Portside

In the near future, those who clean our homes, care for our children and elderly, and do the dangerous jobs that we can’t get others to do have started to organize. They want respect, legal status, and not to be simply dispensed with when they are no longer wanted. Meanwhile, there’s an incredible backlash among others who say these individuals are taking our jobs, virtually replacing us.

This is the world laid out by AMC’s Humans, a co-production with UK’s Channel 4, which will air its stateside finale on Sunday. The story is science fiction, with humanoid robots called “synths” gaining sentience, but like any good piece of work in this genre, it says more about what’s happening in our current world than anything about the future. It demonstrates exactly how complicated it is to outsource something as personal as domestic work and care.

The show’s washed out colors inspire a Mad Men feel, and indeed many of the promises of “synths” are the same sort of promises we sought from technology in the 1950s and ’60s. Why cook dinner yourself when you can get a synth to do it for you? Why not use synths to aid the elderly, so they can closely monitor their medical needs?

In the pilot episode of the show, Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) is caring for his three children and doing housework while his wife is out of town on business. Throwing up his hands at the inability to keep up with the domestic work on his own, he grabs his youngest daughter and goes to the store to buy Anita, a household helper to help him manage it all.

Much like the barrier to hiring a domestic worker now, the ability to purchase a robot is still limited to those who can afford it in the world of Humans. Though we never see working-class individuals at home, you get the sense that only upper middle class people can purchase a synth, much like those who hire housekeepers or nannies today. And many of those nannies and housekeepers have replaced the unpaid domestic work from which Betty Friedan sought to liberate wives and mothers in her book, The Feminine Mystique.

What Humans gets at is the complicated nature of that liberation. In the central family on the show, the mother becomes jealous of how much her daughter prefers the synth caring for the family. She’s both relieved of bearing the burden of doing that work (and fighting with her spouse about it), and guarded against the potential of the synth emotionally replacing her.

Indeed, even as women are working toward greater gender parity in high-level professions and there are currently two women in the race for president, women still disproportionately do more the housework and child care. A survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released this summer found that still women far outpace men in both the percent of women who spend time on household chores and child care, and the amount of time spent on them. Men also tend to spend more time per day on average at work, and more time on leisure activities. Meanwhile, women are still notably absent among highly paid and high-profile professions like CEOs. On the show, the father opted out of doing the work by outsourcing it rather than stepping up while his wife was gone.

As King’s College professor Alison Wolf pointed out in her 2013 book, The XX Factor, women are making gains in the workforce, but they are doing so on the backs of poorly paid, often immigrant labor. “Without the new servant classes, elite women’s employment would splutter and stall,” she writes, though the New York Times review of the book pointed out these women’s husbands rely on such labor just as much.

At any given time, the exact number of domestic workers can be difficult to track because they can be employed in under-the-table, cash-only circumstances — or even slavery-like conditions — and often reside as undocumented immigrants in the country, but BLS estimates the numbers of maids and housekeepers alone in the United States is nearly a million. The fact that the workforce operates in the shadows of the economy also exposes them to widespread employer abuse, from wage theft to assault. The National Domestic Workers Alliance released a report in 2012 that found roughly a quarter were paid less than minimum wage in the state (at the time of the survey, the federal minimum wages was $6.15 an hour) and 91 percent of workers surveyed said they didn’t complain about conditions on the job because they were afraid they would be fired.

In the world Humans asks us to imagine, the synths actually are slaves. This isn’t a problem as long as you believe they aren’t sentient, beings with personalities and desires of their own. But once the humans realize that, their relationship becomes much more complex. A sex toy becomes a sex slave. And this happens to the real people who work under-the-radar as domestic servants today. Human Rights Watch describes domestic workers as “among the most exploited and abused workers in the world. They may be locked within their workplace and subject to physical and sexual violence.”

These conditions have meant that domestic workers in America today have starting to stand up for their rights. They’ve launched campaigns for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in California and New York.

Anita, the gentle and maternal synth who joins her human family amid a domestic dispute on the show, makes a joke in a later episode when the mother asks why humans are so afraid of her. “I think it’s our plan to conquer the planet and make humanity our slaves,” she deadpans.

Again, this cuts close to the bone. While the largely immigrant domestic workforce begins to push for more rights — humane detention facilities, the ability to keep families together rather than deporting them, and a path to legal citizenship — a rash of dehumanizing rhetoric amps up right-wing America (and the UK, where the show was made). Immigrants are called “dogs” and “rapists” and suggestions that they should be treated more humanely are considered a weakness. The show aptly reflects this with an anti-synth rally of angry blue-collar workers demanding an end to synth labor. On Humans, the punishment for a worker is recycling. In real life, it’s deportation.

Of course, Humans is just an entertaining sci-fi thriller that has been renewed for a second season. How those issues play out in real life is much more complicated.