We have a once every 2 weeks housecleaning service, but I don’t consider that servants. We’re in a condo now, but when we were in our house previously we also had a gardener and a pool service. Again, I don’t consider them servants, rather service providers.
That said, in her first marriage my wife had a nanny/housekeeper/cook who would come in every day. She considered her to be just a notch below family, and when she left her then husband that is who she stayed with. The downside for me was that when we got married I found that, perhaps because of this earlier experience, my wife was not into pitching in on household chores. It is in my nature to keep on top of these things and this imbalance has been a constant frustration that I am the only one takin’ care of sh*t. (Sorry for the tangent…)
In other news, a few years ago I had a young lady working for me who was having her third child. She was in a low level position, as was her husband, and lamenting the anticipated cost of putting a third child in day care. Eventually she learned about getting in-home child care that would be much cheaper overall. She was quite amused that a couple in their position would have “help”. Now, we are talking Los Angeles, so relatively inexpensive foreign-born (and probably undocumented) help is abundant, if you don’t mind being out of compliance with payroll regulations, so to speak.
We currently have the house and yard cleaned professionally once every two weeks, but like most people I don’t consider those ‘servants’.
Like MrDibble I grew up in South Africa and was middle class. We didn’t have live-in servants, but it actually wasn’t uncommon in our income range for families to do so, and at least in our neighborhood and the neighborhood of my grandparents (houses built in the 50s) it wasn’t uncommon for the house to have a separate servants quarters section. That would probably appear weird to modern American eyes, given the houses are otherwise pretty standard looking middle class suburban affairs.
I don’t think it is quite as common anymore though.
When I lived in the Congo in 1961 we, like all other UN people, had a servant, who came in the morning, cleaned the house and made the big meal at noon, and then left before dinner. He lived not too far away. My father also had a driver during the day that my mother used when he was in the hospital. That was UN provided, as was the car.
Sorry for the term “servant”. This was because 1. I wasnt sure what other term to use and 2. I wondered if anyone here was from such a wealthy family that actually had help who lived on site.
I do know I used to see job ads for live in nanny or au pair where the family offered a room, car, plus salary. A coworker turned down a position to be head of maintenance and overall property manager for this rich guys big estate and the compensation included an apartment plus many perks (like trips on his private jet and use of his other properties).
I don’t have servants, aside from a woman that cleans for a couple of hours a week, but I have lots of very wealthy clients that do. And they generally have a lot of them
The key person would be the house manager or estate manager. They handle scheduling for the staff and are responsible for hiring and coordinating the multitudes of outside contractors for HVAC, electrical, plumbing etc etc.
The housekeepers that handle the basic laundry and cleaning duties ( most of my clients have anywhere from 2 to 6 fulltime ) basically do the same thing day after day and need very little management. But if the owner doesn’t like they way something is being done - like if they want their shirts folded differently- that request would go through the house manager . Sometimes the house manager role is handled by a live-in couple, usually Eastern European, but I saw that more 20 years ago than I do now. Most of the house managers I work with these days don’t live in and they tend to be All-American white guys with a background in construction management.
Then you have the chef, who is probably the most skilled and highly paid household employee. Usually they work alone but sometimes they have their own staff - I’m thinking of one particular client that has a kitchen staff of six, but that is a family with 8 kids. They also either do the grocery shopping (or ordering and delivery).
Good private chefs are in high demand and can be temperamental and they will often dictate the kitchen equipment, I think that most of the reason clients install the really good high end kitchen equipment ( like the Aga ranges) is that they need it to land a good chef.
For the most part, being really rich is not compatible with privacy. Frankly, I don’t know how some of these people can stand having a houseful of workers in their house all day every day but it goes with the lifestyle.
The popularity of domestic servants has historically been determined by two variables:
The cost of paying them, and
Robots.
#1 is, I think, obvious; the likelihood people will employ servants, and the number they will employ, is proportional to the cost
#2 is a big deal too, though, and by robots I don’t mean the one on the Jetsons, but the ones we now take for granted - your dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, washing machine and dryer. Those machines all replaced labor, and in so doing made servants a less attractive solution. Before you had a machine to wash dishes or clothes, those were very labor intensive jobs, and it was more logical to hire someone to do them.
My husband grew up with servants; I did not. His grandmother’s house - where he spent most of his time - had two maids, a cook and I think someone who helps the cook and a driver, all of who had quarters within the compound. They still do.
