Gender, Place & Culture Playing Happy Families

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Gender, Place & Culture

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Playing Happy Families: rules and relationships in au pair employing households in London, England Rosie Cox; Rekha Narula

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Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 333–344, December 2003

Playing Happy Families: rules and relationships in au pair employing households in London, England

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ROSIE COX, Coventry University, UK REKHA NARULA, University of Sheffield, UK This article examines the way that rules about use of rooms, guests and eating practices operated within au pair employing households in London, England, and how these worked to structure relations between au pairs and their employers. Au pair employment has been growing in Britain in recent years and the au pair scheme provides a particularly interesting situation in which to examine quasi-familial relations because it requires host families to treat au pairs ‘as a member of the family’. Using findings from a questionnaire survey of 144 au pairs and in-depth discussions with 50 au pairs, seven au pair employers and seven agencies that place au pairs, it is argued that house rules are an important part of the au pair’s relationship to her employer’s family. Employers could take a strict ‘positional’ parenting approach, a more negotiated ‘personalising’ approach, or a mixture of the two. Those employers who most literally treated au pairs like members of the family, i.e. like children, did not encourage close relations by doing so. It is suggested that whereas studies of other forms of paid domestic employment have found that employers encourage the development of false kin relations in order to place additional demands on domestic workers, in au pair employment, employers may seek to create distance from rather than intimacy with their au pair and so counter some of the demands of the au pair scheme.

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Paid domestic work is a form of employment that is unusual in many ways. Its location within the ‘private’ family home and the type of work done—caring and affective labour—mean that relations between employer and worker can be constructed in quite different ways from those in other jobs. Hence, false kin or quasi-familial relations have been explored by researchers studying paid domestic employment in a range of situations (see, for example, Young, 1987; Radcliffe, 1990; Gregson & Lowe, 1994; Bakan & Stasiulis, 1997). False kin relations have been characterised as mobilising the rhetoric and practices of familial relations to shape interactions, responsibilities, and degree of intimacy between employers and domestic workers. These might include references to being ‘like a member of the family’ (Bakan & Stasiulis, 1997; Anderson, 2000) or may be indicated by treatment which is outside the normal repertoire of employer/employee interactions (Gregson & Lowe, 1994; England & Stiell, 1997). However, unlike ‘fictive kinship’, a concept used by anthropologists to describe close, kin-like relations such as godparents, false kinship is not necessarily a relationship of equal benefits nor one constructed by both parties. False kin relations appear to function in many situations to Correspondence: Rosie Cox, Faculty of Continuing Education, Birbeck, University of London, 26 Russell Square, London WC1E, UK; e-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/03/040333-12  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI 10.1080/0966369032000153304

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increase the exploitation of domestic workers whilst reducing their ability to resist such exploitation (Anderson, 2000). Whilst false kin relations have been shown by researchers to be an important element of almost all forms of live-in paid domestic employment, the exact nature of ‘family type’ relations has not always been investigated in great detail. This article uses the work of Sibley and Lowe (1992) and Sibley (1995) on children’s experiences of the home to reflect on the way that family-like relations are constructed within au pair employing households in London, England. Sibley’s work has highlighted the importance of rules governing the use of space within the home to shaping relationships within kin families. The employment of au pairs provides a particularly interesting situation in which to examine these relationships because the au pair scheme in Britain requires host families to treat au pairs ‘as a member of the family’ (Home Office, 2002). It also restricts those able to take au pair positions to young migrants without dependants. Au pairs are employed by many families, perhaps 60,000 in Britain [1], and it appears that au pair employment has grown recently along with other forms of domestic labour (Lowe & Gregson, 1989; Platt, 2001; Addley, 2002). The au pair scheme is an agreement between a group of European countries [2] that is meant to allow cultural exchange for young people and provide help to families with young children. Au pairs are meant to live as members of their employers’ families and should be treated as equals (the translation of the phrase ‘au pair’) rather than as paid servants. They are meant to do 25 hours a week of ‘light housework’ or childcare plus two evenings of babysitting. They must have the opportunity to learn English; however, employers do not contribute to the cost of language classes. Au pairs who find jobs through reputable means will normally have a contract that confirms their pay and conditions yet the scheme describes employers as the ‘host family’ and wages as ‘pocket money’ (the Home Office advises that au pairs are given £45 per week plus their own room and meals). Au pairs do not have work permits but au pair visas, and employers do not have to pay tax or national insurance for them. Au pairs must be aged between 17 and 27 years, cannot be married or have dependent children. They can stay in Britain for up to two years but must be living with a ‘host family’ (Home Office, 2002). Au pairs, therefore, are constructed as family members, not workers, by official discourses and their role as one of the most important groups of domestic workers in Britain is hidden. We refer throughout to ‘au pairs’ and ‘employers’, although this is technically incorrect, in order to re-emphasise that au pairs’ work is ‘real’ work and that their relations within the home are governed by the instrumental relations of employment as well as their place as household members. Au pairing is unusual in that it combines elements of employment, cultural exchange and living arrangements. These characteristics mean that a variety of possible relationships are available to au pairs and their employers that emphasise or combine different elements. The study found rules about the use of space within the au pair employing home to be an important way that these relationships were negotiated and defined. Employers could choose to be ‘strict’, imposing a range of rules that are more like those applied to young children, to have a mixed approach, applying rules in some areas but not others, or to seek a more negotiated relationship with their au pairs. In each case, the use of rules within the home both delimited and created the relationship between au pair and employer. Further, those employers who used a number of strict rules and emphasised the ‘au parent’ element of their role, most literally treating the au pair like a child, were not necessarily doing this as a way to integrate the au pair into the family, but rather could be seeking a more distant relationship, while those employers who gave

