Direct Action <<>> Slaves of the 21st century

[Ivo Skoric]

Quite amusing. But it is no better in New York either. It simply 
SUCKS having babies in cities like London and/or New York. That's why 
it is easier to find pet food than baby food in most of New York 
stores. Either one of the parents have to quit job - and then the 
family would not be able to pay mounting bills - or they have to hire 
someone to look after their small child while they are working. There 
is no third. Daycares are SO expensive that they are out of range for 
working poor, low-income earners, and for most of the middle class in 
New York (the cheapest I found is $125 a day, more than I earn...). 
That's where the au-pair class comes in handy. There are several 
solutions: 1) mandatory daycare pay by the employer, 2) cheaper, 
state subsidized daycare, 3) agencies that bring au-pairs to raise 
funds to help bring au-pair's earnings to a livable wage. Otherwise, 
the situation will not change. Illegal nannies are not the exception -
 they are the standard of the American society.
ivo

On 9 Jan 2005 at 21:45, Predrag Tosic wrote:



[ A portrait of the modern-day Western "humanitarians" and 
"liberals",
this time around among the ordinary folks, not the politicians of
other types of high-profile gangsters. ]



January 06, 2005


Slaves of the 21st century

by Urban Fox, Times online correspondent

If you want ruthless cruelty, find a London mother of small children
and ask her about her childcare arrangements

If you want ruthless cruelty, find a London mother of small children
and ask her about her childcare arrangements. The sweet-faced madonna
smiling beside the crib, or cooing at her little darlings in the
playground, instantly turns into something altogether redder in tooth
and claw.

The emergence of a whole new batch of countries from which to source
au pairs (hooray for the collapse of communism) has proved a godsend
for hard-pressed parents in one of Europe's most expensive cities.
Cheap, cheap labour, in the hugely exploitable form of young girls
unsure what people in this country consider hard work, and what is
frankly no better than abuse, is flooding into London. There are no
controls. And complete freedom over a 50-a-week [Sterling Pound]
skivvy is going to the heads of my hitherto blamelessly humanitarian
friends. One by one, they're turning into the kind of racist,
bullying, heartless employers whose appalling behaviour they would
indignantly condemn if they came across it in any other walk of life.

"I'm getting a Serb from Kosovo," Friend A confided at the end of the
summer, with a devilish glint in her eyes. "She wept in the interview
when I asked her how her parents would get along without her once she
came to live in London. It turned out I'd reminded her that her 
father
had been beaten up by Kosovan teenagers the other day. But I figure
coming from a war zone is good. She'll be too freaked out to want to
go out in the evenings. That means more babysitting and cleaning for
us. The downside is that she might go around crying all the time and
get on our nerves. But I've sorted that out too. I've told her she's
not allowed to cry in the house. And she's banned from using our 
phone
to call home." She beamed happily.

Friend B, meanwhile, having picked a series of apparent innocents 
who,
within seconds of being in the house, turned into drug-taking,
fag-stubbing, pole-dancing, child-hating menaces - or at least failed
to do the mountains of washing up, cleaning, ironing, feeding, 
folding
and separating of psychotic small boys brandishing swords that made 
up
her list of duties - fired the lot and turned for her next wee slavey
to a German Catholic religious agency. "Fabulous," she gloated.
"They'll be practically nuns.

They won't drink. They'll have been properly brought up, and know how
to wash up and fold clothes. And they won't ever have fun or go out -
too virtuous. Which means more free babysitting for us."

The London mummy's au pair of choice, it appears, is an abject 
victim.
Friend C chose a Russian girl from a ghost town near a nuclear power
plant in Lithuania, though she was worried that "she might glow in 
the
dark and irradiate us all". Friend D picked a "chavvy" Hungarian girl
from the wrong side of the tracks in Budapest. Friend E suggested I
only employ au pairs who were too fat to attract a social life. "I
find that roughly twice the normal weight guarantees you endless
babysitting," she said sagely.

When these business relationships go wrong, no one could be more
surprised
and upset than the mothers. Their eyes widen innocently as they list
the young miscreant's crimes. "She threatened to walk out, just
because I was kept a couple of hours late at work again and forgot to
call her!" they bleat, or "She had the cheek to give two weeks' 
notice
- just two weeks before the Christmas holidays!"

All five of the au pairs I mention above have, of course, been fired -

and all in very similar ways. When the Serb from Kosovo tried to hand
in her

resignation, pleading homesickness, and begged to be allowed to go
home after the two weeks agreed in her contract, Friend A threw her
out in the street on the very same December evening, her possessions
following half an hour later, in a black binliner. "She'd ruined my
Christmas! I wasn't having her staying in the house a moment longer!"
Friend A raged. "I don't know where she went! And I don't care!"

Friend B, who had been disappointed to discover that the German
religious
agency supplied just the same pretty, leggy, party-minded teenage
girls as all other agencies, lost her temper when her latest was
discovered having a fag in the back garden. She got her husband to
have the row and fire the girl, but the result was the same - au pair
ejected by nightfall, black binliner in hand, with no notice.

Friends C and D also "lost" their au pairs in the space of an 
evening.
Friend C joined forces with her husband for a row over the au pair's
excessive use of the shower ("twice a day, can you believe?"), and 
out
she went into the night. Friend D lost her temper with the au pair by
phone, on a motorway, at midnight, when the au pair called to see 
what
time her employer was likely to get home and relieve her from
babysitting. "How dare you call me so late?" Friend D screamed; the 
au
pair was parked on the doorstep by dawn.

Luckily for the au pairs, they aren't always the victims their
employees take them for. However little time they've been in a new
country, most of them will have made friends, through English classes
or friends from home. So they aren't completely destitute. They turn
up, with their black bags and alarming stories, and sleep on a
friend's floor (if the friend's boss will let them). And then,
resilience and good temper miraculously restored, they go back to
their agency and get another job.

History is full of examples of casual cruelty by employers to their
staff. Black women keeping house for white families in colonial
Africa, never seeing their own children growing up in faraway
villages; ayahs brought back from imperial India with the family 
whose
children they'd raised, only to be abandoned on the streets of London
once they'd outlived their usefulness.

But it's a bit unnerving to find the same tyranny flourishing in
London's liberal suburbs in the 21st century.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-16149-1428074-
16752,00
.html











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