The theme of servants in the 19th century is truly inexhaustible; it is not possible to cover it in one article. But don't eat so bite :)
So, the story about the servants is dedicated to Wodehouse fans.
Servants in the 19th Century
In the 19th century middle class was already rich enough to hire servants. The servant was a symbol of well-being, she freed the mistress of the house from cleaning or cooking, allowing her to lead a lifestyle worthy of a lady. It was customary to hire at least one maid - so at the end of the 19th century, even the poorest families hired a "step girl" who cleaned the steps and swept the porch on Saturday mornings, thus catching the eyes of passers-by and neighbors. Doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals kept at least 3 servants, but in rich aristocratic houses there were dozens of servants. The number of servants, their appearance and manners, signaled the status of their masters.
(c) D. Barry, "Peter Pan"
Main classes of servants
Butler(butler) - responsible for the order in the house. He has almost no responsibilities associated with physical labor, he is above it. Usually the butler looks after the male servants and polishes the silver. In Something New, Wodehouse describes the butler as follows:
Butlers as a class seem to grow less and less like anything human in proportion to the magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler employed in the relatively modest homes of small country gentlemen who is practically a man and a brother; who hobnobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the water supply suddenly fails.
The greater the house the more does the butler diverge from this type. Blandings Castle was one of the more important of England's show places, and Beach accordingly had acquired a dignified inertia that almost qualified him for inclusion in the vegetable kingdom. He moved--when he moved at all--slowly. He distilled speech with the air of one measuring out drops of some precious drug.
Housekeeper(housekeeper) - Responds to bedrooms and servants' quarters. Supervises the cleaning, looks after the pantry, and also monitors the behavior of the maids in order to prevent debauchery on their part.
Chef(chef) - in rich houses, often a Frenchman takes very expensive for his services. Often in a state cold war with the economy.
Valet(valet) - the personal servant of the owner of the house. She takes care of his clothes, prepares his luggage for the trip, loads his guns, serves golf clubs, drives away angry swans from him, breaks his engagements, saves him from evil aunts and generally teaches the mind to reason.
Personal maid/maid(lady "s maid) - helps the hostess comb her hair and dress, prepares a bath, looks after her jewelry and accompanies the hostess during visits.
Lackey(footman) - helps bring things into the house, brings tea or newspapers, accompanies the hostess during shopping trips and wears her purchases. Dressed in livery, he can serve at the table and give solemnity to the moment with his appearance.
Maids(housemaids) - they sweep the yard (at dawn, while the gentlemen are sleeping), they clean the rooms (when the gentlemen are having dinner).
As in society as a whole, the "world under the stairs" had its own hierarchy. At the highest level were teachers and governesses, who, however, were rarely ranked as servants. Then came the senior servants, led by the butler, and so on down. The very same Wodehouse describes this hierarchy very interestingly. In this passage, he talks about the order of eating.
Kitchen maids and scullery maids eat in the kitchen. Chauffeurs, footmen, under-butler, pantry boys, hall boy, odd man and steward "s-room footman take their meals in the servants" hall, waited on by the hall boy. The stillroom maids have breakfast and tea in the stillroom, and dinner and supper in the hall. The housemaids and nursery maids have breakfast and tea in the housemaid's sitting-room, and dinner and supper in the hall. The head housemaid ranks next to the head stillroom maid. The laundry maids have a place of their own near the laundry, and the head laundry maid ranks above the head housemaid. The chef has his meals in a room of his own near the kitchen.
Jeeves played by Stephen Fry.
Children with a nanny
Henry Morland, A Lady's Maid Soaping Linen, OK. 1765-82. Of course, the era is by no means Victorian, but it is simply a pity to miss such a charming picture.
The washerwomen came for water.