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au pairs greater freedom could make them ‘part of the family’ by doing so. Employers imposing a range of rules could do this as a way of overcoming the demand of the au pair scheme that au pairs are treated as family members, whilst simultaneously using the idiom of parent/child relations to manage an employment relation in a way that felt more comfortable within their home.


Paid Domestic Labour and False Kin Relations

Writers investigating paid domestic employment in various parts of the world have detailed the importance of its location within the space of the home as fundamental in shaping the relationship between domestic workers and employers and encouraging the development of ‘false kin’ relations. Feminist geographers have highlighted the significance of the home as a locus of various power relations between men and women (Gregson & Lowe, 1995; Domosh, 1998) and parents and children (Gregson & Lowe, 1995; Domosh, 1998; Holloway & Valentine, 2001). Ideologies about the home and the separation of ‘home’ from ‘work’ have been shown to influence the treatment of women in society generally (McDowell, 1999) and to impact upon levels of economic activity (Hanson & Pratt, 1995; Hardill et al., 1997; Jarvis, 1999; Kwan, 1999) and leisure activities (Moss, 1997). A consideration of paid domestic labour further confounds the home/work and public/private dichotomies as the employers’ home and housework become workplace and paid work for the domestic worker. Domestic employment also challenges notions that the public/private divide is simply a gender divide, showing that it is constructed by (and constructs) class, race and national hierarchies as well (Graham, 1991; Anderson, 2000; Chang, 2000). The ways in which domestic employment relations are negotiated vary between specific situations but quasi-familial relations appear to be important in many situations. The location of the work and its affective nature allow such relations to develop and allow the blurring of boundaries between work and non-work, family and employer. These relations can also facilitate the use of rules within the employer’s home which are like those made in relation to children. Thus, the employer can become ‘mother’ and the domestic worker a child, a power relationship which is more comfortable within the home than that of employer and employee. Stiell and England (1999) and Bakan and Stasiulis (1997) have commented on the ways in which employers of migrant domestic workers in Canada use ‘maternalism’ to shape relations. Rollins (1985, p. 186 quoted in Bakan & Stasiulis, 1997, p. 13) characterises the maternal employer who displays motherliness, protectiveness and generosity as ‘expressing in a distinctly feminine way her lack of respect for the domestic as an autonomous, adult employee’. These authors argue that false kinship relations are used to extract further unpaid physical and affective labour and often veil the asymmetrical class relations associated with paid domestic employment. Similarly, Anderson (2000) found that the rhetoric of being ‘part of the family’ appeared repeatedly in her discussions with migrant domestic workers in six European countries. She argues that employers, and some workers, made use of the notion of the family as a way to negotiate the contradictions inherent in the commodification of domestic work and the tension between ‘the affective relations of the private and the instrumental relations of employment’ (2000, p. 122). Anderson argues that the notion of ‘being part of the family’ works in employers’ interests because it seriously weakens employees’ ability to negotiate terms and conditions:

