THE AYI INDUSTRY TRY

BY LIU JUE (刘珏)

THE AYI INDUSTRY TRY

BY LIU JUE (刘珏)

T he m o d e r n proble ms of and m ark e t so l ut i on s fo r Chi na’s ar m y of dome sti c se r vi ce wo rk e rs

需求急剧膨胀，职业化还远未跟上，“阿姨”的大时代到了！

Stuf fi ng her black backpack with cleaning materials, 45-year-old Lu Ayi leaves her bungalow outside the Sixth Ring Road in the east of Beijing, heading to her fi rst appointment of the day at eight in the morning. It takes at least two hours and a bus transfer to get to her client’s home near Chaoyang Park inside the Fourth Ring Road, but she’s not too worried. Her company offers six RMB in compensation for trips like this, and she can save four. Wiping, scrubbing, and washing meticulously, all at the rate of 25 RMB per hour, until the two-bedroom apartment is spotless, she then rushes to do the same on the other side of the city—just another day.

Lu Ayi’s face is tanned and there are wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but her bright eyes reveal a cheerful nature. Many in Lu Ayi’s position come from dif fi cult circumstances; her misfortunes began with a gambling husband. Skipping out on his debts, he disappeared, leaving his family and his job as a coal miner. Lu Ayi had to persuade the coal mine to hire her as a replacement just to earn a living. Today, she is part of a burgeoning but sometimes dangerous industry, that of the domestic service worker.

There are over 22 million women like Lu Ayi across the country working in the domestic service industry (家政服务). Primarily women from rural areas, they are called baomu (保姆, nanny), zhongdiangong (钟点工, hourly worker), or the more affable ayi, (阿姨) which means “aunt”. However, in this case, these “aunts” are a part of the family in the sense that they do the cleaning, cooking, babysitting, nursing of children and the elderly—whatever chores busy, modern Chinese families have no time for, or simply can’t do.

Back in the 1990s—before the age of booming factories, restaurants, salons, and stores—a profession in the domestic services was one of the few options open to rural women when they migrated to the city. There were limited channels for them to fi nd such jobs, and their distant urban relatives were their only hope for work. Earning merely a few hundred RMB a month, they still took it as a good deal, as their food and accommodation would be covered. Also, the kinship inherent in the position meant that employers were willing to put trust in their nannies who were, after all, family.

This model is virtually extinct today. An unprecedented number of working opportunities have opened up to rural workers, and a domestic service industry formed and grew along with the rising demand. Finding an ayi has never been easier, what with all the agencies and, most recently, electronic platforms helping to match an ayi with a family, but at the same time, there is a serious lack of industry standards. Stuck in the middle are these rural women, and while they may have better prospects than their predecessors, they are still fi ghting to fi nd their place in the modern metropolises around the country.

Currently, the demand for domestic service workers is at an all time high. People’s Daily estimates that of the 190 million urban families in China, 15 percent require domestic service in order to function, and Beijing alone needs more than 1.5 million such workers. This is largely due to the drastic change in the Chinese family structure over the past few decades. Before the 1950s, a Chinese family consisted of 5.3 members on average, whereas a Chinese Family Development Report released by National Health and Family Planning Commission of the PRC in 2014 indicates that the number has shrunk to a mere 3.02. With the one-child policy, urban migration, and lifestyle changes, the extended multi-generation family is already becoming resigned to history. This means less help within the family, especially when it comes to caring for the young and old. And with both spouses working full time and a new emphasis on quality of life, a typical urban family requires a lot of help at home.

Dozens of women from the countryside in Sichuan Province take part in a ten-day training course to start their domestic service career

Though the demand is urgent, according to many clients, fi nding the right ayi is almost impossible. The urban-rural lifestyle differences are palpable. “Here, we call hiring an ayi, qing (invite), because it’s so hard to meet a good one. Once you fi nd her, you want to treat her like a god,” says Hangzhou resident Hu Yang, sharing her experience on the quest to fi nd the one true ayi. To Ms. Hu, the statement is not a joke; she went through 13 different ayi prospects in three years. “The fi rst ayi bailed on me after only a month despite our previous agreement; another ayi broke our 3,000 RMB stereo while cleaning the living room and left a week later because she found out that she was pregnant. From then on we were afraid to hire anyone under 50.”