A maid in the kitchen of a rural cottage. Judging by the photo, this is still a very young girl. However, at that time, 10-year-old children were sometimes hired to work, often from orphanages (like Oliver Twist)
Hiring, Paying and Position of Servants
In 1777, each employer had to pay a tax of 1 guinea per male servant - in this way the government hoped to cover the costs of the war with the North American colonies. Although this rather high tax was only abolished in 1937, servants continued to be hired. The servants could be hired in several ways. For centuries, there were special fairs (statute or hiring fair), which gathered workers looking for a place. They brought with them some object denoting their profession - for example, roofers held straw in their hands. To secure an employment contract, all that was required was a handshake and a small upfront payment (this advance was called a fastening penny). It is interesting to note that it was at such a fair that Mor from Pratchett's book of the same name became Death's apprentice.
The fair went something like this: people looking for work,
broken lines lined up in the middle of the square. Many of them are attached to
hats are small symbols that show the world what kind of work they know
sense. The shepherds wore shreds of sheep's wool, the carters tucked
a strand of a horse's mane, interior decorators - a strip
intricate Hessian wallpapers, and so on and so forth. Boys
wishing to become apprentices crowded like a bunch of timid sheep into
in the middle of this human whirlpool.
- You just go and stand there. And then someone comes up and
offers to take you on as an apprentice,” Lezek said in a voice that
managed to banish notes of some uncertainty. - If he likes your look,
Certainly.
- How do they do it? Mor asked. - That is, how they look
determine whether you qualify or not?
“Well…” Lezek paused. Regarding this part of the Hamesh program,
gave him an explanation. I had to strain and scrape through the bottom of the internal
warehouse of knowledge in the field of the market. Unfortunately, the warehouse contained very
limited and highly specific information on the sale of livestock wholesale and in
retail. Realizing the insufficiency and incomplete, shall we say, relevance of these
information, but having nothing else at his disposal, he finally
made up his mind:
“I think they count your teeth and all that. Make sure you don't
wheezing and that your legs are all right. If I were you, I wouldn't
mention a love of reading. This is disturbing.(c) Pratchett, "Mor"
In addition, a servant could be found through a labor exchange or a special employment agency. In their early days, such agencies printed lists of servants, but this practice declined as newspaper circulation increased. These agencies were often infamous because they could take money from the candidate and then not arrange a single interview with a potential employer.
Among the servants, there was also their own "word of mouth" - meeting during the day, servants from different houses could exchange information and help each other find a new place.
To obtain a good place required impeccable recommendations from previous owners. However, not every master could hire a good servant, because the employer also needed some kind of recommendation. Since the favorite occupation of the servants was washing the bones of the masters, then bad reputation about greedy employers spread fairly quickly. Servants also had blacklists, and woe to the master who got on it! In the Jeeves and Wooster series, Wodehouse often mentions a similar list compiled by members of the Junior Ganymede club.
“It's the Curzon Street valet club, and I've been a member of it for quite some time. I have no doubt that the servant of a gentleman who occupies such a prominent position in society as Mr. Spode is also a member of it and, of course, told the secretary a lot of information about
its owner, which are listed in the club book.
-- As you said?
-- According to the eleventh paragraph of the statute of the institution, each entering
the club is obliged to reveal to the club everything that he knows about his owner. Of these
information is compiled fascinating reading Moreover, the book encourages
reflections of those members of the club who conceived to go into the service of the gentlemen,
whose reputation can not be called impeccable.
A thought struck me, and I shuddered. Almost jumped up.
- What happened when you joined?
- Excuse me, sir?
"Did you tell them all about me?"
“Yes, of course, sir.
-- As everybody?! Even the case when I ran away from Stoker's yacht and I
did you have to smear the face with shoe polish to disguise it?
-- Yes, sir.
-- And about that evening when I came home after Pongo's birthday
Twistleton and mistook a floor lamp for a burglar?
-- Yes, sir. On rainy evenings, club members enjoy reading
similar stories.
“Oh, how about with pleasure?” (With) Wodehouse, Wooster family honor
A servant could be fired by giving him a month's notice of dismissal or by paying him a monthly salary. However, in the event of a serious incident - say, the theft of silverware - the owner could dismiss the servant without paying a monthly salary. Unfortunately, this practice was accompanied by frequent abuses, because it was the owner who determined the severity of the violation. In turn, the servant could not leave the place without prior notice of departure.
