The analysis of how the au pair relation is lived and experienced in Denmark shows that mi-gration regulations are decisive for the way the au pair scheme is practiced as a domestic worker arrangement.
The combination of a live-in obligation, the tying of the residence permit to one specific em-ployer and the lack of a work permit turns the au pair into a marginalized temporary migrant with few possibilities to challenge, much less alter, unsatisfactory conditions, or to organize or or participate in a political process in Denmark. The au pair irrespective of whether she acts according to rules in a pleasant domestic atmosphere or is ruthlessly exploited, is trapped in this triangle of migration management.
Due to this ‘au pair trap’, work life and everyday life for au pairs is organised as live-in, mak-ing it difficult to separate a private sphere from the work sphere. The home becomes work-place and the workwork-place is also her home. However, the au pair’s home is fundamentally someone else’ home, her employer who has the capacity to revise her workload and to even expel the au pair from her workplace, from her home at a moment’s notice, and without any consequences.
The power relation between the au pair and the host family is highly asymmetrical. The inter-views with au pairs showed a variety of experiences from living and working in the au pair trap. Some of these experiences were those of exploitation and others were viewed by the au pairs as fair treatment. However there was a consistent pattern of organising everyday life of the au pair as a paid domestic labour arrangement with specified domestic tasks to be done, scheduled in hours and days. Supervision and management of the labour performed by the au pair was typically organised between the au pair and the female part of the host couple. The au pairs experienced close, intimidating control over their time, work performance and per-sonal behaviour by the female host employer. Some of the au pairs had experienced heavy and increasing work loads and being treated explicitly as maids. The temporal structure of the au pair’s daily work was often unclear or interrupted due to the expectation by the host of the au pair being flexible and at their constant disposal – even in the late evening or on her days off days.
Living as an au pair in the host family is formally subject to regulations whereby the au pair is given her own private room. This room is very often situated in the basement, and the inter-views showed big differences in the quality of the room that is offered the au pair. Privacy can be very difficult to obtain when living in the home of the employer, and some au pairs experi-enced a distinct lack of respect of their personal boundaries regarding leisure and sleeping time, being expected to be at the disposal of the host family twenty-four hours a day, espe-cially regarding child care, as child care was not regarded as work. Thus, time and who is structuring and intervening in (leisure) time were of importance.
The social intimacy in the live-in arrangement resulted in some au pairs feeling that they were subject to too much control in how much they ate, in feelings of exclusion from conversation at the dinner table when the rest of the family spoke Danish, in what they saw as perfidious
179 house rules on when to use the bathroom, and their obligation to inform the host family of their every move outside the house.
Regarding the more formal side of working conditions, the interviews generally revealed that the Danish government’s definition, although ambiguous, of au pair labour not being work and employment, but as some kind of household chores in exchange for pocket money, resul-ted in a poor level of meeting normal Danish labour market rights and levels of payment. Au pairs were paid very low wages for their work, experienced unreasonable insecurity regarding dismissal, difficulties in being informed about national holidays and holiday pay, and they had no possibilities to file a complaint. Furthermore, the au pairs paid bribes in the Philip-pines to migrate as au pairs, which was an additional cost, and they were most often the pro-viders of a family in the Philippines. In need of extra income, many au pairs worked or wanted to work illegally for other families in addition to the host family.
Legality and illegality included in the au pair trap produces a fragile position of the au pair as marginalized, temporary labour migrant in Denmark, and the analysis sheds light on how this specific relation between legality and illegality was filled out and lived as social practice.
The empirical data showed that even if the au pair arrangement is constructed as a legal cul-tural exchange migration scheme, the experiences of the au pair still resemble the experiences of migrant domestic workers elsewhere (Parrenas, Constable, Anderson, Romero, Rollins, Hondagneu-Sotelo and others). Moreover, research results focusing on undocumented mi-grant domestic workers in many respects coincide with the experiences of the au pairs: their dependency on the employer, the lack of possibilities to complain and organize, the low level of wages, the long or ‘stretched’ working hours, the lack of national labour rights, etc.
The use of au pair scheme as a migrant domestic workers programme is still a relatively new phenomenon in Denmark. However, one of the explanations of why Filipinos are being so massively incorporated into the scheme could be the general labour export from the Philip-pines of domestic workers, producing transnational classed, gendered and racialized expecta-tions and subjectificaexpecta-tions of the docile, hardworking, child loving domestic worker. Filipino women migrating to Denmark seem by and large to be aware of the expectations to fit into this framework – not taking the cultural exchange rhetoric for more than a polite intention.
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Chapter 7: Macro-study – legality and illegality in Philippines-Danish au pair migration
The contemporary au pair arrangement in Denmark, which involves largely Filipino women, contains several ambiguities and contradictions in the transnational and national space of or-ganizing and positioning au pair migrants. Ambiguities, contradictions and discomforts are part of the organization of the au pair system.
Au pair migration is managed and regulated migration, but migration management is not only about nation states claiming their sovereign right to admit/refuse non-citizens at the border.
Migration management, especially concerning migration from economically poor to economi-cally rich countries, also operates in transnational chains. Legalising and illegalising different types of migration and migrant statuses are important tools in governing the non-citizen popu-lation and in separating out the desired from the unwanted migrants.
Based on my empirical study of the lived experience of Filipino live-in domestic workers (who have formal status as au pairs in Denmark) as well as an analysis of national and trans-national practices of the Danish and the Philippine governments on management of this par-ticular kind of migration, this chapter analyzes au pair migration from Philippines to Denmark in light of the legality and illegality produced by the nation states involved.