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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).

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The Netherlands has a weird and exploitative setup where you can classify your au pair as a "cultural exchange", and then pay them literal peanuts (room and board plus a token amount of "pocket money")

Another weird cultural quirk of the Dutch that will hopefully go the way of Zwarte Piet one day.

From what I can see online, the average compensation that an au-pair in The Netherlands receives is 300 euro per month, with living expenses being covered by the family. There is no minimum wage requirement for au-pairs like in the UK or the US.

A semi-skilled English-speaking customer service agent in PH makes less than $700 a month to put this into perspective.

Working abroad is a totally reasonable proposition compared to working in the Philippines.

The added cost of having an additional person to provide room and food for way exceeds that €300/month. Especially, when taking into consideration that you might have to extend/renovate the house to lodge another person. Adding an extra bedroom and possibly bathroom is not cheap.

Even if you assume the cost of lodging was 1000€ (which it isn't) then the au-pair would still be significantly underpaid.

A normal full time employee costs at least 2000€ a month (salary, tax, pension plan, health insurance, etc). If you are paying less than that you are definietly exploiting them.

So in reality you’re paying for their food, electricity and heat, letting them rent a room for free, and allowing them the use of the other facilities in your home and on top of that you’re giving them a spending allowance of 300 euro.

In fact, you could do this for a homeless person today, in any city on the globe! And never even ask them to do anything for you!

The marginal cost of food/electricity/bed for adding one additional person to a family is drastically less than those things would cost for a person living alone. Whichever way you slice this, the employer is making out like a bandit under this scheme.

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