Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of boxes -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Making homes -- 3. Working with materiality -- 4. Doing it yourself -- 5. Not doing it yourself -- 6. Home improvement and national identity -- 7. Materiality, inequality and the homeyness of home -- 8. Conclusion -- References -- Index.

"Au pairs have traditionally been thought of as middle-class young women from Northern Europe, who are having a fun gap year in a foreign country. This collection, the first dedicated to examining the lives of au pairs, reveals that this is far from the whole story. Au pairing is now a global phenomenon and au pairs are just as likely to come from Asia and Latin America as from Sweden or France. They are an increasingly important form of very low waged, often unregulated, childcare and domestic labour enabling tens of thousands of families to meet the demands of both work and home life. Despite the importance of the work that they do, au pairs are not recognized as workers and are often excluded from even the most basic protections, such as a minimum wage. As young migrants living inside their employers' homes they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse"--

"Au pairs have traditionally been thought of as middle-class young women from Northern Europe, who are having a fun gap year in a foreign country. This collection, the first dedicated to examining the lives of au pairs, reveals that this is far from the whole story. Au pairing is now a global phenomenon and au pairs are just as likely to come from Asia and Latin America as from Sweden or France. They are an increasingly important form of very low waged, often unregulated, childcare and domestic labour enabling tens of thousands of families to meet the demands of both work and home life. Despite the importance of the work that they do, au pairs are not recognized as workers and are often excluded from even the most basic protections, such as a minimum wage. As young migrants living inside their employers' homes they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse"--

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.

The employment of au pairs to provide childcare, cleaning and other domestic services has been steadily increasing in the UK. This article provides an analysis of representations of au pairs in the British press and on the websites of agencies placing au pairs. This analysis seeks to understand how such imaginings of au pairs affect their life in Britain and how au pairs themselves respond to such imaginings. It argues that the competing portrayals of au pairs as both sexual sirens and committed carers works with other ambivalences in the scheme to facilitate the growth of au pair employment in Britain while simultaneously denying their place as an important source of domestic labour for British families.