Personal services required- Earn £1.45 an hour as an au pair
If you saw personal services required on channel 4 last night then you caught a small glimpse of the life of an au pair in the UK. Ridiculously long hours a job that doesn’t match the description, employers that want to pay you below minimum wage to work seventy+ hours a week, lack of decent food, no privacy and limited access to the bathroom. My wife did some time as an au pair as an opportunity to improve her English, the idea being (like most au pairs that come here) that she would work 30-40 hours a week cleaning and babysitting etc, then spend her free time studying and communicating with native English speakers. The guidelines are as follows:
Works 5 hours per day, 5 days per week
Baby sits 2-3 evenings per week
Receives 2 free days and evenings off
Weekly salary ranges from 52 - 65
She worked for a few different families and the reality was that she worked six days a week, she was always up when the young poorly disciplined children were up even on her day off, she rarely had time to go to English lesson as this conflicted with the two full time jobs she was doing for a room and £60 a week. It translates into an existence of pure domestic servitude. I worked out she was working from six in the morning till 10.30 at night six days a week, normally with two hours free-time in the afternoon, that’s fourteen and a half hours a day six days a week, so eighty seven hours a week not including helping the kids on Sunday mornings. That works out about £1.45 an hour. Plus the lodging worth about fifty pounds a week. I would include the food that’s supposed to be supplies but that rarely happened.
In one situation when she was working as au-pair for an MP’s family and dared to mention that she was not happy with the working situation, she was locked in the kitchen and threatened with immediate deportation (they were scared she would talk about her experiences to the press) when she refused to get in the car to the airport they dumped all her belongings into the drive way and she had to find her own way into the nearest town, homeless and alone in a foreign country.
My advice to anyone considering coming to England to study English is come on a student visa that allows you to work, you can get reasonable shared lodgings with like minded people, work part time and get minimum wage at least and have time to study as well as free time just to enjoy being here.
Works 5 hours per day, 5 days per week
Baby sits 2-3 evenings per week
Receives 2 free days and evenings off
Weekly salary ranges from 52 - 65
She worked for a few different families and the reality was that she worked six days a week, she was always up when the young poorly disciplined children were up even on her day off, she rarely had time to go to English lesson as this conflicted with the two full time jobs she was doing for a room and £60 a week. It translates into an existence of pure domestic servitude. I worked out she was working from six in the morning till 10.30 at night six days a week, normally with two hours free-time in the afternoon, that’s fourteen and a half hours a day six days a week, so eighty seven hours a week not including helping the kids on Sunday mornings. That works out about £1.45 an hour. Plus the lodging worth about fifty pounds a week. I would include the food that’s supposed to be supplies but that rarely happened.
In one situation when she was working as au-pair for an MP’s family and dared to mention that she was not happy with the working situation, she was locked in the kitchen and threatened with immediate deportation (they were scared she would talk about her experiences to the press) when she refused to get in the car to the airport they dumped all her belongings into the drive way and she had to find her own way into the nearest town, homeless and alone in a foreign country.
My advice to anyone considering coming to England to study English is come on a student visa that allows you to work, you can get reasonable shared lodgings with like minded people, work part time and get minimum wage at least and have time to study as well as free time just to enjoy being here.
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