Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Live in help was commonplace for the UMC up through the 1940s. Cheap immigrant labor and cheap black labor made it possible, along with far fewer labor saving devices. Cooking wasn't as fun as it is today, for example. And when it's relatively cheap to have many servants, the very wealthy could create lifestyles and elaborate homes based on having full staff, their lives were really that much more formal.

After the war the pool of affordable labor dried up, though lasted another 20 years for inexpensive black labor, but by the late 60s it was rapidly fading out for the UMC (according to my mother, it went from 1940s live in to 1950s daily help who came in the morning and left once she got dinner ready to the 1960s several times a week to the 1970s once a week). Labor costs spared and now comes with all the social and Healthcare benefits if you have full time help.

There are still very wealthy with help but even that world has changed. It's far more private, people don't want to see help around so they're not waited upon at the table, but the help takes on different forms. You have personal assistants, personal stylists, personal chefs, house managers.

Something tells me that your definition of UMC is a lot different from mine.

If you read literature of the prewar Era basically every household headed by a white-collar man has a housekeeper. Even if he's in his 20s working as a clerk. Would they have written this if it didn't ring true?

Every white collar worker also had an assigned secretary at work to do things like take dictation and messages, even if they weren't in a very high up position, and that's dwindling.

At my law firm in the 2010s, I had a secretary as a first year associate. She took notes during meetings, sent ticklers, and other admin stuff. She also picked up my dry cleaning, arranged the town car for me, planned my trips, etc.

In my F100 company in the early 2000s I sat in a cube on a floor with everyone else - no admin, no secretary, we booked our own trips and town car through the corporate web interface. My starting salary was $110k +bonus. Management had the same set up. Now I’m management and we have a fancier portal but still do everything for ourselves - salary ~$400k +much larger bonus. Last time I had an office with a door was in grad school.

Yeah, that isn't comparable. At all. It is a much lower paying career in which you didn't even have an office. Of course you didn't have a secretary.

It wasn’t a “lower paying career” I was fresh out of grad school making 6 figures 25 years ago. If it was a “lower paying career” I would be making close to $1M/yr after bonuses etc. . . Or maybe you’re the liar from Europe with castles and servants galore who came to America to live in Fairfax county but brags about the life she left and how it was so much better but for some reason she chooses her 2000 sq ft nothing home and to scrub her own toilets.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Live in help was commonplace for the UMC up through the 1940s. Cheap immigrant labor and cheap black labor made it possible, along with far fewer labor saving devices. Cooking wasn't as fun as it is today, for example. And when it's relatively cheap to have many servants, the very wealthy could create lifestyles and elaborate homes based on having full staff, their lives were really that much more formal.

After the war the pool of affordable labor dried up, though lasted another 20 years for inexpensive black labor, but by the late 60s it was rapidly fading out for the UMC (according to my mother, it went from 1940s live in to 1950s daily help who came in the morning and left once she got dinner ready to the 1960s several times a week to the 1970s once a week). Labor costs spared and now comes with all the social and Healthcare benefits if you have full time help.

There are still very wealthy with help but even that world has changed. It's far more private, people don't want to see help around so they're not waited upon at the table, but the help takes on different forms. You have personal assistants, personal stylists, personal chefs, house managers.

Something tells me that your definition of UMC is a lot different from mine.

If you read literature of the prewar Era basically every household headed by a white-collar man has a housekeeper. Even if he's in his 20s working as a clerk. Would they have written this if it didn't ring true?

Every white collar worker also had an assigned secretary at work to do things like take dictation and messages, even if they weren't in a very high up position, and that's dwindling.

At my law firm in the 2010s, I had a secretary as a first year associate. She took notes during meetings, sent ticklers, and other admin stuff. She also picked up my dry cleaning, arranged the town car for me, planned my trips, etc.

In my F100 company in the early 2000s I sat in a cube on a floor with everyone else - no admin, no secretary, we booked our own trips and town car through the corporate web interface. My starting salary was $110k +bonus. Management had the same set up. Now I’m management and we have a fancier portal but still do everything for ourselves - salary ~$400k +much larger bonus. Last time I had an office with a door was in grad school.

Yeah, that isn't comparable. At all. It is a much lower paying career in which you didn't even have an office. Of course you didn't have a secretary.

Anonymous wrote:In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch was a rural public defender and he had a live in maid and cook.

That wasn't unusual in the South before the war. There weren't many job options for black women. But then with WWII, men went away and the US ramped up production of many things to support the war effort, so better-paying factory and shipyard jobs, some of which were unionized, opened up and these women often left domestic work to take these jobs.

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Anonymous wrote:Quality of service in America is horrible across the board - domestic help, at stores, at work, at school, on calls. Many are illiterate and/or ESOL- more lost in translations (voluntary or involuntary!).

Think of how many times you find mistakes in orders, sizes, your instructions, the final product? Now multiply that for someone you give the keys to your house and your kids to.

Other countries people have more pride in their work- like Japan. No need to double check anything.

Other countries domestic service industry is more professional- se Asia, Mideast, Eastern Europe. No matter, they get here, act entitled, assume everyone is a multi millionaire, and quality of service declines— especially if you’re weak at managing people and tasks.

So many do-the-bare-minimum workers here. Such a PITA. Thus when and if you find someone who cares you pay more. But do not pay more for imposters.

Um, no.

We're expats. I've had live-in help in multiple countries, including Russia, India, Singapore, and China. It isn't what you think. It isn't good for anybody, even the fortunate employers of the live-in help. In India, especially, you have to deaden part of your soul in order to share space with someone so very unfortunate, with so limited a future and so miserable a life, to have this, and EVERY lower to upper middle class to upper class person there has a maid. The maids are regularly taken out of school and put into live-in servant (slave) situations, and beating, rapes, and mistreatment of the help is, from what I saw, the norm. It warps something in the culture that embraces such a system.

That’s an exaggeration.

- multiple times expat and FSO

That's my post you responded to, and it absolutely is not an exaggeration.

We're in Singapore now, and I wouldn't say the "helpers", as live-in maids are called here, are treated well, but they are treated SO MUCH better than the house maids in India.

It's very much against egalitarian American culture to desire that kind of personal waiting on and as another PP said, it's seen as lazy, weak and a liability to not care for your own basics no matter how wealthy you are.

Anyone who feels so small inside (looking at you trump) who feels like this is a good system and they can lord it over people have something very wrong with them. People who brag about how it is in other countries are being very unself-aware and extremely out of touch.

There is a long history of servants and help in the US. The idea that Americans are uncomfortable with home help is always more fiction than reality, given that Americans had no problems having help in the past. My 1930s UMC colonial was built with a live in maid's room and bathroom and my own American ancestors had cooks and maids and housekeepers and they were solidly UMC people, not Vanderbilts. Most of their help were immigrants. Live in help died out due to costs and lack of interest from people who'd have been help in the past. But even today there's not much to differentiate cleaning services dominated by recent immigrants or the waves of Irish or German or Scandinavian girls who served a few years as maids in the 19th and early 20th century before finding a better job.

Incidentally, that is what Trump's mother did when she first came over from Scotland. She worked as a maid for a year or two before she met and married Trump's father.