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Au pairing after the au pair scheme: new migration rules and childcare in private homes in the UK

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This post was contributed by Dr Nicky Busch, Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies.

People in the UK work some of the longest hours in Europe and, for those with children, the difficulty in reconciling paid work with childcare involves not only time pressures but significant expense. It is no wonder that an increasing number of families in the UK have turned over their spare room (or in some cases a spare bed in the children’s room) to an au pair. After all, for between £65 and £100 a week, an au pair will look after children, cook, clean and generally be an extra pair of hands.

However, while au pairs do many of the same tasks as nannies, cleaners, maids and other domestic workers, au pairing has often been excluded from discussions of paid domestic labour as it is technically not defined as ‘work’. Au pairs have been understood in the media and in popular discourse as somewhere between students and working holiday makers and have generally been imagined as occupying a relatively privileged position without the same problems as domestic workers. This in part reflects the historical origins of the scheme: it was developed in the post-war years as a cultural exchange programme among European countries allowing young women – and it was only women – to travel to live ‘as an equal’ with a family in another country. They would provide help with household tasks in exchange for pocket money and the experience of living with a host family. The scheme was imagined as providing a small amount of extra household help to families facing the ‘servant crisis’, while also giving middle class young women training in running a home.

However, au pairing grew substantially during the 1990s and 2000s and au pairs are now depended upon by tens of thousands of British families to provide affordable, flexible childcare. The importance of au pairs as a source of childcare and domestic work – and recent changes to legislation covering au pairing in the UK – suggest the evaluation of au pairs as both privileged and protected needs to be revisited. The lives of au pairs, their working conditions and relationships with host families needs to be understood in light of changes to the scheme which mean that au pairs are now less differentiated from domestic workers and that they now lack protections in terms of remuneration and working conditions which previously existed.

The knowledge vacuum about this important form of migrant (mostly) female care and domestic work was a starting point for an ESRC funded research project on the au pair scheme being undertaken in the Department of Geography, Environment & Development Studies by Dr Rosie Cox and Dr Nicky Busch. We are particularly interested in the period since November 2008, when the au pair visa was abolished in the UK. This change, which was part of the move to the Points Based Immigration Scheme, meant sharply reduced government control of the au pair scheme just at the point when for many families in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, the problem of balancing work and home life has led an increasing number of people to turn to low waged labour of migrant women to perform childcare and domestic labour.

The project to date has involved assessing the available data sets to find out what we do and what we do not know about the number of au pairs in the UK and talking to key informants such as policy makers and domestic worker organisations about the effects of changes to the scheme on the ground. We are now at the stage of the project where we interview au pairs and their host families to build as deep a picture as possible of the way the scheme works and how people involved experience being an au pair or being a host family. We will then use our data to produce and disseminate academic material.

Race in Vichy France

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This post was contributed by Dr Ludivine Broch, an Early Career Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.

Life as a Research Fellow

‘Research Fellowships’ have a wonderful allure from afar: a distant, fertile land where one can hole up in the British Library and read for hours on end before visiting various archives where, once more, one is completely unburdened by daily work-related commitments.

Of course, this is not how things work out. Research Fellowships can just as quickly become swamped with admin, organising workshops, starting up academic blogs, participating in conferences, meeting publication deadlines, doing odd bits of teaching here and there… and that’s even before your own life-management issues (plumbing crisis, medical appointments, moving house, etc.) which interfere with the rêverie that is ‘endless hours at the British Library/archives’.

Often, in these times when you are trying to wrap up your doctoral projects but feel drowned in ‘commitments’, there is only one thing that keeps you going: the dream of the next big research project! And this is exactly where I am. I have three years of Research Fellowship (two at the Pears Institute at Birkbeck, and one at the European University Institute in Florence) lined up, and I’m in my fifth month. Already, the conference papers, article deadlines and general admin of organising conferences and workshops have piled up so high… but, I am not losing faith.  Because I have a fascinating project to keep pushing for.

My doctoral studies focussed on the history of railway workers in Vichy France. My thesis challenged the myths of cheminot (orgnanised by the railway workers) resistance and collaboration. The book (coming out with CUP in 2014) looks beyond this: at theft, at Franco-German cohabitation, at professional strikes, at the language of class struggle.

Although this topic continues to interest me, and I am deeply involved in finishing my book, it feels like a much-loved outfit that is starting to age slightly. I am ready for something new. I began thinking about my new research topic in 2011, when I spotted a gap in Vichy historiography. And slowly it has developed into something tangible and manageable.

