Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
You... didn't get it.
Of course I "got it". You just don't like being called out as an "elite".

It's not hard to hire household help. I had a friend who put up a post on care.com and received like 70 resumes in a day. People are in need of jobs, and working parents are in need of childcare. It's not all that difficult. In fact, it's plenty easy to hire someone without paying FICA taxes, or federal and state unemployment insurance, or giving them an employment contract and a copy of the state information on rights of domestic workers, or getting workers' compensation insurance, or confirming they are eligible to work, or reporting new hires and providing quarterly wage reports to the state, or setting up the withholding for the paid family and medical leave act in Massachusetts. It's incredibly easy to hire household help and pay them under the table without doing any of these things.

My point is that if you actually want to follow the law and provide for appropriate protections for your domestic workers, the federal and state government make it exceedingly complex and difficult to do so.
Uh huh, I'm sure "your domestic workers" appreciate that you're following *laws* that afford them the rights they're entitled to. And realize that only the state or federal gummint is their biggest obstacle. If not for your righteous indignation....those workers wouldn't know they're being exploited.

I'm not saying that I'm not planning on doing it (of course I am, I am scrupulously careful about taxes and employment), but I was noting that it's not hard to see how a lot of people take one look at what they need to do and decide it isn't worth the hassle. There has to be a better way to help people make the right decision and provide adequate protections for domestic workers.
"Domestic workers" don't want special protections, they just want equitable treatment. They don't need you to help them find the dignity of their work. If anything, people need to appreciate their value, and pay them accordingly. There's public value in that. You don't have to come from Evanston to know that education is based on zip code. But it's the height of hypocrisy to suggest that zip code doesn't matter.