Au pairs: ‘The value people are willing to pay for an hour of childcare is €3 and not €8.65’

The silence around the burgeoning use of au pairs in Ireland is not serving anyone well, says Aoife Smith of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI).

Ireland has no legal framework for au pairs and nothing that stipulates that they are exempt from employment regulations.

“Under Irish law, a person is a worker if they fit certain criteria: it doesn’t matter what name you give them,” she says.

Smith, who is the co-ordinator of the MRCI’s Domestic Workers’ Action Group, believes the tradition of au pairs as a cultural exchange is outdated and no longer relevant.

“Women were at home more then, and it was an extra pair of hands around the house. Now it’s full-time responsibility for children as young as three or four months.”

A European Parliament report in 2011, Abused Domestic Workers in Europe: the Case of Au Pairs, studied six countries, including Ireland. It said of the situation here: "The au pair stay has, to some extent, become primarily a commodity, sold by agencies and implemented as a 'less-expensive' care and domestic worker in private homes, and only secondary a cultural-exchange scheme."

The MRCI got legal opinion that says au pairs were protected by minimum-wage legislation. “[Au pairs] just don’t know,” says Smith.

There’s no problem where families are paying €100-€120 a week and au pairs are doing no more than 20 hours, because €54 can be deducted for board and lodging and so they are getting the minimum wage. However, she says agencies commonly talk about a 35-hour week and many au pairs are doing in excess of that.

Issues around au pairs first came on the MRCI’s radar about five years ago: generally cases involving non-EU au pairs, particularly ones from Brazil.

“Since then, we have had a steady flow of case work into the drop-in centre around au pairs, and we have started working with a group called the [Irish National] Au Pair Rights Association.” This year it has had a number of Spanish cases.

A dramatic increase in the use of au pairs is also making it increasingly difficult for nannies and childminders to get a proper wage, she says. “It seems that the value people are willing to pay for an hour of childcare is €3 and not €8.65 an hour.”

The Government may not want to be too vocal about the issue because it hasn’t got the capacity to deliver affordable childcare, says Smith.

“But at the end of the day, if people are taking cases, families are going to be embarrassed, and au pairs are finding themselves in situations they don’t want to be in either.”

Non-EU au pairs are particularly vulnerable because, under their student visas, they are not allowed more than 20 hours of employment a week.

“It is difficult for us to work those cases because they are seen as working beyond their immigration status,” says Smith.

Ireland has been really good on enforcing domestic workers’ rights in the past five years but the current au pair situation is undermining that, she adds.

“If you take the name ‘au pair’ out of it and ask a domestic worker, such as a live-in childminder, and an au pair to describe the work they are doing, it is almost identical – apart from the name and the pay.”

The problem is that we don’t have a definition of an au pair, says Julie Kelly, the chair of the Irish National Au Pair Association. Individual agencies, including her own, are safeguarding the rights of au pairs, she says, and “it shouldn’t be up to us to decide what it’s about. It just leaves room for exploitation and room for error.”

The association quotes correspondence it received from the Department of Justice: “An au pair arrangement is regarded as a private, voluntary matter between the parties concerned on the basis of a shared understanding. Therefore, such persons are not regarded as employees but are received by a family and treated as a family member in exchange for certain services, such as limited amounts of housework or babysitting. This activity is regarded as primarily cultural rather than economic.”

It works well as a cultural programme, Kelly says: the problems arise when the au pair is from outside Europe. “If you have somebody from Brazil who has no accommodation and realises how expensive Dublin is and goes for an au pair position, the family don’t actually understand the visa issues and the au pairs don’t want to be au pairs.”

Enforcement of minimum wage for au pairs would “eliminate the programme completely”, she adds. “A family is not going to pay an 18-year-old girl who can’t speak English and has no qualifications to come over from Spain and live with the family for the guts of €300 a week.”

For more information see mrci.ie and inapa.org