Hu also stated that there were problems with, shall we say, work ethic: “She would drink the leftover milk directly from the baby bottle and feed my baby food that she chewed in her mouth. I told her it was unhygienic, but she insisted that it was how babies were raised in her hometown.”

The hands of an ayi, a woman who has worked in the domestic service industry for 16 years

“We fi nally gave up and just wanted an ayi to help with the cleaning, but this time, the ayi we hired threw everything into the washing machine at the same time,including baby clothes, adult clothes, and dirty cleaning towels,” Hu states. “It drove me insane the fi rst time it happened, but she just refused to change her ways.”

Many are also unimpressed by the quality of the work, like Rui, a Beijing resident who regularly uses an ayi’s cleaning services. “When the ayi leaves, I have to clean after her for a week,” Rui says. “She wipes the TV using a wet towel when it’s still on, and it leaves a white, fl uffy mess everywhere she touches it...I know it may sound like a fi rst-world problem to them, but I am a paying customer who deserves decent service.”

The lack of professionalism is rampant in the domestic service industry, as many agencies through which these ayi are hired do not provide professional training and only work on commission. For something as easy as housework and chores, far too many ayi also do not see the need to receive training. And, when there’s virtually no certi fi cate required to apply for the job, few would bother to learn anything new.

Another problem in the industry is a lack of security for both parties. Earlier this year, a Ms. Li in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province hired an ayi who fell and broke her right hand on the fi fth day of work. Ms. Li covered the ayi’s medical bills, but the ayi claims she lost her ability to work because of the injury and sued for more compensation. After almost four months in court, the ayi got 29,900 RMB including the medical bills, constituting only 30 percent of her projected losses, and from the employer’s perspective, hiring an ayi for less than fi ve days cost a colossal amount of money and caused no end of frustrations. Such cases are prevalent in the industry because neither party is accustomed to the idea of a contract or insurance.

Faced with seemingly endless market potential and a problematic industry, many are striving to fi nd a solution, a model that helps rural women fi nd decent jobs with a sense of security and clients to get the service they need. Beijing Fuping Domestic Service Center is a pioneer in this area. Fuping (富平) means“to bring wealth to the common people”. Founded by economist Mao Yushi (茅于轼) and Tang Min (汤敏), a former chief economist for the Resident Mission of the Asian Development Bank, the NGO works with local governments of the mid-west in provinces such as Gansu, to train rural women aged 16 to 50 to be professional domestic service workers and help them to fi nd jobs in Beijing.

In the Tongzhou District of Beijing, over 40 kilometers away from the city center, is the Fuping training school. Simple and crude in appearance, the school offers two to three weeks of occupational training along with food and accommodation without any cost on the trainees’ part. It is in the school’s classrooms—made to resemble a kitchen or a bedroom—that many trainees experience an urban family living space for the fi rst time. Besides housekeeping skills, the school also teaches basic nutrition, safety, medical and legal knowledge, communication skills, and environmental protection awareness. Once the training is fi nished, Fuping’s six of fi ces in central Beijing help these women fi nd employers and provide counseling and home visits to make sure the workers and clients are happy with the arrangements.

Though Fuping is largely successful and respected in the industry today, it, too, had its de fi ciencies. Back in 2006, an ayi surnamed Li was hired to look after a two-year-old girl. Li left her on the sofa to pick up the laundry in another room, and the little girl fell to the fl oor, hit her head, and died. The family was devastated and sued Fuping to the tune of almost 500,000 RMB. As a small and struggling NGO at the time, Fuping’s registered capital was only 30,000 RMB. Founder Mao Yushi posted his response to the incident on his Weibo:“A project aiming to bene fi t society in various aspects has yielded such a result; it was de fi nitely beyond our imagination!” The compensation suit almost bankrupted Fuping. Ultimately, the controversy led to the birth of the standard industry liability insurance, co-created by the Beijing Homemaking Service Association and the Agricultural Bank Insurance Company, designed to cover third-party mortality and morbidity claims as well as property damage.

