Couples Search for Ways to Perk Up Nanny Jobs

Everyone has a story about the Housekeeper From Hell. Within two weeks of the housekeeper’s arrival, half the appliances are broken, the antiques have been polished with De-Solv-It and the best vase is in shards.

To avoid such catastrophes, many employers will offer the moon to hang on to longtime employees who cook, clean and care for their children.

One Trousdale Estates resident desperately wanted to keep her housekeeping wizard who could cook and serve dinner for 10 with one day’s notice.

“Every menu I gave her she improved upon,” says her grateful employer. So when the ambitious housekeeper wanted to go to cosmetology school four days a week, the Trousdale matron offered to continue her full salary and to contribute $2,000 toward tuition, travel expenses and health insurance.

In the past, so many illegal aliens were looking for domestic jobs that even dream housekeepers, nannies and maids were easily replaced.

But since the Immigration and Naturalization Service started enforcing the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1987, there has been a shortage of capable, well-trained housekeepers and nannies. The new law enabled undocumented aliens, who had been working in homes for minimum wages, to qualify for amnesty and move on to more lucrative jobs in offices and stores. At the same time, the law prohibited employers and employment agencies from hiring anyone who didn’t have specific INS work authorization.

“Five years ago I wasn’t afraid to place illegal aliens,” says Claudia Kahn, partner in Baby Buddies, a Beverly Hills placement agency. “Now I’m scared to death. You could go to jail for it.”

Employers were scared too. “People started to panic,” said another Westside agency owner. “They thought the INS would knock on their door and arrest them, so many demanded housekeepers or nannies with legal papers.”

For every housekeeper, nanny or maid with a legitimate green card, there are now 20 to 30 openings at Kahn’s agency.

To keep or lure that virtuoso but legal housekeeper who combines the talents of Perle Mesta and Mary Poppins, potential employers are racking their brains for good perks.

Many couples routinely give their housekeepers or nannies gifts of clothing and toys, or offer the private use of the family car on weekends. And a much-appreciated benefit is an annual paid vacation.

Hefty financial benefits such as health insurance, interest-free loans and pension plans are becoming more common. One Pacific Palisades mother not only pays for her nanny’s health insurance and pension plan but gives her paid annual vacations and flies her, all expenses paid, to Florida to see her relatives several times a year.

Another thankful couple in Los Feliz is setting up a college education fund for their housekeeper’s two toddlers. Although the children currently live in Central America, their mother has ambitious dreams for them, and to keep her, her employers will help her realize those dreams.

After the pension plans, annual vacations and other monetary perks have been used up, some employers offer to lighten the housekeeping load. They hire window and floor-cleaning services, or help for the help--a cleaning woman to allow the nanny to concentrate her talents on the children.

“We wouldn’t dream of making our nanny clean or cook,” says one well-known actress. “We hire other people for that.”

The competition for housekeepers and nannies also has driven up salaries. The going rate for a skilled live-in housekeeper or nanny who can speak English, drive, cook and take kids to the doctor, is $300 to $500 for a 50-hour week. That’s a lot of money--more than some career mothers earn themselves. Perks often begin as a strategy to whittle down those imposing salaries.

Says Robert Mann, owner of the Sandra Taylor Agency: “If you throw in a car for your housekeeper’s exclusive use on her days off, she . . . might even work for $300 a week. Give a live-in some evenings off to perfect her English or some days off to attend a trade school and she’ll work for $250.”

Some employers pile on perks just to hang onto the housekeeper who knows how much starch dad likes in his shirts and how long it will take for the children’s tantrums to subside.

Marta Aguilar, for example, is in her 16th year of service with one Mandeville Canyon couple. She helped raise her employers’ first son until he was 7. Then she stopped living in and worked for the family and others on a per-diem basis. When the family had a second child 15 years after their first, they lured Aguilar back to the house with an unbeatable financial package.

“I was making good money cleaning houses on my own,” says Aguilar, “but my employers topped what I was making and offered to give me a pension plan, take me traveling with the family and gave me the use of a car.”