As a result, when we go to India to visit his family, I tend to feel considerably more awkward about cleaning up after myself than he does. It’s not really the lack of privacy but I’m used to doing things for myself to the point where it’s hard not to be apologetic when someone else is washing my underwear. There’s also a language barrier (which I’ve been trying to eliminate but not many people here speak Gujurati), so that doesn’t help.
The idea of hiring a cleaning service is a little less intimidating for me - it seems more transactional, they don’t come that often, we’re not in each other’s business and probably because I know how much I’m paying I don’t feel as bad about needing the help.
A friend of mine from India grew up in a well-to-do house with servants. She chose to marry for love and move to the US, so she effectively cut herself off from her upbringing. She tells of the first time she had to clean a toilet by herself and how much of an emotional impact it had on her, as it brought up the reality of her decisions, and the impact of the class society she came from that was wrapped up in her sense of identity.
I lived for a number of years overseas, and had a live-in cook, a maid, and for a briefer period of time, a driver/handyman.
Like some others have said here, they become something in between an employee and family. I’m still in touch with my cook despite not having been back in years.
They were also paid generously while with me, 1.5x-2x prevailing market rates (as well as some bonuses and a medical emergency expense I covered).
It was fantastic, and I’d happily do it again.
There’s nothing quite like not having to worry about any of the drudgery of everyday life. There’s a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wake up and whenever you get home, you never need to worry about laundry or dishes or mopping the floor, you don’t need to grocery shop or run errands…it’s heaven!
I also think it’s kind of a shame that we don’t have a culture of doing this in the US - it’s unheard of to pay one person say $25k a year (which is twice minimum wage) or so to live in your house and cook and clean and take care of groceries and errands for you, but instead you need to contract out with multiple businesses that send maids, or pick up and wash your laundry, or deliver groceries, or deliver already-made meals, or whatever.
I’m sure sociocultural factors are a large part of that, and that they would be looked down upon for doing something like that even if the pay was better than a lot of retail positions.
IMO ‘servant’ is a social relationship, and a real thing even if the particular word would not be polite to use openly about a person.
Several responses have said something like ‘except a cleaning service’. A cleaning service is not a servant or servants, though it accomplishes the same thing economically a servant might. Likewise daycare v a nanny.
Not to say there are no gray areas. The original question might have envisioned live in help who exclusively perform a service for one family. Although the social relationship could be partly similar for a non-live-in exclusive nanny, or even perhaps a non-exclusive, non-live-in individual house cleaner.
But generally I’d say if you eliminate people for whom you don’t provide lodging, you’re mainly separating it from any substantive question of ‘what it is like?’. Otherwise, ‘what it is like to hire a cleaning service?’ is not a very profound question. It’s kind of like when you hire a plumber to come to your house and fix your pipes, only a plumber is required less regularly (one would hope).
As far as “servants” becoming like family, I know a couple, (really more “friends of friends” but I have hung out with them a couple of times, they seem like two very cool people) and the husband has a small landscaping business in Connecticut, and he had an older, retired couple as clients (I think the man had been a tenured professor at Yale) who he would do yardwork and gardening for and eventually became kind of an overall handyman when they got older and needed more help, and anyway the landscaper and his wife eventually became close friends with this older couple, who had no children of their own, and it evolved into a kind of “Adopted Grandparents” relationship, to the point that the landscaper and his wife were left the older couple’s home in the will when they passed away.
Apparently, according to my friend (the guy who knows landscaper and wife) the “home” was actually a sprawling estate, worth well over $1,000,000 but landscaper and his wife didn’t let that go to their heads, he still has his landscaping business, his wife is still working as a teacher (or maybe she’s a R.N.) but now instead of living in a tiny duplex they are the owners of a home in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the country.
When I have hung out with this couple, they seem totally down-to-Earth, and they never brought this subject up, my friend was the person who told me about the situation. He said that the older couple who willed them the house did not tell them in advance of their plans, although I don’t remember any details as far as taxes or legal issues are concerned.
So I guess that at least sometimes, true friendship and affection can grow out of an employee/employer relationship, even between people from totally different ages or social circles.
I agree there’s sociocultural resistance on both sides of this economic equation in the US. But, on the employer side it’s cheaper and more efficient for the vast majority of people to access services ‘a la carte’ as they need them than pay somebody full time. Those service providers have economies of scale. And, though partly related to cultural factors on the employee side, it’s not really $25k to have a full time live-in servant in the US on a completely above-board basis (wrt immigration and tax law). It’s substantially more than that.
