Ode to Grietje Verkerk en Lorie MatulayServants and domestic workers: still second-class citizens
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My grandmother Grietje Verkerk started her working life as a servant. She was lucky, she often told me, working for nice people. But it was not very well paid. Years later, I met Lorie Matulay at FNV, a trade union, who was a domestic worker with Dutch families doing the same work as my grandmother. Servants and domestic workers are largely invisible and domestic work does not have a high status in the Netherlands. Yet we cannot do without them, then and now. Therefore, an ode to all servants and domestic workers through the stories of Grietje and Lorie.
Born in 1899, Grietje was able to find work as a day job at the GP's office in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel as a 12-year-old through the network of her mother Christine, the village midwife. A girl for the day started early, at six-thirty, but could go home in the evening after washing up. For the rough work, there was a maid several days a week, who scrubbed the floors and stairs. Grietje dusted, ironed laundry, helped in the kitchen and washed dishes.The extra income was welcome in the family.
Lorie had accumulated a debt to pay for her son's medicine, but despite simultaneously working as a nail stylist and seamstress in addition to keeping a shop, she could not pay it off. So she left her husband with her three young children, knowing that cousin Gloria would keep an eye on them. She left the Philippines for Singapore when she was 28, to look after the children and do the housework with a Swedish family. She travelled on to Hong Kong in 1993 to work and live with successively a Chinese, British, Bulgarian and Dutch family.In 2002, she was allowed to join the family she worked for in Hong Kong in the Netherlands.
When she was a bit older, Grietje found work in Amsterdam. Perhaps she left for Amsterdam as an eighteen-year-old with the turnpike, after her father died in November 1917. We don't know for sure. What is clear is that from July 1920 to July 1921, she lived at two different addresses in Sarphatipark, but that is all we know for sure. According to tradition, she also worked on Prinsengracht, was treated well there and did not have to do heavy work.At one of the addresses, there was a maid, a kitchen maid and Grietje helped in the kitchen cutting vegetables. There she learned to cook well. She also cleaned the brass bell and the brass nameplate every day, dusted and at the many dinners she took the coats and hung them up neatly. She made long days, as she worked even before breakfast until after washing up in the evening. She missed her family, as she could only go home once a week on Sundays with the turn boat. She met Herman Kraamwinkel who was a stoker in the Navy and got him ashore. Grietje and Herman married in 1923. On the certificate, the occupation is ‘servant’.
Grietje went back to work as a servant immediately after her marriage, this time for the director of the De Oude Molen gunpowder factory in Nieuwer-Amstel, where Herman had found work as a stoker. She got on well with the lady of the house and not only became a servant, but also fed her son when she could not feed him enough and Grietje had milk in surplus. Between her five pregnancies, she continued to work in other people's households and Grietje also did her own.
Lorie looks after the household and the three children of the family she came to the Netherlands with. She does not have a residence permit, but because she is living with the family, this does not seem to be a problem. She misses her children and her family, but cannot return home. Remarkably, her employer arranged her own housing in 2006. Most domestic workers live in with family or friends and work at multiple households. In 2006, Lorie's son Louie is murdered and that year becomes a turning point for Lorie. Working in the Netherlands without a residence permit means she cannot attend Louie's funeral because she would not be able to return to the Netherlands. Not going back to the Netherlands would mean that her other two children would not be able to graduate, so Lorie decides to stay. However, she does not resign herself to it and, with a few others, founds Trusted, a union for domestic workers without residence permits. But she also continues to work for the family. She becomes president and works for recognition, residence rights and better working conditions for the many migrant women who work here as domestic workers without residence permits and without labour law protection. Lories work is rewarded in 2009 with the Clara Meijer-Wichmann medal of the League for Human Rights, presented at the Amstel Church in Amsterdam. In 2010, her youngest son graduates. If he finds work, she can finally return to the Philippines, to her family.
Unlike Grietje, Lorie, who cannot get a residence permit for her work, left no trace in civil status records.Lorie's story gained attention through the Clara Meijer-Wichmann medal and was chronicled by De Volkskrant (but only when she was about to return to the Philippines; publicity was too risky before that).Cooperation between trade unions, mayor and police allowed about 400 domestic workers and sympathisers to demonstrate for full labour rights under police protection in Amsterdam on 2 November 2013.
Lorie and Gretel have both worked hard in other people's households, just as their colleagues still do every day. Therefore, they deserve an ode.However, the work of servants or domestic workers is still not a full-fledged profession.If they are well off, it is because of the ‘nice people’ they work for. But neither a servant nor a domestic worker had/has many legs to stand on. Servants were mostly working-class girls who joined the well-to-do. In Amsterdam today, most domestic workers are women without residence permits, working for the middle class. Grietje and Lorie's colleagues remain mostly invisible, and invisibility makes them vulnerable in the housing market, the labour market and in public life. They are still a group with a second-class position, but apart from class, colour now also plays a role.
On 6 June 2011, the International Labour Organisation's Domestic Workers Convention ILO 189 was concluded between trade unions, employers' associations and governments worldwide. The Convention mandates states to give domestic workers labour protection and social security rights like other workers. To become valid, the convention must be ratified.Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries and many South American countries have now ratified the convention.The Netherlands has not. As a result of the treaty, domestic workers would be given full employment status. The Netherlands does not want that. Despite the first feminist wave that gave Gretel the right to vote, the second feminist wave that was kicked off by Joke Smit in ‘Het onbehagen bij de Vrouw’ in 1967, saying that domestic work was so tedious and vacuous, that it was unfair for women to pay for it alone, and the third feminist wave of which Lorie is a part, the working conditions of domestic workers have not improved much since my grandmother's time.
Sources
Sjoukje Botman, Gewoon Schoonmaken. De troebele arbeidsrelaties in betaald huishoudelijk werk, proefschrift Amsterdam 2010.
Margriet Kraamwinkel en Mari Martens, Decent Work voor Domestic Workers. Over rechten zogenaamde illegalen in het schoonmaakwerk. Clara Meijer-Wichmann lezing 2009. Liga voor de Rechten van de Mens.
https://www.ligarechtenvandemens.nl/2009-lorie-matulay/
https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/lorie-kan-eindelijk-rentenieren~b7bf8a52/
https://www.canonvannederland.nl/nl/kinderwetje
https://normlex.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C189
With thanks to:
Mevrouw C.H. Mühlhaus-Kraamwinkel, dochter van Grietje Verkerk
Yvonne Mühlhaus, kleindochter van Grietje Verkerk
Judith Kraamwinkel, achterkleindochter van Grietje Verkerk
Anita Neefjes, Stadsarchief Amsterdam
About
Ode from Margriet Kraamwinkel to Grietje Verkerk en Lorie Matulay.
Grietje was a servant and, as a working-class girl, cleaned the houses of well-to-do Amsterdam citizens.
Lorie was a ‘domestic worker’ and had no residence permit.
Her colleagues still clean the houses of middle-class Amsterdam every day. Despite more than a century of women's struggle, their work is still invisible.
Grietje Verkerk en Lorie Matulay
Grietje cleaned the houses of well-to-do Amsterdam citizens. Lorie is a ‘domestic worker’ and had no residence permit. They and all their colleagues still clean the houses of middle-class Amsterdam every day. Despite more than a century of women's struggle, their work is still invisible.