Do you know anyone with servants?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What percent of households now have full-time “help” (maids, gardeners, footmen, cooks) as opposed to the past ('20s and 1880s might be informative). Is this a cultural or a monetary shift?

My first thread… I live in a very affluent community and am in construction, so I see not only how houses are built, but how they are used via remodels. I also have affluent relatives. No one in my experience aside from 4 or 5 people who are 100-millionaires or more has full time household help. Cooks may be brought in for specific meals (as opposed to caterers for parties–cooks are regular but part-time help). I’d love a cook, but I’d feel guilty no matter how much I made or worked.

Caretakers are a different story–a lot of the larger parcels have them, but they are not expected (IME) to perform the above household duties.

2

How do you define full-time, though? Live-in? Forty hours per week?

My mother-in-law has a close-to-full-time servant, in that she’s there 40 hours per week if she bothers to show up. That’s in Mexico, though, where labor is cheap. The cognate is true, to: servienta.

Here in China we share a servant (ayi, meaning “auntie”) with another family. Between the two families, it’s a full-time gig. Again, the labor is cheap. And in the case of China, it’s often pointed out that having an ayi is part of our social responsibility.

3

My brother and his SO (good jobs, but not wealthy) have a 40 hour a week nanny for their baby.

4

At my high point, we had two live in nannies (we had twins) and a full time house keeper/cook. Of course, this was in China and wages are much lower. Now in the US we do it all ourselves (and the kids are older).

5

Nanny. Didn’t think about that–it’s sort of the catch-all these days. However, it sort of falls to child care, and if time is left over, house care. It might be a sub-set of the old servants?

I think other countries than the US/EU might have other standards…

6

I grew up with a black nanny although she was more of a part of the family than a servant. It was a symbiotic relationship. My ex in-laws have live in caretakers on their 300 acre farm in New Hampshire.

With modern machines, there isn’t much need to have actual servants around unless you are disabled. It is more hassle and money than it is worth. There is a reason few people have them. The total cost of full-time labor is high even at minimum wage. It is better just to call in gardeners, cooks, and maids as a service when you need them.

7

My wife has me. Does that count?

8

Probably not. On the other hand, you have her.

9

I tutor for a family that has a nanny/housekeeper that lives with them. She gets Sundays off, I think.

10

I know several people outside the US who have servants. In one case they’ve had families with them their whole lives, with sons and daughters succeeding in some positions, though that will almost certainly change in this generation. I’m not sure if you mean to restrict the countries you are asking about. Aside from full-time nannies and other domestic workers, I don’t know of anyone in the US who has live-in servants.

11

Kind of.

I know a woman who owns a holiday home in Bali. She only goes there a few weeks each year and has “servants” while she is there. The rest of the year the “servants” live in the house and it is their home. They move out to the local town and act like “servants” when she is in Bali.

When she dies the Balinese family get the place.

12

It’s very common to have Fillipina maids in Hong Kong

13

We had a fulltime nanny for our kids (10 hrs/day during the week), does that count?

I know one family with actual live-in help.

14

It’s becoming quite common in my area for families who bought McMansions to “pay” for them by having a foreign au pair. In effect, the girl gets free room and board and attends university here, and takes care of the kids. Some of them complain that the family uses them like an 80 hour a week servant, having them do much more than take care of the kids. Others say they only work about 20 hours a week.

15

I live in a compound. I have communal cooks, waiters, houseboys, car-wash boys and gardeners. My first wife had maids and cooks.

16

My paternal grandparents always had a maid that came 2-3 times a week (sometimes more) to do chores and clean around the house. When my grandfather died and my grandmother remarried, she took the maid with her to the new apartment, again 2-3 times per week. Now that she’s widowed again, granny currently has no help.

As my grandparents got older, the maid became more useful, doing the tedious chores that would hurt their back, and helping with cooking and ironing. My grandparents did a lot of the chores themselves, like laundry and dishes, but the maid would put the plates away and iron the clothes.

My ex’s sister has a live-in maid/baby sitter, but that is in Brazil, where again, wages are lower. She’s not wealthy, but she is in a higher socioeconomic position than she appears.

17

Yeah, but neither sirvienta nor servicio implies full-time.

