better off at home with a childminder, seeing my mother almost never, is ludicrous. She wasn’t taking advantage of me – she preferred having me with her to leaving me at home. I did too. Of course, there is no doubt that sometimes a line is crossed and it becomes exploitation, but being hysterical about incidents where that is clearly not the case makes genuine exploitation less, not more, detectable. Presumably, if mum worked in an office and her 11-year-old was observed doing some typing on a “bring your child to work” day, all would have been well; adorable, even.

There is an implicit, but very clear, comment on the mother when someone remarks on such a photo “this is effectively child labour” and “that little girl should be in bed”. It is a projection of middle-class values and standards on to working-class lives. Everyone seems quite prepared – indeed, entitled – to criticise working people’s choices, while understanding absolutely nothing about their lives; everything from nutrition to parenting to thrift is fair game. Such attitudes fail to recognise that being poor, raising children while being poor, involves choosing between less-than-ideal alternatives every single day.

My point is not to exonerate the corporate policies that bring people (especially women, especially cleaners) to the point of working very long hours for what is effectively on some contracts below minimum wage. Zero-hours contracts, poorly paid agency staff, weak employee protections, unaffordable childcare – these are the deserving targets of legitimate disgust. But it seems to me that criticism seems to stray, often very harshly, to parenting, and that is an issue of class as much as anything else.

Of course, I would have preferred for mum not to have to work 16 hours a day when I was growing up. I would have liked to spend the evening baking cupcakes together and reading stories. But all that wasn’t an option. To measure a parent against options they don’t have is really quite unkind.

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