It depends on how you define the boat. I think you can argue that in both cases continued servitude is the only way either of them can get food and a place to sleep indoors. There’s a big gulf of experience beyond that. But you can only form a coalition with someone on the basis of common ground. So while you’re both right, it’s not going to help either the cleaner or the engineer get better treatment if they don’t acknowledge similarities where they exist.
> I think you can argue that in both cases continued servitude is the only way either of them can get food and a place to sleep indoors.
No you can’t argue that because it’s stupid. A typical google software engineer will have made enough that in their early 30s they can quit/retire and live the rest of their life at at least the same standard of living as that cleaning lady (almost none of them find that an acceptable standard but that’s far beyond food and a place to sleep)
So what do you want then, a world where the engineer has the same standard of living as the cleaner or where the cleaner has the same standard of living as the engineer?
No one's saying they have exactly the same struggle to deal with. The cleaning lady definitely has more struggles, but this does not change the fundamental point that both the Google Staff engineer and the cleaning lady primarily derive their wealth by selling their labour, as opposed to deriving their wealth from their capital.
They both have the surplus value created by their labor stolen by the capitalist class.
Of course, that affects the cleaning lady more, but the core theft and the exploitative power dynamics they both are affected by are the same.
One of the tricks capital uses to keep control is to pit us against each other. Only through solidarity throughout the entire working class we can affect real change.
Everything else is an implementation detail.