Is this fair (au pair rate/hours)?

[naturelover]

I want to hire an EU au pair for one month this summer.
I was planning to pay 70 pounds a week for 40 hours (8hr x 5 days).
Obviously, nice room and food provided. London suburbs.

Does this sound ok?

Sounds a bit low - from what I've read you would usually pay £70 per week for 25 hours.

Too little in my opinion. £70 should really only be for about 25 - 30 hour work, not 40.

Thought it might be - thanks for the feedback. I would hate to exploit anyone.

If you upped the salary by a bit, but also made it possible for the au pair to stay a bit longer (at the end of their month) and enjoy London as a tourist with free board, perhaps for 2 or so weeks, that might be appealing for someone.

i would also say its very low but given its a summer job, which sooo many people want you might be able to to get away with it.

We had a sliding scale with our au pair - £70 for 25 hours, £80 for 30 and £90 for 35 and I would round up on the whole. Room and board in central London and we paid for her monthly travelcard.

I don't think much of that as a sliding scale, £2 an hour?!

Au pairs have a low basic wage because they don't do many hours and they get free board and lodging, not because you can employ them at exploitative hourly rates.

We pay £75 for 25hrs, £100 for 35 hrs. So I would probably be paying around £125-ish for 40 hrs

Except I really wouldn't in practice, because I would not use an au pair to provide sole care during the summer holidays for 5 full days a week. IMO they are there to help out as part of family, not be a pseudo nanny while the parents go to work. My AP's are all in their mid 20s and very responsible, but I would only let them do maybe 2 days a week max of sole care with my school age children. Personally I think i unfair to treat them like a nanny but pay them a low wage - they're not trained, and I have no idea how they might blow up if they were very tired and my kids pushed the buttons and so on.

Saying that, there are plenty of families who do do this during the holidays and it works fine. In the US I understand that it is standard to have AP's do 40-50 hour weeks during school holidays.

We pay £70 for a 20 hr week.

in the us the aps do up to 45 hours a week, up to 10 hours a day, holidays or not. they often have sole charge of small children all week long./ they have to have min 200 hours of experience with children and exp. with under two if they look after under two's./

They are also paid more like nannies - I believe anyway.

atm they get 195 dollars a week, a few years back they had 139 a week. the wage is calculated on national minumum wage minus food and accomodation.

i wonder whether the british families would prefer if the ap program was regulated in the uk the way it is in the uk? i mean that people need to go through a agency, aps need to stay a whole year and do some college classes etc.

i wonder whether the british families would prefer if the ap program was regulated in the UK the way it is in the US?

Nope. The bits you've missed out are the £5,000+ fee that the federally-approved cartel of agencies charge, and the large number of illegal childcare workers in the US vulnerable to exploitation by employers wanting to avoid this extortion.

Fortunately it won't happen in the UK because you can't place restrictions on the mobility of EU workers so there is no incentive for employers to jump through expensive hoops to imploy an alien legally.

Unfortunately, it does mean that rather than the institutionalised exploitation of the US system, individual employers may seek to exploit their au pairs. We have employment legislation, but au pairs are exempted from the minimum wage provisions and enforcement is a problem due mainly IMHO to lack of information.

when we had an au pair a few years ago, we paid £60 for 20 - 25 hours work.
If we needed more than 25 hours, we paid £5 per hour extra