Introduction

This chapter addresses the sidelining of organizing among migrant nannies in discussions of childcare struggles. There is wide variety in the make-up of the informal childcare workforce, including babysitters, childminders, nannies and domestic workers. In the UK, nannying is historically associated with the employment of British women by upper-middle-class families, and some type of childcare labour continues to be constructed as more respectable than domestic labour. In the USA, nannying is more common and, as an example of the ongoing impact of these hierarchies, the International Labour Organization's (ILO) definitions of domestic worker omitted care work until recently (Anderson, 2000). There are complexities in defining what counts as in-home childcare. The lack of data means that we know little about the composition of the nanny workforce in the UK and USA. In 2009, it was estimated that there were 63,000 nannies working in the UK (Adamson and Brennan, 2017). It is thought that the influx to the UK of migrants from European Union (EU) accession states after 2004 constituted a large proportion of women employed to care for children in private homes at a lower cost than the resident workforce (Anderson et al, 2006). Whereas the term ‘nanny’ used to be associated with a qualified childcare professional (Gregson and Lowe, 1994), more recently, it has shifted to refer to informally employed, low-paid childcare/domestic workers (Busch, 2012; Cox and Busch, 2016). In terms of organizing, nannies occupy a distinctive location as both on the margins of domestic workers’ struggles, as they have been perceived as professionalized until recently, and on the margins of childcare struggles led by workers in the formal sector and in centre-based care. In this context, this chapter asks how migrant nannies’ organizing during the pandemic shift the conceptualization of childcare struggles and the possibility of establishing solidarities between stratified workers.

I start this chapter with a discussion of how nannies’ relationships with their employers have been framed through the lens of intimate exploitation to illustrate their differential access to the categories of mother and worker. In the second part of the chapter, I use the lens of stratified reproduction (Colen, 1995) to show the hypervisibility of middle-class women's reproductive work and invisibilization of nannies and home childcare workers in media coverage during the pandemic.