I know one family that has live-in servants: the servant family has worked for the family of the mistress for centuries. Everybody else I know who has full-time servants by the definitions of the Spanish government (over 30h/wk, the masters are responsible for the servant’s Social Security), this person is a caretaker for an old person.

My mother and brother have the same cleaners, a married couple who come in 4h/wk (2h but two of them). This is much more common, as is having a cleaning lady whose first duty is taking the young children to the bus stop/school (5-10h/wk).

19

Canada has a program where you can import a child-care worker on a special visa. I know this because I saw a program on how it was being abused on Canadian television. Theoretically, they are supposed to get days off, etc.; some people take advantage of the threat of visa reovcation to nake them work slave hours, skip wages, take away their passports, do all the housekeeping, even pass them on to their friends and physical abuse. Good old first world. However, the recruiting agecies back home apparently also get in on the exploitation action. The leverage in the arrangement is very one-sided.

Apparently, you can get a full-time, live in nanny for your child-care. The number mentioned was about $1000/month. Currently, a lot seem to come from south-east Asia, especially the Phillipines. A few decades ago, the nanny of choice came from Jamiaca; since the visa was a help to full immigrant status, this is where a lot of the Jamaicans in Toronto got their immigration papers from.

A well-off couple who do not qualify for subsized day care could conceivably spend over $1000/month on just day care, especially with more than 1 kid. This option is a real bargain if you have the house with room for a live-in nanny.

As for anything more than that, per the OP? You need a gardener, there are landscaping companies that contract for that; they take care of finding people, maintaining all the equipment, on grass-cutting day 10 people show up and the whole 10 acres are trimmed in an hour. A guy with a front end loader shows up after the snowstorm and your driveway is clear in 10 minutes, Ditto for house-cleaning. Instead of one person who lives in, enough people show up to finish the work in an hour or two; someone’s vacation? They worry about filling in the gap. Don’t like the result? The owner of the company sorts out your complaints, and Consuela is replaced by someone else and never shows up again. For the pool, a trained pool-boy will adjust your settings so the pool stays clean and clear.

Chauffeur? The company I used to work for, apparently the high mucky-mucks in head office had drivers (along with a private dining room on the 24th floor in an office tower). Rather than fighting through a 1-hou city commute crawl, they sat in the back and read reports and the driver dropped them off in front of the office, took care of parking, and picked them up again at 5. Convenience is a perk. But, evenings and weekends, unless it was company business I assume they were on their own. The chauffeur did not live with then and enjoy the perk of banging the upstairs maid and the lonely missus.

The only guy I know who did have a servant (a live-in nanny when the kids were young) was an eccentric type who among other things, stayed fit by doing his own gardening pusing a lawnmower around an few acres and raking the leaves every fall. He also fixed up a lot of his run-down turn of the centurn mansion by himself. Some city workers once stoppped by and asked him who owned the place. He said he did. “No you don’t,” hey said. “We’ve seen you here. You’re just the gardener.”

It’s so much simpler to have contractors today, and so much simpler if you have your own private house and don’t have to run a household for a few extra live-ins. You don’t have to try and find a jack-of-all-trades to do all the different tasks a modern household needs. Not too many people can afford enough servants to hire one for each task. Plus, wages and labour standards today make it difficult to demand the round-the-clock service we associate with old-style servants. Those standards are a by-product of the abuse the old-style rich people did heeap on their hirelings.

20

One of my ex-boyfriends is from an affluent community, and when I dated him, his family had two full-time “gardeners” and a full-time housemaid. They also had an au pair for the children when they were younger, but by the time I met them, that was years ago.

They *thought *they treated the housemaid like a family member, but being from a poor family with no servants, I could tell the difference, and I was horribly out of place because I tried not to treat her like a servant, and that made the family a little miffed at me.

The gardeners were there all the time, working on the family’s cars, fixing tiles in the house, working in the garage, running errands for the housemaid (they got the groceries a few times while I visited) and doing holiday/seasonal decorations to the house. They were not treated like family, and were in fact profoundly ignored by everyone in the household.

21

Agatha Christie was quoted as saying she never thought she’d be rich enough to own a car and too poor to have a servant.