Nannies
On the streets of Sydney's trendier inner-city and harbourside suburbs are surprising numbers of what seem to be, at first glance, young teenage mothers pushing prams.
They look strangely out of place, in their unironed windcheaters and jeans. Most women who live in these areas are professionals — accountants, doctors, lawyers and business women who typically defer childbirth until their mid-30s. You only see them on weekends or in the evenings after work.
The incongruity grows as you watch these young women load shopping bags of groceries into the prams and push their heavy burden homeward. It is a scene you are more likely to see in Sydney's western suburbs, where money is short, unemployment is high and women have children young.
These women are not well-to-do mothers, but nannies, who ease the domestic burden for busy professional couples by cleaning, cooking, hanging out washing and bringing up the babies. Live-in nannies employed under conditions set out by training schools work between 70 and 80 hours and are given a night and one day off per week. They earn between $200 and $240 per week, $260 at tops.
Katie is a 19-year-old live-in nanny who cares for the two babies of a Woollahra couple who are both merchant bankers. She suffers chronic fatigue from getting up four or five times a night to make bottles and settle the children. During the day she has to push the children up a steep hill to shop for fruit, vegetables and groceries. She is not allowed to have food delivered because her employers object to the $4 charge. She is not allowed to drive the car and does not have a bedroom — she sleeps on a pull-out couch in the nursery.
Katie may live in a luxurious house in a wealthy suburb but, in effect, her living conditions are equivalent to those of a single mother on a low income. She suffers the same isolation, is without transport and has no psychological support or child-care.
According to the Adelaide based nanny school, Dial-a-Domestic, Katie's conditions are typical. "Nannies are expected to do everything. Because child-rearing is so devalued in our society, being a nanny is considered an easy job. And it's also confused with other domestic labour. Women who bring up children are automatically expected to clean the toilets as well", said a spokesperson for the organisation.
Most nannies are teenage women who have no union and no previous experience in the workplace. Judging from the number of complaints the agency receives, they know they are exploited but have little power to change their conditions.
Nannies are clearly not the answer to the problem of child-care. Parents wealthy enough to shift the burden of domestic labour on to young nannies will do so. Mostly, tinue to juggle jobs and bring up children the best they can with little assistance from spouses or from the state which gains so richly from having its future labour force reared for free.
By Angela Matheson