When then Interior Secretary Mar Roxas made his infamous comment that traffic was “a sign of progress,” he might as well have put on concrete boots and jumped into the Pasig as far as political rhetoric was concerned. The remark cemented his reputation as being lofty and out of touch with the common man.

But it was also, abrasive and dismissive as it might have seemed, entirely right.

These days, traffic is among the least of our concerns—not because it has magically evaporated, but because on the sliding scale of things we should be worried about, its priority has been displaced by being killed in the drug war, the constant threat of martial law, and a plunging exchange rate, among other things.

To complain about traffic seems churlish; one should be so lucky as to be alive to experience it.

There’s another “good problem to have” that no one is really talking about, because talking about these things used to be considered crass; some especially prim or old-fashioned sensibilities might still be offended by the subject of this discourse, in which case you should stop reading at this point.

I’m speaking of the shortage of domestic labor these days. By domestic I don’t mean within the country, as in gross domestic product, but domestic, meaning within the domicile.

There are simply no good maids or kasambahay, and though I don’t know what the situation is like in Mar’s household, he would probably agree with me that this is a good problem to have: It’s a “sign of progress.”

Leisure class

Manila no longer has the seemingly limitless supply of innocent lasses from the barrio to do the never-ending series of chores that every society, urban or rural, industrialized or agricultural, rich or poor, needs to get done.

In the past the chore was largely off-loaded to women. With increasing urbanization and the emergence of a leisure class, upper-class women read novels and played the piano and sang madrigals, while an army of servants, organized in a hierarchy like the military, toiled away “downstairs.”

Less than 50 years ago, it was common to have maids who were specialized in roles such as laundry or ironing, and a supervising matriarch of that section presiding over a platoon of women all ironing away.

Maids became servants who then became “live-in help,” while in Tagalog, the katulong became the euphemistic kasambahay, someone who shared your house.

As people moved from mansions to smaller houses and then to condominiums, there came greater need to multitask. The same woman needed to be able to cook, clean and help look after the children.

At the same time, imperial Manila became a little less imperial as other cities, as what Manileños still call “the province” (i.e., anything that’s outside of Manila) began to grow.

It’s harder to find household help because there are more opportunities for work that’s not in the unregulated domestic sphere, and closer to home. So the hypothetical dalagita need not choose between being one of the many lasses dusting the porcelain vases and being hit on by drunk drivers in the back rooms of a Forbes Park mansion on one hand, and feeding the goats and winnowing grain on the other.

Stop-gap solutions

As with the traffic problem, we should have seen this coming and planned for it. We could have tried to catch up with the infrastructure and the urban planning needed to make it work, which is still what we should be doing now, instead of stop-gap solutions like everyone who can, buying motorcycles or a Toyota Vios on instalment.

Similarly, with the shortage of labor in the urban domestic sphere, the market has responded accordingly to the demand with higher prices for less skilled work, and predatory agencies serving as middlemen.

In the shortage of good maids for hire, the most in demand are skilled cooks. We can only speculate as to where they are going.

While we can imagine that many of the less experienced workers have been absorbed to become salesladies and call center agents, it seems beyond belief that all these women have been sucked up by the professional food industry or are working abroad in the kitchens of cruise ships.

Or is it that the generation raised by mothers who worked as OFWs grew up not knowing how to cook rice or boil an egg or learn which vegetables go into sinigang?

Last week marked International Women’s Day, when, contrary to popular belief, we don’t celebrate women per se, but the advances made by and for women in terms of rights and equality. The domestic sphere is one of the areas in which the Philippines, as with divorce and reproductive rights, continues to lag behind miserably.

Share in keeping house

The long-term solution for a country that is transitioning to a more progressive (in every sense of the word) society is for maids to become less and less central to a middle-class household, and for men and women to share in the business of keeping house.

I’m still part of the generation who grew up believing that a man doesn’t stoop to cleaning toilets. Like many of my generation, the first time I had to do it was when I lived abroad, and discovered to my great surprise that cleaning didn’t happen by itself.

If we’re doing things right in the economic sphere, we parents should be raising children prepared for a life in which they won’t have maids. Only the very rich will have servants, and they will be paid well and treated professionally.

If this sounds like a utopian vision, consider that in Britain, more than 80 percent of the current middle class was descendent from servants, while the other one in five was a descendant of someone who had a servant.

More men are cooking these days, it’s true, but usually they make something insanely complicated, like smoked brisket or sous vide chops or roast beef, and use every plate in the kitchen, then collapse on the sofa and leave someone else to do the cleaning up.

Both boys and girls should learn how to cook and be taught the family recipes—and should learn how to clean up after themselves. As the shortage of good help continues, the lack of help need not render us helpless. —CONTRIBUTED