In the middle of the 19th century, a mid-level maid received an average of £6-8 a year, plus extra money for tea, sugar and beer. The maid who served directly to the mistress (lady's maid) received 12-15 pounds a year plus money for additional expenses, a livery footman - 15-15 pounds a year, a valet - 25-50 pounds a year. In addition, servants traditionally received a cash gift at Christmas.In addition to payments from employers, servants also received tips from guests.Tips were distributed at the departure of a guest: all the servants lined up in two rows near the door, and the guest handed out tips depending on the services received or on his social status (i.e. generous tips testified to his well-being).In some houses, only male servants received tips For poor people, tipping was a nightmare in reality, so they could decline the invitation, for fear of appearing poor.After all, if the servant received too stingy tips, then the next time he visited the greedy guest, he could easily give him a dolce vita - for example, ignore or twist all orders guest.
Until the beginning of the 19th century, servants were not entitled to days off. It was believed that when entering the service, a person understood that from now on every minute of his time belongs to the owners. It was also considered indecent if relatives or friends came to visit the servants - and especially friends of the opposite sex! But in the 19th century, masters began to allow servants to receive relatives from time to time or give them days off. And Queen Victoria even gave an annual ball for palace servants at Balmoral Castle.
By setting aside savings, servants from wealthy households could accumulate a significant amount, especially if their employers remembered to mention them in their wills. After retirement, former servants could go into trade or open a tavern. Also, servants who lived in the house for many decades could live out their lives with the owners - this happened especially often with nannies.
The position of the servants was ambivalent. On the one hand, they were part of the family, they knew all the secrets, but they were forbidden to gossip. An interesting example of this attitude towards servants is Bekassin, the heroine of comics for Semaine de Suzzette. A maid from Brittany, naive but devoted, she was drawn without a mouth and ears - so that she could not eavesdrop on the master's conversations and retell them to her girlfriends. Initially, the identity of the servant, his sexuality, as it were denied. For example, there was a custom when the owners gave the maid a new name. For example, Mall Flanders, the heroine of Defoe's novel of the same name, was called "Miss Betty" by the owners (and Miss Betty, of course, gave the owners a light). Charlotte Bronte also mentions the collective name of the maids - "abigails"
(c) Charlotte Brontë, "Jane Eyre"
With names, things were generally interesting. As I understand it, the higher-ranking servants, such as the butler or personal maid, were referred to exclusively by their surnames. A vivid example of such treatment we find again in the books of Wodehouse, where Bertie Wooster calls his valet "Jeeves," and only in The Tie That Binds do we recognize the name of Jeeves - Reginald. Wodehouse also writes that in conversations between servants, the footman often spoke of his master familiarly, calling him by name - for example, Freddie or Percy. At the same time, the rest of the servants called the said gentleman by his title - Lord such and such or Earl such and such. Although in some cases the butler could pull the speaker up if he thought that he was "forgetting" in his familiarity.
The servants could not have a personal, family or sexual life. The maids were often unmarried and without children. If the maid happened to become pregnant, she had to take care of the consequences herself. The percentage of infanticide among the maids was very high. If the father of the child was the owner of the house, then the maid had to remain silent. For example, according to persistent rumors, Helen Demuth, the housekeeper in the family of Karl Marx, gave birth to a son from him and kept silent about it all her life.
Illustrative photo
PHOTO: Flickr/by WageIndicator.org - Pictures from Pa
Let me tell you something that everyone is interested in: how rich people actually live.
I worked for a cleaning company for over two years. I had a flexible schedule and a good salary. I never perceived this work as a career, did not identify myself with it.
I didn't spy on my clients. But when you regularly clean them at home, you willy-nilly notice things that are very unusual for yourself.
I drove up to these houses along small winding roads, and there were gnomes and green "carpets" around - everything was like in a fairy tale. I parked the car in a special parking lot far from the clients' houses: so that, God forbid, the oil from my car would not spoil the look of the asphalt for them. I enjoyed the view of the pier and the boats that glittered in the bay opposite their houses. I cleaned the house and drove to a new address. I had 20 clients. Two or three houses a day.
A few months after my employment, my boss asked me to clean houses "slow down". (We don't say that, of course. We call it "more careful.") There was a lot of turnover at the company, and the boss explained that I needed to stay at houses for longer lines. The firm was paid hourly for our work.