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Becoming ‘part of the family’ is not only a means of maximising labour extracted from the worker. It is an attempt to manage contradictions. For the employer it helps manage the contradictions of intimacy and status that attach to the domestic worker, who is at once privy to many of the intimate details of family life, yet also their status giver, their myth maker. (2000, p. 124) Whilst employers appear to benefit from false kin relations with employees, not all employers choose to encourage them and not all employees accept them. HondagneuSotelo (2001) found that some Californian employers considered establishing friendly relations with their employees to be yet another unwelcome chore, while Bakan and Stasiulis (1997, p. 11) argue that ‘many household workers have firmly rejected the notion that they are part of their employer’s family on the grounds that such kinship-like idioms mask their actual subordinate status’. Studies of paid domestic employment in Latin America have highlighted the way in which domestic workers are often treated as children by their employers. Relations of false kin and affectivity are used to absorb the domestic worker into her employer’s family and remove her independence (de Melo, 1989; Garcia Castro, 1989). Young (1987), Radcliffe (1990), and Gill (1994) have shown the position of young, migrant, live-in domestic workers facing restrictions by their employers both as employees and surrogate ‘daughters’. The semi-integration of the worker into the family makes her labour become the ‘natural’ behaviour of any woman in a household, whilst her position as ‘daughter’ rather than adult, and inferiority in terms of ethnicity, are used to restrict her freedoms and exclude her from full membership of the family (Young, 1987). Everyday matters, such as the use of names, rules about visitors or the clothes domestic workers wear, become moments for the negotiation of the employer/employee relationship (Radcliffe, 1990, 1999). These explanations have particular relevance to au pairs who are, by definition, an entirely young, migrant workforce. It is not only migrant status, but also specific regulations of domestic workers’ visas which encourage quasi-familial relations between domestic workers and employers, thereby making national governments actors in this seemingly intimate relationship (see, for example, Pratt, 1997, 1999a, 1999b on Canada, and Yeoh & Huang, 1999 on Singapore). Pratt (1999b) specifically highlights the role of government policies in constructing domestic workers as family members to the detriment of the workers’ interests. She also argues that employment agencies construct nannies as ‘not quite workers’ and so justify wage levels and working conditions that would be unacceptable to Canadian citizens (1997, p. 167). The au pair scheme is one of the most pronounced examples of this official sanctioning of false kin relations, with its emphasis on au pairs being treated as family members and its negation of their status as workers. Equality with employers, inclusion in their lives and affective relations within the household are meant to define au pairing. Whilst employers of other forms of paid domestic labour may use notions of false kin to further integrate employees into the household to increase their exploitation, these notions are central to the au pair scheme and may be an unwelcome element of it for some employers. Along with the power relations that exist within the home between men and women and employers of domestic workers and their employees, attention has recently been turned to the power relations between parents and children (Holloway & Valentine, 2001). Studies of children’s experiences have highlighted the importance of house rules in shaping relationships and influencing children’s use of space (Sibley & Lowe, 1992; Sibley, 1995; Holloway & Valentine, 2001, 2003). Wood and Beck (1994) go so far as



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to say that rules make homes from houses, transmitting memories of past relationships and experiences. Sibley and Lowe (1992) and Sibley (1995) have suggested typologies of family relationships based on rules governing use of space within the home and how these are communicated to children. These include differences between ‘personalising’ and ‘positional’ families and those that are ‘disengaged’ or ‘enmeshed’. Personalising families are those that negotiate rules with children while in positional families power is vested in the positions within the family, and dominant members of the family, usually the parents, are authoritarian. Enmeshment/disengagement describes an axis of family interaction. ‘Enmeshed family members are excessively involved with each other denying personal space for others. Disengagement, at the opposite pole, describes a situation where there is poor communication and individuals feel isolated’ (Sibley & Lowe, 1992, p. 192). They suggest that use of space within the home, and the rules which govern this, are important elements of familial relationships and personal development. It is worthwhile, therefore, to reflect on the way that rules are used within au pair employing households to create specific relationships between au pairs and their employers.