A history of black people in Vichy France

Whilst the history of Jews in Vichy France had been told and re-told, the history of black people – an otherwise hot topic in modern history – had been largely untouched. Of course there have been plenty of studies of race in France – but they almost always skip over the 1939-45 period – a period reserved for the study of antisemitism. And while some studies of blacks in the French military and French colonies have been taken on, nothing has been done in depth on black people in metropolitan France during the period of 1939-45.

The question of race sits uncomfortably on the sidelines of Vichy history: although blacks were not targeted as visibly and vehemently as the Jews, they were still victims of racial prejudice and sometimes discrimination. Laws targeting Jews to ride in the last carriage of the metro, to stay within the limits of the demarcation line, and to give up their professions in the arts, were also applied to ‘negroes’. The black minister Henry Lémery was dismissed from the Laval government in September 1940 on the basis of his skin colour. Colonial propaganda dispatched throughout France embraced traditional images of the black savage: an exotic, harmless beast whose simple attire was matched by an even simpler mind. Colonial troops who had helped both the French army in May-June 1940, and the Free French in 1940-44, were sidelined from the Liberation ceremonies in 1944-45, and from the general army as a whole. What do these stories say about race in Vichy France?

This is an extremely large topic. However, by dividing my project into manageable chunks, I will examine the many facets – cultural, socio-political, intellectual – of this question of race under Vichy. And after sneaking away to Paris a few days last term, I am increasingly convinced that a micro-history of blacks in Parisian arrondissements will begin to tell us something about race in daily life.

Ultimately, by challenging traditional assumptions of racial persecution under Vichy, I am hoping to shift the historiographical discussion from one where the history of Jews under Vichy is examined seperately from the history of racial minorities, to one where they intersect. Indeed, Marrus and Paxton were clearly correct when, in their remarkable work Vichy France and the Jews (1981), they placed Vichy’s attitudes towards Jews within a longer history of antisemitism. Yet recent works suggest is that this history also intersects with another history: a history of blacks, of the colonies, of difference. How does a history of race interact with the history of Jews? How do they illuminate one another? These are the questions which inspire me through my Research Fellowhsip.

What is the point of banning discrimination on grounds of sex in insurance?

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This post was contributed by Professor Deborah Mabbett, from Birbeck’s Department of Politics.

On 21 December 2012, a ban on the use of sex as a criterion in pricing insurance came into force throughout the European Union. In a forthcoming article in the journal Regulation and Governance (pre-publication version available now), I have examined how the ban came about and what its significance is.  The ban was originally proposed by the European Commission in 2003, but the Commission was persuaded to drop the proposal. Instead, insurers were required to publish the statistical basis for discriminating between men and women, to show that differences in premiums were justified by differences in risk. This compromise was successfully challenged in the Court of Justice of the EU by the Belgian consumer association, Test-Achats.

At the root of the debate about sex discrimination in insurance was the question of whether discrimination was necessary for the market to function efficiently. Insurers do not use every relevant piece of information when pricing their products. Some information is too expensive to acquire, some is already subject to legal prohibitions (such as information about ethnicity or religion) and some is subject to voluntary restraint (such as genetic information). Furthermore, long-established practices of risk classification become entrenched in insurance. Long use yields long data series that enable insurers to check that their assessment of risk is robust, and consumers get accustomed to conventional discriminatory practices.

What drew the European institutions to disrupt the convention that sex is used in pricing some forms of insurance? One answer is that the Commission was concerned about the rise of defined contribution pensions, where individuals buy an annuity with their accumulated pension savings. Women get smaller annuities than men because they live longer, on average. However, on a straightforward cost-benefit analysis, this did not make a strong case for banning discrimination, as women are likely to pay more now for car insurance. Furthermore, insurers can find other indicators for long life expectancy (such as occupation and family history), and they will find new ways of identifying safer drivers too.

A stronger answer is that discrimination was already prohibited in some states of the EU, so different countries had different rules despite the supposed existence of a single market in insurance. The Court of Justice held that there should be a common rule across Europe. Since non-discrimination is a fundamental right, it held that this should be the basis for regulating the single market.

