Background and theoretical literature

Migrant au pair labour is an illustration of new ‘international divisions of reproductive labour’ (Glenn, Reference Glenn1992; Parreñas Reference Parreñas2000) under post-Fordist capitalism (Hamilton et al Reference Hamilton, Kintominas and Adamson2024; Parreñas Reference Parreñas, Anderson and Shutes2014). Feminist scholarship on social reproduction highlights that reproductive labour (such as but not limited to care and domestic work) does not simply ‘maintain[] life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Brenner and Laslett, Reference Brenner and Laslett1991, 314) but is also crucial to the sustaining of labour power and the means of production under capitalism as well as the reproduction of capitalist norms and ideologies such as constructions of ‘motherhood’ and the ‘family’ (Bakker Reference Bakker2007).

Despite escalating care needs, welfare states are withdrawing from once-central roles in the direct provisioning of social reproduction (Brennan et al Reference Brennan, Cass, Himmelweit and Szebehely2012; Castles et al Reference Castles, Leibfried, Lewis, Obinger, Pierson, Castles, Leibfried, Lewis, Obinger and Pierson2010; Fraser, Reference Fraser1994). One form of outsourcing is the routine use of migration regimes to recruit care and domestic workers (Kofman and Raghuram Reference Kofman and Raghuram2015; Pavlou Reference Pavlou2021; Shamir Reference Shamir2011; Williams Reference Williams, Anderson and Shutes2014). While au pairing is ‘always imagined to be outside [of global care] chains’ and instead considered to be ‘privileged and temporary’ (Cox and Busch Reference Cox and Busch2018, 62, 8), emerging critical literature challenges the distinctions between au pairing and other forms of migrant domestic work (Berg and Meagher Reference Berg and Meagher2018; Clinic et al 2018; Cox Reference Cox2015a; Cox and Busch Reference Cox and Busch2018; Parreñas Reference Parreñas, Anderson and Shutes2014). Official ‘au pair’ visa schemes exist in Western Europe (e.g. Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands) and Nordic countries (e.g. Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) as well as the United States (Calleman Reference Calleman and Widding Isaksen2010; Chuang Reference Chuang2013; Kintominas Reference Kintominas2024). Given that EU nations can freely move within the EU, au pair visa schemes in Europe primarily create migration routes for non-EU citizens, and there is a strong correlation between restrictive border practices and the introduction of bespoke au pair schemes (Pavlou Reference Pavlou2021, 30, 42–43). Formal au pair schemes typically have restrictive criteria for entry (age limits, unmarried, no dependants/pregnancies), require au pairs to lodge contracts with authorities, regulate weekly wages (‘pocket money’), exclude au pairs from labour law protection as ‘non-workers’, and tie visas to staying with the employer/sponsor (Kintominas Reference Kintominas2024).

The settler-state of Australia has historically had a peripheral status in the expansive ‘global care chains’ literature (Brennan et al Reference Brennan, Charlesworth, Adamson, Cortis, Michel and Peng2017). The perceived lack of migrant domestic work in Australia is attributed to the country’s highly resilient model of the male breadwinner/female home-maker sexual contract and related norms about domesticity, motherhood, and non-delegable duties of motherly care, as well as strict immigration controls for ‘non-skilled’ migration and national mythologies of egalitarianism (Baxter Reference Baxter, Huang, Yeoh and Rahman2005; Daiger von Gleichen and Seeleib-Kaiser Reference Daiger von Gleichen, Seeleib-Kaiser and Shaver2018; Higman Reference Higman2002). Unlike counterparts in Europe and the United States, Australia does not have a formal ‘au pair’ visa. However, au pairing is arguably more surreptitiously linked to the country’s working holiday visas and student visa programmes (Berg Reference Berg and Cox2015; Hamilton et al Reference Hamilton, Kintominas and Adamson2024; Kintominas Reference Kintominas2024). No statutory instrument, modern award, or judicial decision has clarified au pairs’ legal status as employees, though the national labour inspectorate has made some faint remarks that ‘au pairs are often employees too’ (Fair Work Ombudsman 2023). The rise of au pairing can be linked to dramatic expansion of working holiday and student visa programmes in recent decades (Wright and Clibborn Reference Wright and Clibborn2017), lack of affordability and accessibility of formal Early Childhood Education and Care, and increasing public discourse emphasising the importance of women’s workforce participation and productivity while cultural norms around motherly in-home care remain stubbornly intact (Adamson Reference Adamson2017; Hamilton et al Reference Hamilton, Kintominas and Adamson2024).

