Why Domestic Staff Can Improve Your Lifestyle


by - Date: 2010-09-12 - Word Count: 384 Share This!

The tradition among middle and upper class families of employing domestic staff to do household chores goes back hundreds of years or more, and offer great time-saving value to their employers who are busy attending to their jobs, travelling, or attending business interests. In some societies such as in England during the Edwardian era, the grooming and apprenticeship of domestic staff was elevated to a complex, perfectionist art with strict rules of conduct.
All servants had specific duties, such as doing the laundry, taking care of the elderly, running errands, cooking, setting the table in the proper order, dusting the furniture, cleaning the kitchen and bathroom among other duties, sometimes assigned by gender. A butler and a family chauffeur were functions done only by men, while child-rearing duties were only done by females.
Most domestic staff around the world usually had little or no legal protection, typically being treated as only slightly above slave labour without regard to hours worked or wages paid, their lives being at the mercy of their domestic employers. During the early twentieth century in industrialized countries, many people organized and began demanding better working conditions for domestic workers, which were improved in many countries, but in some countries things are still done the old-fashioned way.
Virtually all the domestic staff work in some countries is done by immigrant labour, as the local population is unwilling to do it. In other countries the income level between urban and rural inhabitants is so great that urban families will hire rural migrant labourers to do domestic work.
Toward the middle of the twentieth century and beyond, domestic staffing agencies evolved to screen domestic staff applicants to make sure they were able to do typical assigned duties, and were then sent to families as temporary workers. This served a double purpose of offering a prospective family a worker that was capable of doing whatever the family wanted, plus the domestic staff worker would receive a fixed wage and fixed number of hours during the time they were employed. It also offered legal protection to both parties since either could report any wrongdoing by the other to the staffing agency. It also required the family to notify the agency in advance if they wanted to change the work agreement, such as extended hours or different days of employment.

Related Tags: family, home and family, housekeeper, domestic staff

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