While insurers resisted this strongly, arguing that it would disrupt the market, their reaction now that the matter is decided is rather muted. On the Today programme on 21 December 2012, the spokeswoman for the Association of British Insurers emphasised that the effects on premiums were unpredictable, that the market remains highly competitive, and that consumers should shop around. The fact is that insurers do not want an extended public debate about discrimination. They prefer the legitimation provided by market competition, which leaves insurers autonomy in determining their pricing strategies, subject to regulatory constraints. Public scrutiny is uncomfortable because it is prone to reveal that insurers’ practices have a weaker technical basis than they like to imply. During the debate on sex discrimination, statistical studies were done which suggested that premium differentials were not always explained by underlying differences in risk, and that some potential alternative predictors were ignored. This should not really surprise us. While insurers have competitive incentives to search for good predictors, they also have marketing reasons to set prices to the advantage or disadvantage of particular groups.

It is tempting to see the ban on sex discrimination as a step towards a more ‘social’ Europe, going beyond the creation of a free trade area and regulating market transactions for social purposes. However, it is not clear what the social purpose really is: the Court of Justice has upheld a principle rather than pursuing a goal. The case highlights that markets are based on conventions which come under scrutiny when they are exposed to cross-national comparison. The ban reconstitutes the European insurance market and adjusts the ‘playing field’ for competition, rather than addressing a social policy problem or promoting equality of outcomes.

(Woman next to car image via Shutterstock.)

Food insecurity in Palestine

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Dr Elisa Cavatorta completed her PhD in Birkbeck’s Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics in 2011.

While the Millenium Development Goals have focused on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and many efforts have been put in place, food insecurity remains a serious concern in many parts of the world.

The Rome Declaration on World Food Security (1996) and the World Food Summit Plan of Action define food insecurity as the situation when people do not have adequate physical, social or economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

Previous studies have tended to consider the factors which affect food insecurity either at household-level (such as income, family structure and sectorial employment); or at district or country level (such as soil fertility depletion, agricultural sustainability and access to markets).  While there is a consensus that these factors can be interlinked, they are rarely assessed in combination. One of the main challenges to address environmental factors and accessibility to resources, together with socio-economic characteristics is the integration of the two into a common spatial unit.

Dr Cavatorta and Sam Waples, of Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, engaged in a interdisciplinary research effort to look at the spatial distribution  of food insecurity prevalence among communities  in the West Bank region of the Palestinian Territories – an area not only characterised by diverse topography, vegetation, climate and land-use; but one where development and mobility are considerably hindered by the political division of land.

Differently from the existing literature, their study explores the association between household level food insecurity and physical characteristics such as soil fertility and access to resources. A range of data sources are integrated including household level survey data on food insecurity, community level census data as well as environmental factors and resource accessibility data modelled to communities and their surrounds.

The study is part of a larger research project including a similar investigation for the Arab Republic of Syria, which, due to the current events, has been suspended. The case of Syria, a large agricultural producer, would shed light on the role of agriculture in addressing food security.

Dr Cavatorta and Sam Waples use a mix of quantitative techniques, fieldwork visits and elaborate Geographic Information System (GIS) information to create an original and comprehensive dataset on 489 communities in the West Bank.

The analysis allowed the estimation of food insecurity incidence at community level throughout the entire West Bank. The results of these estimations were mapped and they highlight distinct spatial patterns, with clusters of severe food insecure communities found in the North West near the border of Israel as well as the centre of West Bank between the towns of Salfit and Bethlehem. The highest levels of food insecurity were found in Area A, the part of the West Bank which falls under Israeli civilian and military jurisdiction.

Dr Cavatorta and Mr Waples elaborated upon existing GIS layers of community and region locations, road networks and mobility restrictions to compute measures of market access, the number of mobility restrictions and measures of access to services. This is a specific consideration to be taken into account in the case of the West Bank, where mobility restrictions have a serious impact on food insecurity levels.

Taking the analysis one step further the results allowed preliminary policy simulations and their impact on food insecurity to be conducted. Amongst the considered policies they simulate improvements in living conditions (increasing wealth or decreasing unemployment), the lifting of mobility restrictions and finally the development of infrastructure. The results indicate that potential policies not only impact upon incidence of food insecurity with varying levels of effectiveness but also the response to policy varies geographically too.

In summary the combination of food insecurity, socio-economic and physical data at the household and community level has created a powerful dataset which has allowed both the prediction of food insecurity in communities not surveyed and how environmental factors explain food insecurity incidence. The results were used to investigate a number of scenarios which highlighted the need for both political stability and effective locally targeted intervention.