Methodology

This article draws on findings from two research projects carried out nearly five years apart. The first examined various types of paid domestic labour in one area of London (see Cox, 1998). This study revealed some of the problems with the au pair scheme; the number of au pairs employed, their low pay and often-illegal working conditions. Five au pairs, three of their employers, four other employers and five agencies that place au pairs were interviewed at length. All of the au pairs were female and from western Europe. All but one of the employers was female; in the remaining household both parents described themselves as the au pair’s employer and both were interviewed. Following from this a more extensive study of au pair employment in London was carried out in 2000–2001. Au pairs were contacted through English classes and asked to complete a questionnaire about their experiences. The purpose of the questionnaire was to gather basic data about a larger group of au pairs in order to provide context for in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The questionnaire was relatively brief and was designed to be clear to people who had perhaps not been studying English for very long. It contained a mixture of closed questions, asking au pairs about their age, background, rules within their employers’ homes and characteristics of the household, along with open questions asking about high and low points of au pairing and general experiences. Questionnaires were completed by 144 au pairs; 6 were male and 138 female, 95% came from European countries (30.6% from the European Economic Area, 65.6% from other countries covered by the au pair agreement) and 5.6% came from countries that are outside the agreement and 81% were under 26 years old. Group discussions were held with about 40 au pairs at their language schools, and interviews were held with 10 other au pairs. Two agencies and two volunteers for a project that offers support to au pairs were also interviewed. In these discussions au pairs were asked about their experiences of au pairing in more detail (unfortunately, none of the male au pairs took part in these discussions). Agencies and those working with au pairs were asked for an overview of the scheme. Interviews were fully transcribed and analysed thematically alongside data from the survey. Analysis of the effects of au pairs’ age and nationality is ongoing so these issues are not commented on in this article. Pseudonyms have been used throughout to ensure the anonymity of respondents.


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Whilst this represents the largest study of au pair employment in Britain, there were some limitations to the methods used. As au pairs were located through language classes only the most privileged au pairs were likely to have been surveyed. Those who could not afford classes, were not given the time to attend them, or who were avoiding contact with the authorities because of their visa status would not have been found. It was difficult to carry out interviews with au pairs because of the constraints on their time. Many simply did not have to time to meet outside their employer’s home for an interview and/or were not allowed to invite people into the house. Again, this had the tendency to exclude some of the most isolated au pairs from the study. Similarly, only language schools and agencies that were operating in the most conscientious manner agreed to participate whilst many others refused. Employers were also very difficult to locate and were self-selecting, meaning that only a small number were interviewed and that group may well not have been representative. Findings reported in this article are, therefore, suggestive of possible experiences rather than generalisable.

Living with the Boss: use of space and relations in au pair employing households Rules may be designed by au pair employers, as by parents, for practical reasons, to protect valued objects, control the number of strangers entering the house, or regulate mealtimes. However, like the rules Sibley and Lowe (1992) and Wood and Beck (1994) found to operate in kin families, such rules also work to structure relationships within the home. The use of rules within au pair employing households in the study varied widely and was often not consistent within families. Of the au pairs surveyed 55% were subject to strict rules about some aspects of home life but not others, 31% were not subject to rules in any of the areas asked about and 14% were consistently subject to strict rules. The questionnaire also asked au pairs if they felt like a member of their employer’s family. Those who were subject to the greatest number of restrictions were least likely to answer ‘yes’ to this question. Of these, 11.1% said they did feel like a member of the family, whilst 72.2% said they did not. Of those with greatest freedom 78% said they felt like a member of the family and 12.2% said they did not. Those subject to a ‘mixed’ regime were most evenly balanced: 38.4% said they did not feel like a member of the family but 43.8% said that they did. This suggests that, for these au pairs, treatment as a member of the family, like a child, did not encourage a feeling of family membership. This section examines in detail how rules and practices surrounding the use of rooms, guests and eating are negotiated within au pair employing households, and how such practices shape relations between au pairs and their host families. Use of Rooms

The use of space within the house can contribute significantly to the physical comfort of au pairs and employers and can also be a way of negotiating the au pair/employer relationship. The rules and practices controlling the use of rooms within au pair employing households reveal some of the difficulties of negotiating an employment relation within the ‘private’ space of the home and incorporating an ‘outsider’ into the family. They can both highlight and disturb these boundaries. The research found a range of practices surrounding the use of ‘family’ rooms such as the living room, television room or kitchen. Some au pairs spent their free time in family rooms and interacted freely with family members, but the majority did not use family rooms because