Setting the scene: demands for au pair care prior to the pandemic

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, parents described experiences of care overload, work–life conflict, and the insufficiency of public care systems to meet care needs. This was particularly the case for women working ‘non-standard’ hours and in demanding professional careers. Au pairing therefore emerged as a strategy for (some) women to reconcile the competing demands of intensive mothering (Ennis Reference Ennis2014) and as ‘ideal workers’ (Acker Reference Acker1990), as well as to overcome gaps and insufficiencies in formal care. In these ways, interviewees described unmet needs and strains upon social reproduction in terms of ‘depletion’ and crisis (Perrier Reference Perrier2022; Rai et al Reference Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas2014). For example, Zoe was a front-line healthcare worker who worked ‘incredibly irregular hours’ including during the night and on weekends. She felt that ‘the government does basically a completely terrible job of anything to do with childcare’ and experienced how ‘the daycare situation … was dire’. She recalled:

Another parent, Eileen, also worked long and unpredictable hours and travelled frequently for her work, living away from home for extended periods. She explained, ‘our jobs have both always demanded that we [my partner and I] can’t leave work until everything’s done. So we were never going to be reliable enough to pick up from daycare’. Because she felt that ‘we really felt like we didn’t have that much of a choice. You know, we sort of felt like we had to get an au pair. Otherwise … how are we going to survive?’.

At the same time, not all mothers interviewed worked outside of the home. Brianna, who was a stay-at-home parent, found having au pair care important because she struggled with isolation and postnatal depression, compounded by her husband working long hours and having ‘no family around’ as an immigrant:

The demanding nature of infant care and insufficiency of formal childcare services were compounded by uneven intrahousehold gendered distributions of care and other household labour (Hess and Puckhaber Reference Hess and Puckhaber2004, 76). For example, mothers were typically in charge of recruiting, onboarding, and managing au pairs. Zoe described how ‘although I was obviously married, I was functionally alone’ given the hours and amount of travel her partner did for his job. Thus, hiring an au pair ‘rarely challenges the gendered division of reproductive labour, and may in fact cement it, as the work of childcare and housework becomes more invisible to fathers in au-pairing households’ (Cox and Busch Reference Cox and Busch2018, 156, 155). Au pairing care was also sought after when other (gendered) informal care, such as grandparent care (see, e.g. Hamilton et al Reference Hamilton, Hill and Kintominas2022), was unavailable because parents had moved overseas or interstate away from family and other support networks.

Desires for au pair care were also informed by cultural norms favouring full-time in-home, familial care, particularly for very young children and infants. Some mothers expressed strong cultural or normative preferences for in-home care that would be most similar to care by a stay-at-home mother. As a form of round-the-clock familial in-home care and domestic help, au pairing assisted women to meet these expectations of ‘intensive mothering’ (Macdonald, Reference Macdonald1998; Sekeráková Búriková Reference Sekeráková Búriková2021). For example, Deidre liked having a ‘second mum’ to help her manage her parenting load:

Other women described how it meant they could keep their house cleaner, someone could give their children closer or undivided attention for activities and help with homework, or there would be more nutritious food served at meal times, thus meeting norms and high expectations about parenting that remained firmly their responsibility.

For some parents, au pairs were important to help ‘plug gaps’ in care, supporting with variable and logistical care work and running the household. For example, Zoe did not rely on au pairing as a complete childcare solution as she also had a combination of nannies, formal childcare, and after-school care. However, au pairs provided out-of-hours and flexible care. Her au pairs’ work focused on the beginning and end of the day and ‘non-standard’ working hours: ‘get [the children] dressed, take them to school or daycare, and then do pick up, make them dinner and bath’. Nonetheless, even with these less-comprehensive duties, it ‘actually starts getting you to that 30 hours, or whatever it is, pretty quickly’ (Zoe).

Parents were also clearly motivated by cost and the broader regulation of the childcare market, including their (in)eligibility for childcare subsidies. As one au pair put it: ‘here in Australia, everyone depends so much on au pair[s]. It is the easiest way to get childcare. Because childcare here is so expensive’ (Caterina). Almost all parents interviewed had combined family incomes were too high to be eligible for childcare subsidies under current policy settings. Zoe described how ‘we’ve never been eligible for any of the childcare subsidies’, though even with her high income, she ‘always spent more on a combination of childcare and au pairs than I earnt’. Eileen also described that while ‘not resentful about the financial side of things’, she felt that it meant ‘we just do it ourselves’. Another mother felt both ‘too rich and too poor’, given she was ‘not earning enough to be rich enough to afford childcare’ (Deidre). Brianna, a stay-at-home parent, did not think the government had a role to play in care provision. She explained, ‘I don’t feel like it should be the government’s job to say what is available to families’ though as a migrant she was ‘not sure what the government offers … as far as kickbacks [subsidies]’.

