So three nannies said that they prefer to work 3-5 hours a week and not 20, one said that she is actually looking to work for the government (and had to come out all the way to my house to figure out I’m not the government, I guess), one didn’t show up for the interview at all with no warning. And these are all women in their fifties and sixties. Younger candidates show such incredible entitlement and such incapacity to stay in a dialogue instead of slipping into a monologue that it never even gets to the point of scheduling an interview.
In our town, one can get world-class service in what concerns skilled work. My dentist is sensational, my massage therapist and hair stylist could easily be working in any world capital, the realtor and the banker are super professional, restorateurs are out-of-this-world good. But as for low-skill work, it’s impossible to get anybody to do it with any degree of reliability or work ethic.
Just one example but I have more. During the first pregnancy, I wanted somebody to come over and clean the house. The local agency said they only send out teams of three cleaners and you have to pay for all three. When they arrived, it turned out that one of the cleaners was a child of maybe 11 or 12. The child clearly didn’t do any work and ended up breaking one of the glass flowers I had in a vase and trying to conceal the damage. But I had to pay for the child to be there, breaking things, because that’s the only way to get cleaners. The whole experience cost a lot (A LOT) of money and the results were entirely inbisible. Of course, I didn’t repeat the experiment.
Casual work around the house, lawn-mowing – it’s a struggle to get any of that done in this town and it’s always unreliable and aggravating. And everybody else I know around here has the same (or sometimes even worse experience).
I always loudly and angrily disagreed with people who argued that mass immigration into developed countries was caused by local people refusing to do low-skilled* work like gardening, cleaning, cooking, child and elderly care, etc. The very idea seemed ridiculous to me. And now I’m discovering that I was wrong this whole time. I hate to be proven so entirely wrong but I can’t deny the mounting evidence any longer. So reader valter07 and others who made this argument: you were right this entire time and I was wrong.
We currently don’t have any immigrants other than college professors in this town. But capitalism operates on the demand/supply principle. There is demand for this sort of work, and it is inevitable that it will eventually be met.
And then the locals will become very angered that immigrants “steal” their jobs and will vote for the future equivalent of Trump.
* Low-skilled is not necessarily low-paid. What I’m trying to offer prospective nannies (including very good benefits, by the way) and what cleaners, handymen, mowers, etc. charge is anything but low-paid.
Clarissa's Blog 
I do have a suggestion, one that should have occurred to me earlier. I’m involved in a small business networking group, BNI. Local chapters basically function the way that villages used to do in two ways: (1) mambers get to know and trust one another and refer business to each other, and (2) peer pressure within the group ensures members provide quality service and are accountable. BNI has more than 1 million members globally and there are several chapters close to you, for example http://www.bnimidamerica.com/chapterdetails.php?chapterId=3090&t=b755316666e1ef4d78728e003fa1fc033d677e486c66fd758b3188b2b5b2adf1&name=BNI%20Extreme%20Business%20Builders%20(formerly%20Edwardsville)
My guess is you could contact or visit the chapter and get good referrals for whatever you need. That’s what I do.
LikeLike
Thank you, Vic, I’ll try because I’m getting very upset over here.
LikeLike
I’m really sorry you are in this bind.
LikeLike
It’s a bind all right. Both N and I started thinking about quitting our jobs.
LikeLike
Oh Christ. Don’t do that!
LikeLike
Out of Topic – a local cartoonist gives his view of Hillary’s precidency…
https://scontent-bru2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/s480x480/13445307_157087388039749_7335217436559685637_n.jpg?oh=03517d0e28c7795597eedb3e88667213&oe=57C4D072
LikeLike
<a href=”https://www.angieslist.com/’>Angie’s List. You have to pay a nominal fee to join but my mother’s on it and she’s had good luck with several service providers. Also, what do your peers who live in town say about who they hire for similar types of services? In my experience, people who clean houses and baby sit as a business all have similar types of clients.
Of course she has not lived in a rural area, but suburbs of cities. She currently lives in an area with a lot of immigrants, Spanish speakers, and snow birds.
Personally though my mother hasn’t really hired immigrants for these kinds of jobs such as cleaning, yard work and baby sitters. Yard work is variable. She’s never hired agencies with bonded cleaners but gone with independent cleaners for cleaning. It’s not cheap but it’s cheaper than the agency and more thorough.
You want to go with independents who have several clients. They tend to be more reliable than people looking for “pin money.” Maybe check to see who cleans businesses and who does yard work for those businesses (for yard work and cleaning)?