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they felt unwelcome or were asked to carry out work if they met family members in shared spaces. A minority were specifically subject to rules prohibiting them from occupying family spaces unless they were cleaning them. The early research project had revealed that the majority of au pair employers interviewed did not encourage or allow au pairs into family living rooms. In fact only one employer allowed the au pair to use the living room freely. Some au pairs were allowed to use family spaces when the family was not using them; others were banned from these rooms at all times (except when they were cleaning them). Following from this the questionnaire survey asked au pairs about the rules in their house. Only 9% were specifically not allowed to use the living room and 2% were not allowed to use the kitchen when they wanted to. However, the focus groups and interviews revealed that a lack of specific prohibition did not mean that the other au pairs felt happy to use these rooms. Discussions revealed that many au pairs felt excluded from ‘family’ spaces in more subtle ways. Generally these could be described as a feeling of discomfort or inappropriateness of sharing space with the family or using family spaces. Eva and Elana, two au pairs from the Czech Republic, exemplify these feelings: The only thing is, for example, in the evening when they are at home, I wouldn’t go and watch television downstairs. I’ve got television in my room. Why should I go there [the TV room]? … I am a person who cleans there. I am not a member of the family. These quotations show the close relationship between the construction of the space of the house and the construction of the au pair/employer relationship. The second au pair directly equates spending time in certain rooms with her place in the family. The kitchen was used freely by many more au pairs but some still felt unable to use this space whenever they wanted to. However, the reasons for au pairs keeping out of the kitchen appeared to be different from that which kept them from using the living room. Kate, also from the Czech Republic, describes the frustration she feels about both belonging in and being excluded from the kitchen. A number of interviewees expressed similar conflicts: I don’t dare to go downstairs in the kitchen even if I am hungry. I prefer to stay upstairs because I know that whenever I come downstairs there will be some work for me, something to clean in the kitchen or something. I want to have my time off and it’s not possible to have time off and to come downstairs and have, I don’t know, have a coffee. I am always waiting to hear ‘please could you just …’, ‘one minute’. I don’t want this. In this case the rules and practices within the home appear to work to distance au pairs from their employers, emphasising the contractual nature of their relationship, even though such rules are contrary to the au pair scheme’s guidance. The one au pair who was interviewed who regularly spent her evenings with her employers enthused about their friendliness and how close she felt to the mother and related this to her inclusion in their normal evening activities. Employers interviewed were aware of the importance of house rules in shaping the relationship they had with au pairs. Stephen and Maggie, both au pair employers for many years, show two contrasting approaches: If you’re living with an au pair then, for me anyway, it’s crucial that that person becomes part of the whole family. And, therefore, the first word is ‘anything that is in here’—and this is quite genuine—‘is yours’. So it could be


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the fridge, the TV or whatever. You cannot bring somebody in and say ‘Don’t come into the lounge if we’re in the lounge. Don’t use the kitchen if we’re in there’. I always gave them a big room and I gave them a telly and I’d say to them ‘If we’re ever in the sitting room don’t feel free to come in’. Whereas lots of people say, you know, the au pair deal is that they’re supposed to be part of the family and I’d say ‘you’re not. If you want a buddy buddy family then we’re not the family for you’. Whilst few employers would perhaps be as honest about their practices as Maggie, the general expectation of au pairs, employers and agencies that were interviewed was that au pairs would give the host family ‘space’. This could be expressed in terms of au pairs going to their own room in the evening even if they used communal spaces during the day. As Jan put it: They don’t sit in here [the living room], that’s about my only house rule. They’ve got a nice bedroom and in the evening we go our separate ways. However, employers who did not want to include their au pair in communal spaces did not construct this as excluding the au pair but, more often, described the arrangement as giving an au pair ‘independence’. Also, some au pairs working in families that did try to include them experienced this as limiting and impinging on their free time, revealing the complexity of negotiating quasi-familial relations in a home/workspace. Sibley and Lowe (1992) reflect that one model of unproblematic family interaction is the ‘separated’ family, in which communication is adequate rather than abundant and personal space has priority over family interaction. At the same time ‘enmeshment’, where family members are excessively involved with one another, is identified as problematic rather than desirable. House rules, therefore, are an important part of delineating the au pair’s relationship to her employer’s family. The limits put in place by some employers are like those that ‘positional’ parents exercise over children. In her study of domestic workers in Peru, Radcliffe (1990) identified the control employers have over their employees’ movements as being the clearest demonstration that there was of their power to cast workers as perpetual children. However, inclusion in family spaces can also be ambivalent, and may be experienced as an additional loss of privacy.

