Young, foreign, female: The gendered and nationalized nature of household labour in the au pair institution

 The au pair mobility programme was originally founded to promote the exchange of cultures by arranging a one year sojourn of foreign young people in a local host family. However, many recent studies argue that this scheme is misused by families to employ cheap live-in domestic workers from abroad.  

Hidden by the official terminology of “au pair girls” and “host families” the structural conditions of this scheme enable a drastic power inequality between employer and employee. Au pairs are especially vulnerable to exploitation as this work is only very little regulated and the workplace within the private sphere of families is extremely difficult to monitor. Au pairs officially are not granted the status "workers" and are not protected by the labour law and labour union.

On the basis of biographical interviews with female and male au pairs from Russia and Eastern Europe, I would like to reveal individual experiences and coping strategies concerning au pair work in Germany. The special gendered nature of the au pair institution can best be shown by comparing the working conditions and duties of female au pairs with those rare cases of male au pairs. To sum up my findings: young women are normally hired for cleaning, cooking and babysitting toddlers, while men are hired for looking after older boys, and seldom are supposed to clean or cook. Nevertheless, both male and female au pairs experience discrimination and exploitation at their workplace, which have to be analysed as specific intersections of gender, nationality and age.  Above that, my paper aims to show au pairs’ strategies of resistance against mischiefs of their labour conditions such as complaining, bargaining for higher wages or threatening to leave the family, working very slowly or trying to spend time out of the house.