We’re talking a pretty small % of Americans who would really afford that, though again I agree there are people who could, and who’d recognize real value from it, who don’t because it would make them feel ‘upper class’ and most rich Americans still want to think of themselves as ‘middle class’. But again also people who just wouldn’t derive that much economic utility from avoiding cleaning up, doing the laundry, people who value their privacy more highly, etc. And also again the flexibility to have somebody else cook when you don’t want to, but cook yourself when you want to, without having to still pay somebody (ie. order out).
Yeah, you have some good points - it would cost more due to FICA and getting some contracts written up and whatever, but even at $35k, I still think plenty of households could afford that for the level of utility they’d get (particularly dual income households). 17% of households make more than $100k, and 5% of individuals are in that bracket, so the total market is as high as 20M households (even if we cut it in half, ~10M households is a decent potential market).
I think the biggest obstacles are sociocultural - from the “employer” side the middle class thing that you suggested is a big one, and the privacy one. We also have this whole “everyone is out to get you and you must vet strangers to the n-th degree before trusting them” thing in our culture, which I’m sure is another barrier to entry.
From the “employed” side, social stigma and not wanting to do other people’s dirty work probably kill it even if they would make twice as much as retail AND don’t have to pay rent.
It just really seems like a lost opportunity, though, because especially if you had kids, lots of households would see value from it for that price point, and being paid twice as much and getting free rent sounds like a great deal for somebody whose other options are retail or fast food.
Maybe I should start a “live-in placement” business and see if there’s actually a market here.
I see a big problem is the “servant” would have a life of their own. They will want to have maybe their own family, friends, and interests. BUT, the host family would have to demand to be first.
So what if your live in nanny wanted her boyfriend to move in or else has a child? What if the days off she wanted were the same as what the family needs her to cover while the parents are away?
We had several young people to come in and work with our kids. We would lose several to marriages, college, and one joining the marines.
My wife had a live-in nanny (when she was a child, naturally). This woman did a good deal of raising my wife, and stuck around as a housekeeper long after my wife was grown, but I don’t think she feels especially close to the woman.
We have had a succession of nannies, some of whom we are still close with. We went to one ex-nanny’s wedding; another still sits for us occasionally and she, her husband and two daughters come to occasional big events like our daughter’s birthday parties. One stuck as an art tutor, although I can’t stand her. Others, I can’t even remember their names.
The one person I have known personally who had a live-in nanny went this route when he found out that this would cost less than regular child care for his two then-preschool aged children, one of whom was physically healthy but severely mentally disabled. He was a single parent (wife had left; the child’s disability had nothing to do with that because it happened before she was diagnosed) who had a job with very irregular hours.
My parents now have a house cleaner for the heavy cleaning, and her husband does the yard work and snow shoveling. They refuse to move out of the house, and they just can’t do that any more.
I used to work with a woman who would do this - and I mean she would sometimes stay up until 2 or 3am to make sure the housekeeper came to a sparkling clean house. Unfortunately, I also suspect that she and her husband had a “The Help” attitude about her.
One of our technicians put out the word that she would do housecleaning, for a little extra money (IIRC she was asking $10 an hour in cash; this was about 10 years ago.) One pharmacist took her up on it, or rather, his wife did; she would go to their house and dust, vacuum, and otherwise clean the living room, kitchen, bathrooms, and downstairs rec room, and I have no doubt that they treated her with the same respect he gave her at work. Another tech asked, “What does his wife do while you’re there?” She giggled and replied, “Oh, she puts her feet up in the recliner, drinks a can of pop, reads a magazine…”
I grew up in Peru, most people had servants and if you didn’t you probably were one. You didn’t even have to be rich or even upper middle class. Grandma was basically barely above what we would consider poor and she had a servant her whole life. Ours were treated well, if they stayed with us for years they did feel like part of the family but they eventually moved on and didn’t really stayed in touch.
I soooo miss our help in China. Like Chefguy, we paid more than the market rate, we ate meals together, treated with respect, helped out with their kids getting into Shanghai schools, and more. They weren’t family but they were more than paid help. One woman we had for more than a decade, and we still keep in touch 8 years after leaving. Having twins and working a demanding job, it was just a godsend. We had one woman that just looked after the twins at night. She was 8pm to 8am with sleep time. When the twins were about a year old, we had two live in nanny’s plus the women that helped full time for a decade. It was great!
Frankly, perhaps part of why my wife and I are divorcing is that after moving to the US, my stay at home wife had to step up since my work didn’t lighten up.