Rules about Guests

Another way in which the space of the house could be regulated was by employers imposing rules about au pairs bringing guests home. The rules about the number of guests au pairs could have, whether they could stay for meals or stay the night varied, and there were sometimes different rules for male and female visitors. The survey found 11% of female au pairs surveyed were not allowed to have friends to visit and another 7% were only allowed to have females to visit, 28% were not allowed to have friends to stay, and another 6% were only allowed to have females to stay. All au pairs were asked if they would be allowed to have their boyfriend or girlfriend to visit or stay and 41% said no. There were no noticeable differences between the rules male and female au pairs faced about guests. It is worth noting that employers with strict rules about visitors were not necessarily the same as those with rules about the use of communal rooms. Maggie, quoted above, would not allow any male visitors or allow her au pairs to have boyfriends



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at all, while Jan was happy to allow boyfriends to stay any time. Of those au pairs who reported they were not allowed to use the family living room or kitchen freely (13 people in total), only one was allowed to have visitors, including a boyfriend, to visit or stay. Two were not allowed any visitors or overnight guests and the others were allowed guests who did not stay overnight, or were allowed females or their parents to stay. As Sibley and Lowe (1992, p. 193) comment about ‘real’ families, ‘attitudes to domestic space are more subtle and complex than … dichotomies would suggest’. Like rules over use of particular rooms, the existence of rules about visitors is an important element of the au pair/employer relationship. As in ‘real’ families, rules construct the relationships within the home as more or less egalitarian, more or less authoritarian. More authoritarian employers can infantilise au pairs by exerting the sorts of controls over them that would be more appropriate for young children or teenagers. Controls on visits by boyfriends/girlfriends, in particular, deny the au pair the status of an independent, sexually active adult (Bakan & Stasiulis, 1997). However, whilst these restrictions may cast the au pair as a child they are not necessarily the same as those imposed on the families’ ‘real’ children (cf. Radcliffe, 1990). In interviews au pairs were asked if the children of the family could have friends to visit and sleep over. Only one employer did not allow sleepovers for the children, and all allowed visitors. Marta, who had been told she could have friends to visit but was accused of turning the house into a bed and breakfast when she did, compares her treatment to that of the teenage children: The lady told us I was making a bed and breakfast of the house, it was the same time when one of the boys brought, almost every working day, his friends from school and they had lunch here. So we are a school canteen, almost, but I can’t have a friend to stay overnight. This example shows the contradictory nature of some restrictions imposed on au pairs. In this case the employer is able to use her position as ‘au parent’, someone who is responsible for the au pair’s welfare, and landlady, someone in control of the house, to impose rules about visitors. The use of rules to control the use of space in the employer’s home is an effective way of establishing power relations between domestic worker and employer whilst using the idiom of family membership rather than the rhetoric of employer and employee (Young, 1987; Garcia Castro, 1989; Radcliffe, 1990). Food and Eating

Practices surrounding food and eating are an important measure of the nature of a relationship (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001) and food has been recognised as a medium through which family relationships can be negotiated and constructed (see, for example, Valentine, 1999; Kneafsey & Cox, 2002). Stories about food and eating occurred repeatedly in interviews. Eating practices can be organised so as to integrate the au pair into the family, to give her independence, to exclude her or to treat her like a child. In the survey au pairs were asked who they normally ate with; 39% ate with the whole family, 28% ate with the children and 13% normally ate on their own. Only 7% said it was up to them who they ate with and only 2% ate with the parents if the parents and children ate separately. As discussed earlier, employing families appeared to combine control over some aspects of au pairs’ lives with freedom in others. Those who included au pairs in mealtimes, or gave them a choice about their eating arrangements, were not


