The Danish au pair programme is officially defined as a cultural exchange programme. The following definition of an au pair is posted on the website of the Danish Immigration Service:
A person who stays with a host family for the purpose of improving his/her language skills and possible academic knowledge and insight into the host country 89
One way of viewing the arrangement’s consistence with this description, if any, may be to describe the stated motivations and informants’ own description of practices that are acted out in specific au pair relations in host families.
In the interviews conducted with both au pairs and host families, a consistent theme was that the au pair relation was viewed principally as a work for pay arrangement and only secon-darily as a cultural exchange.
89 www.nyidanmark.dk (10.09.2008).
145 Lynn, aged 27, a high school graduate with a two-year-old daughter, was from a family of eight children, of whom she was the second. Her younger siblings were still in school. About her situation in the Philippines and the reason she went to Denmark as an au pair, she said:
My father is a farmer and my mother is a plain housewife. My brother is studying in secon-dary [school]. I have a daughter, but I’m not yet married to her father, but we are still hav-ing communication. When I already have a daughter, I work of course for my daughter (…) that’s why I planned to go to Denmark
Lynn sent money home to both her child and to her child’s father, who lived with his family, and to her parents and siblings. The possibility of earning money had been decisive for her decision to go abroad, particularly after she had her baby:
I cannot find a job in the province, because there is no company. It’s really hard. I can’t ask my mother: ‘Can you buy this and that for my daughter’, because they also need help from me.
About her expectations for being an au pair in Denmark, she said that she expected that she would be working hard and receive the minimum wage. Nevertheless, she was favourably surprised:
I expected that I had to work, I expected that they will only pay me the minimum salary, but when I came here they paid me more than I expected, so it’s not so hard for me here.
Interviewer (H.S.): So you knew about the salary?
Yes, of course I read it the contract, it’s 2,500. So I only expected that amount. I read the agreement, so I’m aware. When I came to my host family, they were also aware of it.
Yvonne, who was 21 years old at the time she was au pair, had to interrupt her nurse’s train-ing to help support her family.
I came here to earn money for my studies and also for my family (…)
My mother is a teacher, but her salary wasn’t enough for us, so we must sacrifice every-thing to have money for me to continue my studies. And my father is a politician, but he is only in the local [government]. We are very poor there in the Philippines.
Eve, who was 23 years old, had also interrupted her nurse’s training in order to help her fam-ily. She was the youngest child of 11 siblings. One of her brothers had helped her financially, but she had apparently felt guilty about accepting money when other members of the family did not receive any:
I have only my mother because my father died a long time ago. I’m interested in coming here so I can help my family, my mom and my grandmother. Because I would like to make them happy, because in the Philippines it’s complicated. All my sisters married at a young age; fourteen, sixteen, so they make a lot of kids, so I feel guilty to their kids because they can’t afford, so I want to help my nephews and nieces.
Naomi, aged 29, had decided to give up her job as a veterinarian in the Philippines because her father became badly ill and died some years earlier. In connection with his illness, her mother had taken out an expensive mortgage on their house and, in addition, two sisters were
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still studying at college. Naomi and two of her sisters decided to go overseas to make money:
‘We just decided to come here to pay the mortgage of our house, and the education.’
Of the 24 au pairs who were interviewed, two mentioned that they used the au pair pro-gramme to travel in Europe, which is otherwise difficult for third-country citizens, and to im-prove their qualifications for the job market in their home country.
The remaining 22 interviewees indicated that working to earn money – for themselves and/or their family – was the main reason they came to Denmark as au pairs. The decision to go overseas was made most frequently, in the case of the majority, because of difficulties with finding a well-paying job in the Philippines.
The host families were not blind to the fact that the au pairs were here to earn money. In the narrative of the host families, however, culture and cultural differences were elevated in im-portance, but were not articulated as a cultural exchange element. Rather, culture was articu-lated as a series of obstacles or needs to which the au pairs had to adjust in order to learn or improve their practical domestic labour skills.
As Rasmus, a male employer who has had two au pairs, explains:
And I also think that these Filipinos get something out of it. In that there lies in the regula-tion that [you have to] learn something about culture, and they both [of our au pairs] have been very eager to learn how to cook. They didn’t know anything when they arrived, but they write it down. They didn’t know anything about cooking when they came. What num-ber 2 knows today is basically what we have taught her. And she writes it down in detail.
And then she can make that meal the next time.
In Rasmus’ interpretation, cooking is a skill that he and his wife need to teach the au pairs, and obviously the task concerns cooking in modern Danish style though he phrases it as the general skill ‘cooking’. Thus, learning to cook (Danish style) is equated with learning to ad-just to the (local) culture, and is a task by which the au pair must compensate for cultural shortcomings. Any notion of ‘exchange’ in this interpretation of cultural exchange is absent.
It is only the au pairs who need to learn new cultural skills.
Anne, a Danish employer emphasised that the au pair in question was a ‘very, very sweet and nice girl’ and that her children loved her. Nevertheless, the au pair was lacking in certain do-mestic labour skills, and here, explanations of cultural differences were employed:
But she is not like that … it sounds so … it’s not meant in the way I say it now, but she really comes from – I had almost said a hut with a thatched roof … I mean … you know, she doesn’t know how a refrigerator works, she didn’t know how a washing machine worked … I still haven’t been able to teach her to empty the filter in a drier, and it has noth-ing to do with that she doesn’t want to, but it has somethnoth-ing to do with the world she comes from being so different.
A counsellor to au pairs whom I interviewed, someone who estimated that she had advised about 100 au pairs over six months, believed that 80-90 per cent of the Filipino au pairs remit-ted money to their families.
147 Several of the interviewees talked about the Danes’ lack of understanding of why they remit-ted money to their family. For the au pairs, this was an important part of being a member of an extended family, whether it was presented as ‘culture’ or financial necessity.
All of the interviewees who aided the au pairs (civil servant, priest, head of the association) said consistently that the Filipino au pairs come to Denmark primarily to work and earn money.
The host families also weighed the amount and quality of the au pair’s domestic work in rela-tion to the salary they paid.
One au pair employer, Rasmus, mentioned that the expense for an au pair may be compared to the money the family had formerly spent on outside cleaning help and childcare and that they now got more for their money. In addition, they obtained more reliability and logistical con-venience by replacing changing domestic helpers with an au pair:
You have to say that its close to a brilliant arrangement. Compared to young girls who were unstable and cleaning help who were problematic and problems in keeping it up long term and finding a babysitter for a Saturday night, this is a solution which I don’t have a guilty conscience about.
All the host families interviewed mentioned the work that the au pair carried out, be it domes-tic work or childcare, as the reason they have taken on an au pair. She takes some of the pres-sure of their daily life. None of them mentioned cultural exchange as their primary reason employing an au pair.