As an Equal?

Au pairs are relied upon by tens of thousands of UK families to do everything from childcare and housework to elder care, pet feeding and waiting at dinner parties. Traditionally thought of as privileged and well-educated young women having fun on a 'gap year' abroad, au pairs have been excluded from many of the recent discussions on migrant domestic labour. However, since 2008 au pairing has been effectively unregulated in the UK and the result is that au pairs now constitute one of the poorest paid and least protected groups of workers.

Through an examination of lived experiences, As an Equal? draws on detailed research to examine au pairs and the families who host them in contemporary Britain, revealing au pairing to have become increasingly indistinguishable from other forms of domestic labour. Crucially, hosting an au pair is shown to form part of families' attempts to provide good (enough) childcare in the context of extended working hours and poor public childcare provision. This increased reliance of families on an exploited workforce is shown to form part of the wider political climate of economic austerity, and raises profound questions about the position of women within the neoliberal economy.

Autorentext

Rosie Cox is Professor of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. She has been researching au pairs and other forms of paid domestic labour in the UK for nearly 20 years. She is the author of The Servant Problem: Domestic Employment in a Global Economy (2006), coeditor of Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007), co-author of Reconnecting Consumers, Producers and Food: Exploring Alternatives (2008), Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (2011) and editor of Au Pairs' Lives in Global Context (2015).

Inhalt

Introduction

1. A Short History of Au Pairing
2. Invisible Work and Hidden Inequalities: Gender, Class and Nationality in Au Pairing
3. The Twenty-First-Century Growth in Demand for Domestic Labour
4. What is an Au Pair?
5. Au Pairs and Hosts in Cyber Space
6. The Life and Times of Au Pairs
7. Good Workers? Good Parents? Good Hosts?
   Conclusion