Date published: 2008/02/19
The BBC says:
Housewives would be paid more than the average worker if they received the going rate for their household chores, a survey has suggested.
A poll of 4,000 housewives for networking website alljoinon.com suggested that the average mum worked for nearly nine hours a day every day.
The website said a housewife would earn almost £30,000 a year if she was employed to do all the same errands.
The average annual UK wage is £23,700, according to official figures.
It must be getting close to April Fools Day if this kind of article is appearing. It seems that alljoinon.com is a social networking site which wants, and has managed to get, some free publicity from the BBC. That is what this article is really about. (And if you go to the alljoinon.com website, you cannot get anywhere past the home page unless you register. So even the "about us" link does not work. That is how obnoxious they are.)
So, since the BBC kindly provides free publicity for a private company, does it bother doing any critical analysis? No, it just publishes what looks like a straight press release from alljoinon. They even laughingly classified it under "business" rather than "entertainment".
The first thing the BBC could have noted, for example, is that this press release is the result of a survey, so is not representative. But of course housewives do indeed do lots of work at home, so no matter how unreliable the survey, you can easily put a story together with similar claims.
And the BBC could have tried to answer the question as to who should pay for this work. Well, presumably the customer, i.e. the husband and the children. Well, that's silly, since of course children are not meant to pay for this work, and (presumably working) husbands do implicitly pay for this work by providing an income. The fact that the median UK wage would not cover the wage a housewife allegedly deserves just goes to show that most of her chores would not get done if they had to be contracted out to third parties.
Now if this had been a special interest pressure group providing the story, and not just a company out to get some free publicity, one might expect the story to meander into the idea that of course the customer (i.e. the family) should not pay for the work, the government should, since of course the government should always pay for everything. (Another silly idea, since every citizen would start to fabricate claims about how much unpaid work they were doing here, there and everywhere.) The BBC resisted the temptation to go down that road this particular time.
The BBC must get dozens of these silly press releases every day, how do they decide which to cover? Is there any connection between anyone in the BBC and alljoinon?
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