Who cares about au pairs?: a study on the work and social protection experiences of Filipina au pairs in the Netherlands

Contemporary discourse recognizes the au pair scheme as cultural exchange programme for young women who aspire to travel and experience a foreign culture. On the contrary, the programme is also criticized for being a cheap source of domestic labour of the host families consequently resulting to vulnerability of the au pairs. Yet, in these opposing perspectives, it is apparent that the voice of the au pairs as the participants of the cultural exchange programme appears to be missing. This research unveils the missing voice and perspective of the au pairs from existing literature by showcasing and focusing on the au pair’s own experiences as they share their stories from their own lens. The research examines the work and social protection experiences of the au pairs by analyzing and contextualizing it through the frameworks of human capital, wasted precarity, and assemblages of informal and transnational social protection. The conducted qualitative interviews with the current Filipina au pairs in the Netherlands showed that their work experiences can be akin to a spectrum. On one end, the au pairs asserted to have positive work experiences attributed to experiencing a foreign culture, feeling of being part of the family, learning new knowledge and skills, achieving personal growth, and attaining a stepping-stone beneficial for their future career plans. On the other end of the spectrum, the au pairs’ negative experiences reaffirmed their condition as precarious migrants in the host country. I discuss how the au pairs’ immigration status, involvement in insecure domestic work sector, ambiguous positionality in their host family, and “marginal social identities” produce their precariousness. Furthermore, the au pairs’ experiences of social protection reveal how strategically they have assembled social protection from their established social networks and state-driven provisions to secure themselves from imminent social risk and protect their rights as citizens of the Philippines and as temporary migrants in the Netherlands.