This is a quote from Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. In this book Ehrenreich works minimum wage jobs to see if she can survive on them. Here she is a maid:
“Self-restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million-dollar condo…who is (according to a framed photograph on the wall) an acquaintance of the real Barbara Bush takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been ‘bleeding’ onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the world-wide working class—the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this building, and now bend and squat and sweat to clean it.”
Although I am only about halfway through it, I really recommend this book as it is full of amazing insights such as this and is wonderfully written.
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