As of June 2014, Fuping has trained and helped 27,000 domestic service workers to get jobs, 90 percent of whom come from rural areas, to serve more than 13,000 families in Beijing. Many of these women thrived in the domestic service industry and went on to pursue other careers in the city.

Chen Junxia is one of the rural women who has bene fi ted from Fuping’s efforts. Now in her ninthyear in Beijing, she recently opened a yoga studio; the 28-year-old Chen, from Tianshui County of Gansu Province, dropped out of school when her family was too poor to support her. “I shed many tears and had to work in the fi elds to help my parents,” Chen recalls. Later, she heard from the Women’s Federation of the county about Fuping’s program and decided to join. “I’d never seen the outside world and was very anxious the whole trip,”Chen says. “But the teachers from Fuping were there at the train station to pick us up; all of a sudden, I felt much better.”

After Chen fi nished her training, she got her fi rst job as an ayi and earned a monthly salary of 800 RMB. In the years to come, living in a ten-square-meter apartment, Chen would get married, become pregnant, and quit her job. When her baby was ten months old, she sent him back to her hometown and returned to work. Fuping helped her to fi nd another job, and from there Chen worked her way up and decided to start her own business.“Though I am not an ayi anymore, I still attend Fuping’s various activities on the weekends, and it will always be my home.” As to the future, Chen plans to get her son back to Beijing now that she can afford it.

Fuping is one of few such organizations that provide rounded support for rural women to work and live in the city. And for the development of the industry as a whole, the efforts of a few NGOs are not enough. In the end, the healthy development of the industry is the real solution to the problem. In recent years, domestic service has combined with e-commerce to show new potential, more precisely, the online to of fl ine (O2O) business model. Instead of going to an agent to fi nd an ayi, families can now turn to the internet or download various apps to browse listed domestic workers to fi t their requirements. The big players in the fi eld right now are Ejiajie (“e-house clean”), Ayibang (“ayi helps”), Ayilaile (“here comes ayi”), and Yunjiazheng (“cloud domestic service”).

For Ayibang, as an example, all the domestic service workers are hired by the company and paid a monthly salary with insurance, bene fi ts, and holidays, while clients pay the company for the services of the ayi. The company also provides standard training and takes feedback from the comment section when the order is fi nished—or they can even call to rate customer satisfaction. This gives the profession more stability and ensures a certain level of quality control. The app also expands the market by making the domestic service workers more available and the hiring process more simple—a few clicks and the housework is taken care of. It still has a long way to go, but the O2O model has already tapped into the huge potential market of the domestic service industry.

Lu Ayi, from the seemingly harrowing beginning of this story, is Lu Shuping, one of Ayibang’s recent hires. Having just come from her hometown in a village in Jincheng, Shanxi Province, she began her career as a domestic servant last July. She’s already one of the highest earning workers in the company, with a monthly salary of around 5,000 RMB. “I am very quick and thorough,”she says. “And, I ask my clients at the end of each service what else can I do for them. I am happy to work until they are satis fi ed, even if it’s already passed the time period booked; if they are unreasonably demanding, I will still do what they ask without an extra charge, but I will try to avoid their booking next time.”

“I quite like my job now,” Lu Ayi says. “I only work eight hours a day, and sometimes when I fi nish early, I enjoy a walk in the park.” Besides worrying about her 21-year-old son being too shy to look for a wife and her 18-year-old daughter’s occasional stomachache, Lu Ayi is more than content about the situation. “As to the future, I don’t worry too much,” Lu Ayi says, “It can’t be worse than before.” When her husband fi nally came back—many would have suggested a divorce—Lu Ayi took him in because she wanted to keep the family intact. The whole family now all work in Beijing, though they live in separate locations. Last year, Lu Ayi’s husband even gave her 2,000 RMB for the Spring Festival. She’s happy with the improvement.

Though Lu Ayi has bene fi tted greatly from the modern services and market answers to a dif fi cult question, the lot of the domestic service worker is a tough one. It can be poorly-paid, thankless, and sometimes even dangerous. For now, there are no real solutions to the problems domestic service workers face, but slowly the market and clients are trying to get a better class of ayi by being a better class of customer, giving these essential people the respect, the money, and the safety they deserve.