If I cleaned houses faster than other girls in my department, clients were no longer willing to pay for their "inefficient" work. The stakes immediately began to seem too high to them.
Therefore, I tried to simply “kill” part of my working time. I looked into the master's bedside tables, trying to understand the essence through them american dream. Then, having nothing to do, she would go to the cabinets and look at the empty wine bottles.
I also saw how many pills they take every two weeks. Doctors once prescribed them for treatment, but now it was their way of relaxing.
Rich people have pills for everything: pain, anxiety, insomnia, depression, impotence, allergies, high blood pressure, diabetes. Pile of drugs. My personal favorite is the testosterone booster cream. (I had to see what it was. This thing eliminates the lack of libido in women. You apply the cream anywhere on your body except for the genitals.)
Hustler porn was regularly filmed in one of my clients' homes. Every nightstand was filled with bottles of lube, piles of underwear and cum-stained sheets. Someone even tried to cook here: once I found a pot full of beef. The whole house stank of caramelized ham.
Other customers had a separate fridge with cat food. This rude animal even had its own bedroom!
There was a garden house next to the porn house. Across the road. Both had large garages the size of living rooms and ocean views.
I was in the garden house every other Wednesday. This is rare. The owner spent most of his time at the hospital so it was always clean. Unless it was necessary to shake off the dust and wipe the dining table.
His wife died many years ago. I guessed this from the photographs placed throughout the house. They were made in the 80s. But every little thing that she once collected continued to be carefully stored in its place.
On the cork board in the kitchen, there were sticky notes of her to-do lists: Get a new hose from the courier, Find someone to fix the cracks in the sidewalk, Install a new gate latch.
She was forced to deal with "male" affairs, because her husband spent the whole day at work. And here's what it all led to.
The bathroom has two sinks. One still has a hair dryer attached. It hangs on a special hook. On his side was a cup with a comb and all the medicines he took in the morning and before bed. Each time they were different.
Opposite the sink was a wicker shelf. On it was a picture of their eldest son. He wears a green scarf and a beard. He shows the victory sign. And the signature: “Do not stand and do not cry on my grave. I'm not there. And I don't sleep." This is how the owner of this house starts each day.
The amount of money my clients spent was amazing to me.
In one of the houses, I saw a receipt for a blanket I had just bought. It was more expensive than my car. I vacuumed children's rooms, larger in size than my entire apartment.
Rob - my demanding client, whom I went to on Fridays and who adored me - spent $3,000 every month on TV and the Internet. At Christmas he sent me a card with $100 inside.
I usually never meet my clients. Once I saw a lady from a porn house once in a store. She wore a huge coat of wool dyed red. She chose her steak. I stood five meters away with cough syrup and baby juice for my daughter and pretended not to notice her. But she had no idea who I was. I knew that right now she was being treated for a protracted genital infection.
I saw a woman using testosterone cream in a restaurant. A tall, slender lady in good shape, with fluffy blond hair. She was wearing high heels and had way too much makeup on. She met her lover in a restaurant. They smiled at each other, but did not hold hands.
Once he left the bag at her house and did not pick it up until the children and their dad returned home.
This bag contained a vibrator and lube. I stood in front of this couple at the bar and thought how sad it must be to lose your libido.
After a while, I got used to the loneliness that reigns in these houses.
I'm used to wives smoking and cheating on their husbands the same day they leave town for a few days.
One such client kept a box of cigarettes in her garage freezer. Long thin cigarettes. I don't remember the brand.
Her entire pantry next to the kitchen was stocked with fat-free soups, crackers, and salad dressings. There was never anything in the fridge but water and salads.
My most important client asked me to visit him twice a week for a few hours. In addition to cleaning, I did many other things: I folded his mother, father and two young sons, ironed him.
His mother left her office next door only to pay me off and ask about the midwife in town. “I'm pregnant,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, you are the first person who knows about this, except for my husband.” She was afraid that my master would find out about it. That is, she did not think that he would be delighted with the idea that he would have a brother.
