Gender, work, non-work and the invisible migrant: au pairs in contemporary Britain

Abstract

Campaigns by Uber drivers, Deliveroo riders and McDonalds workers have highlighted problems with the new world of platform economies and zero-hour contracts. At the same time, the Brexit process has opened up debates about the UK's dependence on low-waged workers from the EU. Together these trends raise questions about who is going to do low-paid, labour intensive work in the future and what their rights will be. Within these debates, au pairs have been largely invisible despite the fact that they are EU workers who are depended upon by perhaps 100,000 families in the UK, and the fact that their status excludes them from protections available to other workers. This paper explores the current UK situation to examine how this invisibility is related to the gendering of the work au pairs do. While traditionally masculine jobs, such as construction work, have tended to be reimagined as self-employment, au pairing is an example of the way that traditionally feminine tasks are produced by policy discourses as 'help'. Despite this invisibility au pairs do large amounts of work, on average working 37.8 h per week for 'pocket money' at about half the level of the National Minimum Wage and they are increasingly taking on tasks, such as the care for very young children, that would have been done by qualified nannies in the past. In addition to the current debates over the rights of workers in new 'platform' economies, and the possible problems arising from Brexit, we need a broader conversation about work, what it is and how gendered assumptions inform government policy and curtail the rights of workers.

Stratified pathways into platform work: Migration trajectories and skills in Berlin’s gig economy

“…In this context, obtaining student and working holiday visas, as well as leveraging ‘ethnic capital’ to obtain ancestral citizenship, can be understood as a bottom-up practice to pursue international mobility for those who do not belong to a narrow range of people eligible for work visas. For other sectors of the economy, the strategic use of non-work visas is well documented, for example, the use of au pair visas (Cox, 2018; Hess and Puckhaber, 2004), tourist visas (Shinozaki, 2015) and student visas (Anderson, 2010; Maury, 2020). Similarly, platform workers’ strategic choices of visas and ancestral citizenship applications in this study can be interpreted as a successful bottom-up mobility strategy to overcome entry barriers in the German labour market since platform work is not financially lucrative enough to meet the mandated income thresholds of Blue Card Visas.…”

Young Spanish au pairs in London: migration and gender tensions in the context of intra-EU mobilities

“…The Brexit referendum helped to reveal the degree to which the United Kingdom depends on poorly paid, highly flexible labour from the EU (Cox 2018). According to Cox (2018, 1), "100,000 families in the UK depend on EU workers for care work, one sector that may be particularly affected by the loss of EU workers".…”

“…It is not a job per se as au pairs pay neither taxes nor Social Security contributions. Finally, this work is mostly carried out by women, as part of their natural role under the cultural assumptions that naturalize this work (Comas 2017;Cox 2018). Due to the invisible nature of au pair work, the sector is not regulated and there is no official definition of "au pair".…”

“…The figure of the au pair was initially associated with an exchange between young, single women from "good families" in the middle and upper classes of England, France and Germany in the 1920s (Cuartas 2014). This activity supplemented the work performed by nannies and domestic workers, and was a form of social distinction (Cox 2018). However, as the care sector has become more precarious, nannies and domestic workers have been replaced by au pairs, who work in unstable, unregulated, flexible conditions for low pay.…”