In our town, one can get world-class service in what concerns skilled work. My dentist is sensational, my massage therapist and hair stylist could easily be working in any world capital, the realtor and the banker are super professional, restorateurs are out-of-this-world good
All these workers have to be licensed in some manner. Also one unhappy client could ruin them.
LikeLike
“Also, what do your peers who live in town say about who they hire for similar types of services?”
LikeLike
Unwillingness of the locals to do the low-skilled work is not the main cause of immigration, but it is a contributing factor. I do not think that locals avoiding this kind of jobs are thinking anything about implications for immigrants. They just can afford (both economically and psychologically) to not do these kinds of jobs. And then, when there is demand, something creates the supply… Most locals would be happy if all that stuff could be done by the robots (except those who get off on actually exploiting human beings), but we are not there yet.
And, frankly, I did not expect a thing like that to happen in the Midwest. Thought it was more of a problem of the European countries, like in France, where one could more easily afford to live on unemployment benefits and not soil oneself with low-skilled work.
LikeLike
“I do not think that locals avoiding this kind of jobs are thinking anything about implications for immigrants. They just can afford (both economically and psychologically) to not do these kinds of jobs. And then, when there is demand, something creates the supply”
“Thought it was more of a problem of the European countries, like in France, where one could more easily afford to live on unemployment benefits and not soil oneself with low-skilled work.”
LikeLike
It is the same thing qualitatively, not quantitatively. I once was introduced to a friend of a friend in France who, by that time, has been “looking for job” for five years. He had Ph.D. in history, and as long as he could not find a job that matched his qualifications, he was “looking”… I do not know, maybe he did some little tutoring under the radar, but I cannot imagine him doing any cleaning…
LikeLike
I have 2 regular workers and the way I got them was through word of mouth. It is hard to find good people but you can.
LikeLike
I have the strangest feeling that I’m reading one of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple short stories where the gentry’s number one topic of conversation was servants, how hard they were to find and how unsatisfactory they were once found.
(or for that matter, working class men talking about women)
LikeLike
This is precisely the attitude that’s at the root of the phenomenon. It’s shameful to be “a servant”, so people from the cultures where these are normal, respectable jobs move in to fill the vacuum.
LikeLike
I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve found that in the US there is a great dignity in labor, and there’s this idea that your dollar buys the same things as my dollar.
This is definitely not the case in India, and I suspect, many other countries (England comes to mind). How else do you explain the idea of ‘old money’ vs ‘new money’? It is not enough that you have money, you should’ve obtained your money through ‘acceptable’ ways.
LikeLike
I find it very weird, too, but how else can one explain why people prefer to work at Walmart where everybody says conditions are bad and not for me at 3x the pay plus benefits?
LikeLike
Has to be something else because I really find the idea of one’s class being defined by one’s job truly alien to American sensibilities.
Only in places like India does a cultured schoolteacher finds herself superior to the millionaire businessman who didn’t graduate college. Here it’s straight up cash.
America’s motto is, in the immortal words of Al Davis: ‘Just win, baby’.
LikeLike
Only in places like India does a cultured schoolteacher finds herself superior to the millionaire businessman who didn’t graduate college. Here it’s straight up cash.
I have to disagree that it’s straight up cash in the US. Money overrides education/culture when it comes to a huge gap like a schoolteacher and a millionaire, but these types of things definitely exist when the money differences are smaller. An American schoolteacher making a modest wage with a ton of student loan debt holding him/her down, could easily feel superior to an electrician or a plumber who has his own business and makes two or three times more money with has no student debt. And that schoolteacher probably looks down on the McDonald’s manager or the Walmart manager even more than the electrician and the plumber, even though they are earning more money.
LikeLike
“Has to be something else because I really find the idea of one’s class being defined by one’s job truly alien to American sensibilities.”
That’s a joke. I’ve worked as a caretaker for disabled children, a waitress, and a house/office cleaner. Those jobs all paid better (sometimes 3 times as much!) than people in my age group, even those with higher levels of education were making at the time, and one of the reasons I quit was the constant devaluing of myself, as a person, by everyone I knew, including people I was making more per hour than.
Caretaking, waitressing, and cleaning are not considered careers. They are not “doing something with your life” with housekeeping especially, my hours were considered to be ever-flexible by other members of my family and they constantly expected me to drop everything on a whim for emergency babysitting/caretaking.
“but I have to be in to work!!” they would complain if I told them I would not be able to help them out due to my schedule. I was frequently already at/in the middle of work when they were calling.