While I cleaned her stainless steel appliances and wiped down the granite countertop in the kitchen, she and I chatted.
She said that she wanted to give birth at home, despite her mature age. I told her how dangerous it was, by my own example, but she did not believe me.
A week or two later I noticed blood stains in the toilet. She told me that she had a miscarriage. Now I saw a completely different person in front of me: hunched over, “nailed” to the ground. I don't even know what else to say here.
After a while, I quit the cleaning company and began to work for my clients without intermediaries. It was more difficult, but
I got the opportunity to not mess with idiots who asked me to clean their house in a "special" suit while they walked around it naked.
I stopped spying on my clients. There was no need for this now: I cleaned their apartment quickly, and I did not have to spend time doing nothing. They all send gifts to my daughter and me for the holidays that we could never buy with our own.
And I vowed that I would never again want a house that was too big for me to clean on my own.
The work of a housekeeper is one of the most difficult, and if we are talking about a wealthy family, then not always decent problems or quirks are added to a decent pay.
Alina, a girl who worked as a housekeeper in several wealthy families, told the correspondent about the juicy nuances of her work. By the way, the non-disclosure clause is the first in the contract with the employer. So, all coincidences, as they say, are random.
Often, says Alina, men are looking for housekeepers. True, their duties do not include cleaning the premises at all.
“When posting an ad, I never would have thought that there would be so many offers of intimacy. Once, having already settled down, on the first working day I was offered 100 dollars for sex, ”says the girl.
Fortunately, there are also real job offers. However, even here there are curious situations.
“In one family, I was asked not to clean the toilet, as the wife of the employer usually cleans it. I didn't understand what was the matter. But she learned from the nanny that she washes it, pretending to be a housekeeper in their role playing", - Alina recalls the juicy details.
In fact, housewives are not always so kind that they remove some of the duties from their housekeepers. For example, one of the girl's employers decided to demand the maximum for the money paid.
“I thought I would come, work and leave. But she did not give a minute to rest. Strictly from 9 to 6 without a break gave tasks. Once I got sick. At work, the temperature rose to 39. So she did not let me go home.
She blocked the outer gates of the mansion and expressed her dissatisfaction, explaining it by the fact that "once you came to work, then work." She also paid the least. Then I called the police, they took me to the police department, but I refused the application. And, as a result, she ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, ”recalls the housekeeper.
The duties of domestic servants usually include dry and wet cleaning of the entire house, washing windows, ironing clothes and keeping the wardrobe clean and tidy. Sometimes they are asked to look after the garden, says Alina, but it is unrealistic to complete such a volume of work in a day.
Despite the fact that payment in wealthy families, as a rule, is quite pleasant in terms of money, there is always a risk that it will be deducted from it for some wrongdoing.
“Once I broke a vase. Looks chic. I was asked to pay $500 for it. I repaid the debt from my salary, but took the broken vase with me. I have a friend who works in this area.
In general, he estimated it at 13 thousand tenge. It turns out that family friends gave this vase to the owners, saying that it was from Egypt. But it turned out that the vase is from China,” says Alina.
Now it all looks funny. Then it was no laughing matter.
In another family, the employer asked Alina to take out her diamonds in front of her and spray them with a special cleaning and protection agent. Having once read the composition of the product, the girl was very surprised - it included ordinary liquid soap and flavored substances.
The girl admits that she always left her employers herself, a few months after starting work. The fact is that many of them came up with new duties for the housekeeper, more and more, and, as a rule, not previously specified in the contract.
The clauses in the contract are very diverse, up to instructions on what and how to do. For example, another housekeeper, Aizhan, said that the contract with one of the employers included a point that was obvious to every housewife - to wash white linen separately from colored ones. It turned out that the previous servant managed to ruin the master's blouse in this way.
For Aizhan herself, for example, the most unusual thing was that she had to wash and dry the decorative pebbles that adorned the corridors and halls of the house. At the same time, stones had to be carried from the second floor to the first, in order to arrange water procedures for them, and up; and they weighed a total of about 30 kilograms.
