Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

The third expedient—the employment bureau—is apparently coming into general use, especially in the large cities where some means of communication is necessary between those desiring employees and employment. But it is in the large city, where the greatest need for it exists, that the employment bureau is most unsatisfactory. The bureau lives by the fees paid to it by those desiring help and those seeking employment. Every expedient, therefore, is used to extort fees from both classes, and it is difficult to tell which suffers more from this extortion. Even when numberless fees have been paid, the employer too often finds himself without the service to which his fee presumably entitles him. The first department abandoned by a large philanthropic institution in Boston, was the intelligence office, “because it was found impossible to supply well-trained servants while there was no demand for any other.”[230] But the greatest objection to the intelligence office is that it is often a breeding place for vice and crime. An investigation recently made of the intelligence offices in a large city showed that it supported one hundred and twenty, two thirds of them controlled by foreigners, many of them managed by minor ward politicians, and four of them under police supervision. The employees that can be found through such agencies are not those willingly received into a respectable family.[231] Employment bureaus in small cities are apparently more satisfactory than those in large ones, while those offices are to be commended which use printed forms for obtaining statements from previous employers as to the qualifications of applicants.[232] Those agencies patronized by an inferior class of employers and employees, especially those that are at no pains to secure recommendation of employees from respectable persons, are worse than useless.

Employers who adopt the fourth policy and advertise for help are forced to open an intelligence office on a small scale in their own homes.

All of these difficulties are so great, especially that of securing reliable testimony from responsible employers, that many persons tolerate incompetent service rather than incur the risk of a change for the worse.

A fifth difficulty encountered by the employers of domestic service, and probably the most serious of all, is the prevailing indifference among housekeepers to the action of economic law—a failure to realize that in domestic service, as in other occupations, the course followed by one employer has an appreciable effect on the condition of service as a whole. This can be best explained by a few concrete illustrations “drawn from life.”

Mr. A, an employer, leaves his city home during the summer, retaining in it two servants to care for the house and paying them their usual wages, $16 a month. No special service is required of them, but wages are paid in consideration of the tacit understanding that they are to remain in his employ. On the return of Mr. A, Mr. X, who has discharged his servants during the summer, offers the employees of Mr. A $18 a month. This price he can afford to pay since he has been at no expense for service during the summer. Mr. A, rather than lose his trusted employees, pays them the advance offered by Mr. X, although the services of neither employee are worth more than three months previous.

Mrs. B, an employer of limited means, with a natural gift for cooking considered as a fine art, takes an inexperienced girl from Castle Garden and teaches her after long training something of her own skill. She pays fair wages, which are considered entirely satisfactory by the employee in view of the instruction she has received. Mrs. Y, who ignores Mrs. B socially and is indifferent to the matter of wages, calls on Mrs. B’s cook and offers her $5 per week. This is much above the current rate of wages in the place and moreover Mrs. B cannot afford to pay it. She therefore loses her trained cook.

Mr. C, an employer in haste to reach his distant home and anxious to secure a servant, engages in the afternoon a Swedish girl who has that morning landed in America and of whom he knows nothing. She is to accompany his family, which includes five children, to their Western home, have all of her expenses of travel paid by her employers, and receive $4.00 a week for her services as a nurse-maid.

Mrs. D, a housekeeper with a large family, moderate income, and ambitious tastes, employs one general servant and requires, in addition to the ordinary duties of such a servant, dining-room and chamber service.

Mrs. E, her nearest neighbor, a housekeeper with a small family, simple tastes, and free from numerous social demands, makes all of the desserts herself, requires no table service of her employee, and expects her daughter to assume the care of the chambers.