Today, Aguilar makes in one week almost twice what she made in a month when she first started with the family. “I didn’t ask for it, they just offered,” said Aguilar.

If a familiar and trusted housekeeper like Aguilar quit, the employers would have to hire and train someone new--a process that creates a long and stressful transition period. But perhaps most important, children require continuity. Recent studies have shown children’s learning can be hampered by high caretaker turnover.

But tantalizing perks are definitely necessary to lure live-in help. With increased salaries, many housekeepers can now afford their own apartment or house and refuse to live with their employer’s family. One agency owner says they have dozens of candidates for live-out help, but find it a struggle to find maids who are willing to move in.

To keep her live-in, Beth Rogers, of Brentwood, happily kept raising the ante. A mother of four and the owner of a farming company, Rogers sent her housekeeper to school to learn English. Then she paid for her driving lessons. Eventually, she sent her to accounting classes so she could handle the family budget. “I called her my ‘home manager’ because she was so much more than a housekeeper,” said Rogers.

When her housekeeper’s son, Raoul Cano, arrived from El Salvador, Rogers took the boy into her home rather than lose her crackerjack home manager. She nominated him for enrollment at the Curtis School, an exclusive private school in West Los Angeles where her four children were enrolled (and where she was on the board of directors), but he won a scholarship on his own.

Gradually, he became part of the family. He lived with her children, went on ski trips with them, accompanied them on summer vacations.

Today Cano is applying to good private colleges. “He’ll get in,” says Rogers. “He’s a great guy and he’s done very well. If he gets into an expensive college, we’ll help him apply for financial help and supplement whatever he can’t get for himself. Anything that our kids would get, Raoul will get. I don’t believe in creating second-class citizens.”

But these elaborate incentives don’t always work. Three months after coming to live in the home of one Hancock Park family, the housekeeper announced she was pregnant and moved out. The couple offered to build a guest cottage behind their house where she, her boyfriend and child could live. When her mother and brother showed up from Guatemala, they were invited to move into the compound, too.

The more the housekeeper held back, the sweeter the deal got. At one point, the couple offered to sign up their housekeeper’s son at the exclusive temple preschool their daughter attended to ensure a spot when he was older. But she never did come to live with them. “I think she was afraid there’d be personality conflicts or cultural conflicts between her family and mine,” said the Hancock Park matron.

But gifts and financial rewards are often successful in warding off “maid raids.”

Teri Ockander, a retired computer saleswoman, has offered perks to her cleaning woman as talismans against losing her: “I had one very competent housekeeper who was lured away by a better deal. I like my present help very much, and, as a result, I find myself offering extras and making little concessions. I buy clothing for her and gifts for her children, and I wait until she leaves and do things like wipe spots off the kitchen floor by hand.”

The irony here is that what begins as a way of holding on to an employee may ultimately function in exactly the opposite way.

Once employers send their foreign-born housekeepers to driving school, to trade school and to night school to learn English, these newly educated women are qualified to take on more ambitious, better paying jobs. One actress hired a Guatemalan woman to care for her son and helped finance her schooling; now that sophisticated, bilingual Latina is a real-estate saleswoman making an upper-middle-class salary.

Other employers offer extras to their employees as a simple tribute. They want to acknowledge the skill and dedication needed for the job. Says Criss Martin, a divorced working mother of three who pays her cleaning woman 50% over the going rate, “I believe in paying through the nose for good people. My cleaning woman has never missed a day, she’s trustworthy, and she does a great job. That’s worth an awful lot to someone who works. I think these women who won’t pay extra for good help but go out and buy a $500 dress are crazy. They’ve got their values in the wrong place.”

According to Robert Mann, many of these benefits really shouldn’t be considered perks. “Paying your housekeeper’s health insurance is becoming more and more common. An annual paid vacation, for one week or two, has also become relatively standard. And why not? Here is this woman you’ve entrusted with the most precious possessions in your life--your children and your home. Don’t you want to treat her like a human being?”