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necessarily those who were most flexible about visitors. Only 14% of those questioned faced strict rules about both visitors and eating arrangements. Eating with someone can imply equality and friendliness. Au pairs who are made to eat alone are not being integrated into the family and those who eat with just the children are not being treated, or coded, as adults. One employer, Maggie, explicitly stated that eating, and the foods eaten, were important parts of the relationship. The au pairs she employed always ate with the children in the early evening and not with her and her husband later on. The au pairs were also expected to eat the same food as the children and not more expensive ‘adult’ food. However, Jan was very clear that eating together was a crucial part of the relationship; she illustrated this by describing something that had happened to a relative: My sister-in-law just got a new au pair and she says she will never sit down at the table with them at mealtimes. She used to potter around the kitchen until eventually my sister-in-law had a word with her and said, ‘You can’t do this! You’re behaving as though you’re my servant, you won’t sit down at the table with me. Even if you don’t want to have dinner, sit down at the table and have a drink’. As this illustrates, there is a balancing act taking place within the au pair/employer relationship. Eating communally can bring au pairs into the family and make them more equal, whilst leaving them to eat with the children can deny their adult status. Eating practices can also exclude au pairs from the family or emphasise their specific place as employees. One au pair lived in a house that also had a live-in housekeeper and she ate with the housekeeper. When there was a dinner party she was expected to serve guests, not to sit down with them, and so was coded clearly as an employee, not a family member. The foods au pairs are expected to eat can also code them as specifically inferior. One au pair who cooked for herself described the food she was given by her previous employer: I was given scraps, it was opened and when they got something new I was given what was left, near the use-by day or sometimes even after that. An agent who was interviewed had also come across instances of au pairs only being given food that was past its use-by date. These au pairs are not being treated as children or even as equally human to their employers. The expectation that au pairs can eat scraps or food that might not be safe resembles a slave/master or human/animal relationship and certainly does not include au pairs as equal members of the family. Au pair employers can use food and eating practices to delineate relationships because au pairs live-in. Unlike other forms of work, the ground on which the relationships of paid domestic employment are negotiated is the very basic stuff of family life.

Conclusions: the contradictions of family membership

False kin relationships and membership of the host family are ambivalent qualities of au pair employment. For the employer there are responsibilities towards the au pair but also extra power. Employers can use rules about everyday practices within their homes to balance this power and responsibility and negotiate a relationship that is comfortable to them. The space of the home is a particularly effective setting for this type of negotiation because it contains and represents familial and affective relationships and is space where we are used to seeing rules imposed on children.



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Like relationships within ‘real’ families, false kin relations in au pair employing households are not equal and rules that control space and behaviour within the home are an important way in which power relations are expressed and reinforced. Quasi-familial relations can be used to renegotiate an employment relationship that takes place within the home into one that fits more comfortably in that space but that still retains a power structure. As Anderson (2000) has argued, integration of a domestic worker into the family is a way of trying to manage the contradictions of domestic employment, contradictions which are inherent when paid labour takes place within the intimate space of the home. For au pair employers, these contradictions may be added to by the demands of the au pair scheme, requiring host families to treat au pairs as family members. While most employers have a mixed or ‘personalising’ approach to rules that can help integrate au pairs into the family, the use of a ‘positional’ style of control within the house, involving strict rules and little negotiation, may offer some employers a way of overcoming the demands for intimacy that the scheme requires. Such rules do not feel out of place within the home and, therefore, these au pair employers are able to mobilise hierarchical notions of family membership to negotiate contradictions within false kin relations.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Nuffield Foundation Social Science Small Grant SGS/00466/G. We would also like to thank Lewis Holloway and Bernadette Stiell for comments on an earlier draft of this article and the three anonymous referees for their detailed and perceptive comments. We would particularly like to thank Gill Valentine for her recommendation of Sibley’s work on house rules. NOTES [1] No reliable or comprehensive figures on the extent of au pair employment are collated. This figure is an estimate based on Home Office data on visas and extrapolations from the survey of au pairs in London. The lack of data such as these about au pairs adds to the ‘hidden’ nature of their work. [2] When the research was being carried out these countries included all of the European Economic Area and Andorra, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, The Faeroes, Greenland, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey. In December 2002 Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania joined the scheme because of government concern that a greater supply of au pairs was needed (Addley, 2002).

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