THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 69
paid Slave Laborers! Tell Him What
to Do with the Broom!” Ms. offered, by
way of illustration, a sample letter of
resignation:
This is to inform you that I am no longer
running this household. The cupboards, the
Lysol, the linoleum, the washer, the dryer, the
marketing—they’re all yours. I HEREBY RE-
SIGN....
You can fend for yourselves. Best of luck.
Mom
Feminists urged economists to count
housework as work, calculating, in 1976,
that housework constituted forty-four
per cent of the G.N.P. Groups that in-
cluded the New York Wages for House-
work Committee, Black Women for
Wages for Housework, and Wages Due
Lesbians fought a “wages for house-
work” campaign, calling the exploita-
tion of women’s domestic labor an in-
ternational crime.
They allied with welfare-rights activ-
ists, who, after all, were seeking wages
for mothers and who, starting in 1967,
as the National Welfare Rights Organi-
zation, also campaigned for a kind of
basic income. “The greatest thing that
a woman can do is to raise her own chil-
dren, and our society should recognize
it as a job,” the chair of the Milwaukee
County Welfare Rights Organization
argued in 1972. “A person should be paid
an adequate income to do that.” What
they did not do was support the Nixon
Administration’s Family Assistance
Plan, whose benefits they believed to
be inadequate and whose work require-
ment they rejected. It never became
law. Still, by 1976 wages for housework,
a proposal born among radical femi-
nists, had earned the support of one in
four Americans.
Meanwhile, crafts became a commer-
cial juggernaut—especially hobbies for
women, the she-shed equivalent of the
workbench in the garage. Michaels and
Hobby Lobby, craft superstores, along
with Martha Stewart’s books, peddling
needlepoint, knitting, and pastry-mak-
ing, boomed in the nineteen-eighties.
Some women began to pay to do, as
hobbies, what other women protested
doing, as unpaid labor.
Another way to think about the key
turning point of the nineteen-seven-
ties is that activists sought collective-
bargaining agreements for housework
just when industrial union membership
was plummeting. Outside of agricul-
ture, more than one in three working
Americans belonged to a union in the
fifties. In 1983, one in five belonged to
a union; by 2019, only one in ten did.
Union membership declined; income
inequality rose. To explain this, Suz-
man points to the “Great Decoupling”
of the nineteen-eighties: wages and
economic growth used to track each
other. From about 1980, in the United
States, the G.D.P. kept growing, even
as real wages stagnated. To compen-
sate, many Americans worked more
hours, and took on extra jobs, especially
in the service sector. (Currently, more
than eighty per cent of U.S. employ-
ment is in the service sector.)
In the early nineteen-eighties, Dun-
kin’ Donuts launched one of the most
iconic television ad campaigns in Amer-
ican history. A schlumpy guy named
Fred the Baker drags himself out of
bed in the middle of the night, puts on
his Dunkin’ Donuts uniform mutter-
ing, “Time to make the doughnuts,” be-
fore shuffling, half-asleep, out the door,
barely saying goodbye to his wife, who
is still in curlers. In one ad, he’s so dog-
tired that he falls asleep at a dinner party,
his head dropping onto a plate of mashed
potatoes. In another, he goes out his
front door and then comes back through
the same door, day after day, ragged and
weary, muttering, “Made the dough-
nuts,” until, finally, he bumps into him-
self, at once coming home and going
to work. This campaign proved so pop-
ular that Dunkin’ Donuts made more
than a hundred different versions; these
ads were on television, around the clock,
from the year Maria Fernandes was
born until the year she turned fifteen.
In 1997, when the actor who played
the baker finally retired from the role,
“Saturday Night Live” ran a skit, fea-
turing Jon Lovitz, looking back at just
how long this ad campaign had lasted.
“My character, Fred the Baker, well he’s
sure seen America through some tough
times,” he says. “The Gulf War, just an-
other time to make the doughnuts. The
Rodney King beating, time to make
the doughnuts.”
With the G.D.P. rising and wages
flat or falling for so many Americans,
where did all that wealth go? Much of
it went to chief executives: in 1965,
C.E.O. compensation was twenty timesthat of the average worker; by 2015, it
was more than two hundred times that
of the average worker. That year, Nigel
Travis, the C.E.O. of Dunkin’ Brands,
took in $5.4 million in compensation
(down from $10.2 million the previous
year) and called a proposed fifteen-
dollar-an-hour minimum wage “abso-
lutely outrageous.”
Chief executives wouldn’t have been
able to plunder so much money if the
federal government hadn’t let them
do it. The Biden-Harris campaign en-
dorsed a raft of legislation designed to
end what Democrats call the “war on
unions.” Even if this stuff could pass,
which is unlikely, there are other forces
driving income inequality. “The death
of Maria Fernandes demands a
call to action,” ran the headline of
an article by the head of the American
Federation of State, County, and Mu-
nicipal Employees, a few days after her
death. She reportedly worked more than
eighty hours a week and earned less than
forty thousand dollars a year. (Asked for
comment, a spokesperson for Dunkin’
claims that her employers “offered po-
sitions of greater responsibility” for a
higher wage, but asserts that she “didn’t
express interest.”) She may have really
liked selling doughnuts. But that is not
the point.M
aria Fernandes, the daughter of
Portuguese immigrants, rented a
basement room in Newark for five hun-
dred and fifty dollars a month. She was
born in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ac-
cording to reporting by the Associated
Press, her family returned to Portugal
when she was eleven, but around the
time she turned eighteen she came back
to the United States. She had wanted,
once, to be an actress, a police officer, a
flight attendant, or maybe a beautician.
She spoke four languages—English,
Portuguese, French, and Spanish. She
was chatty; friends nicknamed her
Radio. For a while, she had a boyfriend
whose bills she paid. Normally, she
worked from 2 to 9 P.M. at the Dunkin’
Donuts kiosk inside Newark’s Penn
Station. Then she drove to Linden,
where she worked from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M.
On weekends, she took morning shifts
in Harrison. The boyfriend told her to
quit one of those jobs. She said, “No,
I’m used to it now.”