Reply to Why are nannies treated like both hourly and salaried employees?

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Reply to "Why are nannies treated like both hourly and salaried employees?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Nanny here.  This is why it is so important to have a detailed contract that gets both of you on the same page around this stuff!

My contract says that if a snow day is anticipated, I need to be at work or use PTO or take the day without pay.  I only get paid for a snow day if my bosses and I agree the night before that it doesn’t look like it will be a big deal and then we get a surprise 6” or something unexpected overnight.  It’s fine with me because we talked through all these permutations at the beginning of my employment, negotiated and I got bigger things that mattered more to me than paid snow days.

The biggest reason nannies are hourly employees (aside from “it’s the law”) is that there are already major boundary issues with the nanny/family relationship that aren’t present with most hourly employees and the room for massively overworking nannies functioning as a salaried worker are just too high.  [b]The reason nannies get benefits that most hourly employees don’t is because most hourly employees are basically interchangeable with any other cog in their particular machine.[/b]  One checkout clerk is just as acceptable to the employer as another, so if they need a day off or need to call in sick, they can do so without throwing things off.  But you don’t just want any warm body who can pass a criminal background check to sub in for your nanny.  Additionally, the tasks many hourly workers have don’t rely on them to be emotionally adept.  So the benefits of PTO are there 1) to avoid burnout so that your nanny can continue to be patient and loving and attentive and 2) because offering PTO allows you to build a mutually-beneficial arrangement where you have control over the circumstances under which your nanny takes time off (such as needing X weeks notice).[/quote]
Wow! Did you really just write that? Do you have any idea the breadth of jobs that are paid hourly?

I agree that a nanny contract is really important. I disagree with most of your other nonsense. Nannies are human beings with a tough job, and they should be compensated fairly and humanely. But so are other hourly workers. Yeesh![/quote]

I replied to someone else downthread, but to clarify, no, I didn’t mean (and shouldn’t have flippantly implied) that hourly workers are all mindless drones.  My point was simply that in most hourly positions, the assumption is that anyone who is qualified to be in that position is acceptable to fill any given shift.  But even if you are an amazing nanny, you can’t just walk in to a random family and immediately jump in and do everything perfectly.  There will always be major training involved and it takes time to connect with kids, especially at young ages.  So in the category of time off and finding a replacement to fill a shift, nannies have more in common with salaried workers (who typically have a job that they have unique knowledge about outside of general professional skills) than hourly workers (who typically have a professional skillset as a baseline but differences between individuals don’t dramatically alter the quality of the work).[/quote]

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