Being torn apart by dogs, long hours of work and mask shows are just some of what people who decide to get a job as housekeepers for wealthy Russians have to go through. The market of Russian servants, apparently, is not much different from the slave market, its volumes are unclear, wage statistics are vague, and the rights of workers are practically not protected in any way. At the request of samizdat “My friend, you are a transformer”, the editor of L’Officiel Russia, Irina Shcherbakova, learned firsthand what life is like for butlers, maids, housekeepers and nannies who serve wealthy people.
“The most common mistake is to make friends with someone from the staff and start to perceive this person as a family member,” says gallery owner and daughter of businessman Oleg Baibakov, Maria, in a column she wrote for Tatler magazine. - Nothing good comes out of it. As a rule, you lose a good maid, but you don’t gain a sister or a friend.”
Baibakova's column was published in Tatler three years ago. Maria generously shared her experience: how to competently dismiss a servant (“quickly and in front of witnesses”), who has the right to sit at the same table with the mistress of the house (only her son’s tutor) and why it is impossible to give the maid “Prada trousers from the season before last”, and the old “Louboutins” it’s just right to give if the maid has a daughter. In the crisis of 1914, these home economics tips outraged everyone at once - from the pro-government media and the former Nashi press secretary Christina Potupchik, who threatened Baibakova with a "wolf ticket", to the most progressive part of the Russian Facebook. Pretty soon, the scandal took on an international dimension: the London Times, for example, broke into an article headlined "Tatler teaches oligarchs to fire maids." It even got to the point that BuzzFeed released the Top 13 Life Hacks on How to Treat Servants. A few days later, Baibakova apologized for the Facebook column, saying that the text was "heavily edited" and that when she "translated it into English, she could see how indifferent and rude it turned out."
However, not a single piece of advice - even the most rude and indifferent - from Baibakova's scandalous column has anything to do with the conditions under which servants actually work in Russia. The "ethical management" that the gallery owner calls for is an unknown thing for most Russians who can afford a housekeeper. And if a film or series were made about a Russian house with servants, it would not be Downton Abbey, which Baibakov mentions, but rather a fresh Zvyagintsev or the old Coen brothers. Why, we will explain below.
Echpochmaki and recruitment agency Lada Dance
A house in a spa town in Spain, owned by a family from Russia; in the kitchen, cooks in white uniforms prepare Tatar food - echpochmaki, belish, meat soup. The mistress of the house, a regal woman of about fifty, shouts across the room: she does not like how the table was wiped, and the echpochmaks came out inauthentic. The cook, a tall Georgian woman in her early thirties, apologizes in a low voice. After dinner, the cook tells me her story: divorced, a schoolboy son is waiting at home, she has been working in the family for several years. Her case is indicative, but far from the most difficult. A maid who worked for a Russian banker in the late 1990s and early 2000s recalls: “He gave receptions at the dacha, sometimes a hundred and sixty people. At first we were forced to cook, but then the servants began to come from the Mario restaurant. Everyone was terribly afraid of the owner. When there was a mistake, they didn’t come up like that, they didn’t serve food to the guest - that’s it, right behind the fence. We were picked up every morning by a car at Kuntsevskaya. And the driver could take it and say: “But you are not going today.” You don't work anymore. In my presence, four or five people were fired like that.”
The situation has changed little since then. They still prefer to hire servants in the house unofficially: agreements are oral, wages are in an envelope. This makes it possible to dismiss in one day, without compensation, and labor legislation does not work here. The main channel of employment is personal connections. Most often, domestic staff is taken on the recommendation of friends, neighbors or relatives.
Wealthier homeowners often use agencies. Fun fact: since 2006, one of these agencies, Impeccable Staff, has been owned by the singer Lada Dance. Dance is proud of the fact that “carefully checks the biographies of employees” and declares that she was able to pick up a nanny for Andrey Grigoriev-Apollonov and a driver for Dmitry Kharatyan.
Banknotes in trunks and salary in envelopes
In the nineties and even in the first half of the 2000s, the work of individual housekeepers was paid higher than the average music reviewer. “The salary was $600,” recalls the heroine, who worked as a nurse before becoming a maid. - With this money it was possible, if you saved up for six months, to buy a good one-room apartment. And after two or three months, they added another fifty dollars to me. Money was delivered to the person I worked for in such checkered trunks. Several bags at once, at night.