But that could be taken as simply dysfunctional family dynamics.
If friends were talking about their jobs and I would bring up a new client, or a new house or new people I met through my work I would be talked over, or interrupted, or asked when I would be going back to college, or what I “really wanted to do with my life” “what are your actual goals”
Now that I work as an administrative assistant for a local government office, I never get those questions, even though being an administrative assistant can hardly be seen as changing the world.
Clarissa, as someone who has done caretaking, part of the problem may be the amount of hours a week you are asking. Many people doing these kinds of jobs already have multiple clients they are working for. It may be that giving you 20 hours a week would mean making you their only client, which they may not find desirable.
It’s hard to explain, but what you see as the desire for fluidity and flexibility (which I agree is also valuable) can also be a desire for security. If I’m working for 5 clients 6 days a week and one of them drops me, I lose a 5th of my income at the most. If I leave all of those clients to work for one client, or maybe I can keep 1 or 2 other clients, but the main client drops me, then I’ve lost at least half my income. And in jobs like caretaking and cleaning job security is also as fluid as the economy.
LikeLike
The stories we tell to explain why we choose fluidity matter on the level of individual lives. On the level of collectivity, however, these narratives matter a lot less than the end result, which is the obvious liquefaction of all aspects of life.
LikeLike
I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve found that in the US there is a great dignity in labor, and there’s this idea that your dollar buys the same things as my dollar.
Is there? Obviously in the US there isn’t nearly as strong as an idea that your job is social class forever but there’s definitely this idea that you can ill treat people serving you. Otherwise, why would sites like “The Customer Isn’t Always Right” exist? I’ve had strangers use family members’ jobs as object lessons in what not to do. “Go to college, kid or you’ll end up like him.” Also if it weren’t for public accommodation laws, my dollarwould not buy the same thing as other people’s dollars. We’d still have the Green Book if we didn’t have these accommodation laws. We see these attitudes with all these fights over gay wedding cakes right now and religious pharmacist laws.
I also find a lot of people who hire casual workers have no idea how to act towards them. There’s a way to be a professional employer without being cold, overly familiar, a pushover or an asshole.
I don’t know where Clarissa lives exactly. If it’s a university town, there could be a quite bit of town-gown friction informing these reactions. The town relies on the university but the residents resent the students and the professors at the same time and vice versa.
LikeLike
So Clarissa, you can’t find any decent doctors or competent help in a university town in Illinois?
Why don’t you and N move to a civilized state like Arizona? Good medical care, good yard keepers, great maid service, you name it — easy to find out here.
Great weather, too. (It’s 119 degrees today.)
LikeLike
“Great weather, too. (It’s 119 degrees today.)”
-Ugh. It was 104 where I am and closer to boiling point on the pavement (I actually saw water spilled on the pavement bubble off). How do you people live without chilly things? If I lived in Arizona I think I’d have to eat copious amounts of ice cream just to stay alive.
There are plenty of people around where I live who would love to do all this work. And they often do, for insanely low costs. Which sucks because I just want to grab someone and ship them off to Illinois for you, Clarissa. Which is probably illegal in many ways. I’m sorry the search is going so poorly. 😦
LikeLike
We do have few modern conveniences out here, like air conditioning and refrigerators. (My electric bill is about $500 a month during the summer. I deduct it from my taxes as a medical expense.) 🙂
LikeLike
Would you live in Arizona without air conditioning?
I don’t think the weather is “great” if you have to be five inches from a fan or an A/C source or a swamp cooler.
And I see way too many places that don’t take advantage of cross ventilation or try to minimize heat in other ways and just build giant hot boxes. It’s insanely stupid, even if you’re not looking at overall weather trends.
LikeLike
I’m extremely grateful that the AC exists but I’m very tired of living like a prisoner for 6 months out of a year. I’ve got prison pallor because I have to remain hidden inside for weeks on end. 😦
LikeLike
A great possibility is Yellowknife. I could really enjoy living there.
LikeLike
Are there any parent and toddler meet up type groups locally ( as an atheist I always looked for ones held in community centres rather than church ones) – you might think Klara is too young to benefit and that she has great toys of her own at home, but other mums can be a valuable source of recommendations of this type!
LikeLike
My husband just landed in Phoenix . He’s there on business. He reports that it’s 108F .
LikeLike
Tell your husband to enjoy Paradise-on-Earth during his short visit here. He definitely won’t have to worry about being cold.
LikeLike