Legal Representation
One reader, Bérénice, brought up the idea of starting an au pair labor union to preserve their rights, or at least finding free legal advice to deal with some basic situations. But this is largely impossible for several reasons:1. Most au pairs come to the area with the goal of learning or perfecting their use of the local language, and therefore don’t know it well enough to either fight for their rights or explain their issues to someone in that language. Orders from the family were accepted without question because we didn’t know how to negotiate, or more importantly, what would happen if we refused or argued at all. And a lawyer will hardly have patience for a young foreigner who can barely explain the problem.
2. Coming from vastly different countries, we were totally unaware of the government hierarchy, what help was available to us, or how to find such help. If there was free legal aid available, we certainly didn’t know where to find it or even that it existed, and there is no existing labor union for au pairs, as it’s not a full-time or typically recognized job.
3. It’s extremely difficult to find the legal means against psychological abuse. Evidence of physical abuse or lack of nourishment or proper living arrangements is one thing, but moral and language and psychological bullying is hard to define and quantify, and even harder to defend. And any received legal advice for such a situation would probably be to leave, as there isn’t much else that can be done.
Psychological Harassment
It’s very difficult to describe what happens in a home as an au pair unless you’ve been one yourself; even hearing it described from multiple sources doesn’t quite do it justice. So, there are some things to take into consideration regarding the daily difficulties:1. Your maternal tongue may not be spoken regularly at the house, leading to many miscommunications, unintentionally offensive responses, and misconstrued attitudes. A frequent saying with one of my friends was, “Yeah, my host mom told me to do this, but I don’t really know if it’s right cuz it was all in French and I don’t speak French.” Even though we did “speak French,” we would joke that we couldn’t at all because of our daily difficulties in understanding basic instructions and getting them horribly wrong.
2. When you do something wrong, you’re yelled at like a child, not the 20-something adult you are. Ok, so 20-something is very young, I get it, but it’s not so young that you deserve to be yelled at with your tail tucked between your legs. We are adults, but we rarely got such acknowledgement from our employers. To them, we were old babysitters looking for a free ride to Europe and incapable of basic life functions.
3. You have to live with your employer. Everyone has bad days at work- days when something goes wrong with the boss and you can’t wait to go home. But what if your workplace is your home? You can go in your room and close the door, but they are still there. You can run into them in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. They could unexpectedly knock on your door with instructions for the next day. Which means that you never really stop working, or at least that’s what it feels like. In your free time, you can get a text with a new task at any moment of the day, and you’re usually always woken early on the weekends by loud children. Your ringtone becomes the bane of your existence, and the family taking a weekend away is cause for endless celebration.
4. You’re usually too young and inexperienced and too far away from home to be able to fend for yourself or leave and figure things out. Getting a job abroad is scary and challenging and in a different language, so it’s “nice” to have a family to fall back on. But that also means that you don’t know that you’re allowed to speak out against them or find a better situation. Because, after all, if all your friends are unhappy, how could you possibly find something better? As I get older, I get better at defending myself, but I could never regret my responses at the time, because I did the best that I could.
5. They almost never ask how you’re doing, if you have fun plans, encourage you to get out and do things, etc. In the first few months, I was super excited to recount a new language opportunity or ask for help, but I quickly came to see that my host parents weren’t so enthusiastic in response. As the year progressed, I think they tired of having a young adult living with them, “invading” their family space, and so they simply never asked. But those questions are 100% necessary to the comfort and ease of someone living in the house, no matter who they are.
6. One commenter suggested to make sure to recognize your own faults and then you can proceed to a conversation about a problem. But that wasn’t the issue. We were doing things “wrong” so often that we were constantly trying to figure out what exactly the problem was, simply because we didn’t want to be yelled at again. But trust me, the parents would never ever ever admit that they did something wrong. If it was even suggested, it would be swept aside and a new fault of yours would be presented. We were always changing little tasks in our routine so that things would run more smoothly, but there was consistently some new problem every week without fail.
No comments:
Post a Comment