The size of the domestic worker market is not well understood. The Rus2Web publication, for example, cited the following statistics, referring to the FMS: in 2015, the agency issued about 1.8 million patents, while 450,000 people received them in the capital. In theory, the procedure for issuing patents was developed just for those who are employed as servants in the house of individuals, but today those who work for legal entities also receive them - simply because such a patent is easier to obtain than a full work permit.
Wages have gone down, but the number of household staff hasn't gone down. By 2010, according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development, there were twenty million people in the country. According to last year's data from the Center for Migration Research, seven million migrants work as housekeepers, maids and nannies in Russia. The average salary of a housekeeper is 30-60 thousand rubles. Some work in several houses at once. For example, Wednesday and Friday are cleaning of a three-room apartment in the historical center where an employee of the Moscow City Hall lives, and Tuesday and Thursday are visits to the producer, who, in addition to everything, asks to look after her schoolgirl daughter: sometimes she needs to be picked up from lessons or taken to the cinema . Housemaids who are taken "with accommodation" are often paid less. So on the website arinarodionovna.com, a family without children and animals is looking for a housekeeper with a salary of 30,000 rubles in a house on Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway. Requirements: "Dry and wet cleaning, cleaning of bathrooms, washing the refrigerator, dishes, seasonal window washing, laundry, ironing with a steam generator." We need a woman from forty to fifty-five years old, “who knows how to cook well, work with household appliances: a vacuum cleaner, an iron, a slow cooker, a double boiler, an electric grill, a microwave oven, an oven, a juicer, an electric bed linen press, a washing machine and a dryer. Responsible, punctual, observing subordination. For comparison: the site editor in a lifestyle publication, who works remotely and part-time, earns about the same. And the average salary in Moscow, according to Rosstat, is 59 thousand.
Mask shows and mad dogs (no, not Tarantino)
The homes of some wealthy clients are raided, and the staff often comes under suspicion. “There was a case, they put on mask shows for us,” says a Moscow housekeeper who wished to remain anonymous. - They came at night, I was generally in shorts. No one was allowed out of the house, neither the hostess, nor mother, no one. The investigators sat down in the kitchen. I got dressed and cautiously went out to them, asked if they could have tea or coffee. One:
- You can have tea.
The other looked at him like that and asked:
"Aren't you afraid of poison?"
Unofficially hired personnel are not protected from anything, and being fired suddenly without explanation or an investigator catching you in your underpants is far from the worst thing that can happen. Injuries at work are sometimes not compensated in any way, and if they are compensated, it is not enough. “The mistress of the house,” says the same housekeeper, “terribly loved dogs. Well, it's just terrible. And she constantly bought these dogs, collected, or something: she saw, wanted, took away, and then all the care for them fell on us. Kurzhaars, German shepherds, lap dogs - the house was large, the former residence of Shevardnadze on Rublyovka, there the guards drove around the territory in a jeep, so there was enough space. No one cared much about the dogs, they were angry and twitchy. The owner sometimes kicked them when she got angry, and she also bought collars with electric shocks, and the son of the animals used electric shock when he was bored. And then one day I take out bowls of food for big dogs - and I see a small one running across the whole yard. I think, no matter how they eat it, I grab it, but they rush at me. When the guards came running, I was gnawed by three kurtshaars and one German shepherd. A small dog, they say, was torn apart, there was not even anything left of it. And I even had stitches on my scalp. I spent ten days in the hospital, I was paid for a junior suite, and that's it. The stitches were removed and redone. Even when everything began to heal, it was still terrible. I looked out the window and realized that I could not go outside. I was afraid of the air. I was helped by a psychologist who went to the owner's mother. The psychologist came, I closed my eyes, clung to him, and together we stepped over the threshold of the hospital. I thought the hostess brought the psychologist, but it turned out that he himself heard what had happened and came. Do you know what the owner said when he found out that the guards had to shoot the dogs? “Well, how will we return, but no one will meet us? ..” And not a word about me. And only later, when I quit, they told me that he and his wife said that I myself was to blame.
