Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES
• Position: Editorial - Editorial

Viagra and the Performing Arts * The Rebate That Isn't * Virtuous Salads and Naughty Desserts Tom Daschle's Hillary Problem * E-mail and the Overflowing Inbox

THERE IS MUCH THAT IS marvelous about Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book, Nickel and Dimed. Most impressive of all is her firsthand reporting of what it's like to work in a low-wage job. This is the kind of journalism this magazine has long encouraged. It takes enterprise, imagination, and guts--all of which Ehrenreich possesses in generous amounts.

My one quarrel with the book is that she dismisses housework as inherently demeaning. Of course, it can be demeaning. But it is less and less so these days. The reason is that increasingly the employing couples are at work and away from the house. When my housewife mother used to oversee our maid with new instructions every fifteen minutes or so, I used to feel sorry for the poor soul. Mother was a nice woman, but that much supervision can be maddening.

Most of today's domestic employers, though, are not at home. They are at the office. Even when they are at home, they're likely to be busy working in their home office. So the housekeeper is free to proceed at his or her own pace, thinking about whatever comes to mind. And this to me is the magic secret: being free to set your own pace, your mind free to roam where it will.

In my adolescence, I held a number of bottom-of-the-chain jobs, chief of which was as a private in the United States Army. Of all those jobs, the one I enjoyed most was messenger. As a messenger, I was free to think about politics, sports, and gifts--the three subjects that, in reverse order, engaged my imagination the most. Unsupervised housework offers similar freedom. And since housekeepers are in short supply, they don't have to work for people who leave too onerous a list of written instructions or, as in Ehrenreich's case, a cruddy toilet bowl.

In the Washington area, housekeepers can earn $20 an hour. If they work through a company, however, they get less and can be required to work tight Schedules that are as bad as being supervised by my mother. The companies are popular because household couples don't want to do Social Security paperwork and run the risk of employing illegal immigrants. If the laws were changed so that the employer of a household worker who worked fewer than, say, 10 hours a week for that employer was not responsible for Social Security paperwork and had no responsibility for determining the immigration status of the employees, many of these companies would go out of businesses, and the housekeepers could have the best-paying jobs to choose among. And they, too, would have the glorious opportunity to daydream.

DID YOU THINK THAT WHAT Bush calls a rebate is really a rebate? Most people I know think that they were getting a rebate on the 2000 taxes they paid in April. What they're actually getting is an advance on the money they will save next year because of the tax cut. If you got a $300 "rebate" this year, the tax cut will save you $300 less next year.

IF YOU'RE NOT WORRIED ABOUT Bush's plans to expand Alaskan oil drilling, you might consider that there are now only five inspectors to police all the pipelines in the state. Even Indiana, which produces only 2.5 million barrels of oil annually compared to Alaska's 400 million, has nine inspectors. What's more, Alaska's inspectors don't make surprise visits. They tell the companies when they're coming so they have time to clean up their act.

"I'VE SPENT HALF THE DAY catching up on my e-mail," a friend told me last week. How long had he been away? One week. E-mail, as we pointed out not long ago, has become a major time-consumer. It reminds me of a phenomenon I encountered when I was a government bureaucrat: the tyranny of the in-box. When you arrived in the office each morning, you usually found your in-box overflowing with memoranda. The reason was that everyone sent copies of their memos to practically everyone of any...