In summary, needs and desires for au pair care emerged in a context of longer-standing strains upon privatised modes of social reproduction including gendered care norms of intensive mothering. Middle- and higher-income earners’ exclusions from childcare subsidies meant they had less incentives to use public services. Additionally, strong cultural and legal norms that position care as women’s work as well as difficulties to reconcile work with care demands often motivated mothers to seek out au pair care. Au pair care was often seen as a means to get through intensive years of parenting infants and young children, especially where women had returned to work but were still seen as primary carers. In this way, au pair care helped women to meet and reconcile demands of being both an ideal worker and an ideal parent, while preserving the gendered norms of care as ‘women’s work’ and preserving the household as the normative site for ideal care. Overall, desires for au pair labour were strongly shaped by the broader context of inequalities in the household division of labour, cost, lack of other informal sources of care, and gendered norms of home-based familial care and intensive mothering. Strong desires for affordable, accessible, and flexible care and household assistance were much more significant than any pursuit of ‘cultural exchange’ as a result of hosting an au pair as has been documented more widely in the emerging critical literature on au pairing (see, e.g. Cox and Busch Reference Cox and Busch2018).

Migrant mobilities into au pair work before and during the pandemic

Legal and cultural norms portray au pairs as ‘neither workers nor migrants but as “guests” of “host families” on a temporary sojourn’ (Cox Reference Cox2007, 282). Within this imaginary, au pairs are legible only as highly privileged (very) young women, from the Global North, seeking a cultural exchange (rather than employment or longer-term migration/resettlement). Interviewees’ pathways highlight how these dominant descriptions of au pairing as a ‘gap year’ obscure the wider range of mobilities and pathways. Abrupt changes in migrant mobilities during the COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus how au pairing can also be a form of subsistence and survival work during crisis, unemployment, or housing insecurity and where there are limited desirable opportunities for other decent work.

Some interviewees fit within the more conventional image of an au pair on a time-limited cultural sojourn. For example, Anthea, in her early 20s from Western Europe, heard about the working holiday visa scheme in Australia and decided after finishing high school, ‘you know what, this sounds fairly easy … let’s do this’. She thought au pairing sounded like a much better option than ‘fruit picking and all that’. So she saved up money for flights, put up a profile on the digital platform AuPairWorld, conducted some video calls, and found her first host family before she left home. The host family picked her up from the airport the day she arrived. Nonetheless, Anthea did not stay with just that one family but instead worked multiple au pairing jobs, regularly changing employers to try to secure better conditions and pay. Two other young women from Western Europe, Ursula and Vanessa, likewise viewed au pairing as a means to facilitate their ‘fun experience’ abroad before starting university. However, unlike Anthea, they did not organise their au pairing placement in advance but rather turned to au pairing after they arrived, and it seemed like a practical and desirable option for work. Au pairing was also not part of their career or work plans:

However, not all women were so young, nor were they always from Western or Northern Europe or North America. Caterina was a care professional in her late 20s from Eastern Europe. For her, au pairing was both a means to facilitate her ambitions to travel and was relevant to her work. She ‘really wanted to be an au pair to a child that has autism’ and had learned that the Australian system was ‘quite advanced in autism’, and so her ‘reason to come here was also to participate in some of the schools, or in autism support groups’ and ‘get the best things out for my future work’. Caterina was one of 9 out of 26 au pair interviewees who had a specific educational qualification and/or professional background in care work, education, or health (such as nursing, occupational therapy, speech therapy, childcare/preschool, or teaching). For these women, their skills, qualifications, and experience sometimes helped them to acquire better placements (more childcare-focused, less cleaning and housekeeping). Parents also often described how their ideal au pair would in fact be older and with some professional qualifications in care or education – that is, not ‘gap year’ young women. Temporary migrants who had worked in care or education before often turned to au pairing because it was similar to their professional background or because it was easier to find work in this high-demand sector.

However, for another cohort of interviewees, au pairing was just a job they turned to out of necessity, circumstance, or strategic avoidance of worse forms of migrant labour. For example, Inka described:

For some interviewees, au pairing felt like their only job option in a difficult job market in Australian cities – reflecting the broader challenges for temporary migrants trying to find decent work (Wright and Clibborn Reference Wright and Clibborn2019). For example, Alejandra from Latin America described how she struggled to find work in hospitality because of her limited fluency and confidence in English. She ultimately turned to au pairing because she ‘fear[ed] it was my only option of work in Australia’. Similarly, Francesca, from North America had ‘tried to work in like hospitality and … they wouldn’t hire me. And I, you know, I was struggling. … So I was like, fine, let’s go do this au pair thing.’ Interviewees on student visas described how they felt particularly constrained by the then visa limitation of a maximum of 40 allowable working hours per fortnight, which pushed them into informal, cash-in-hand jobs. For example, Francis described how ‘with the student [visa], it’s very hard to find a full-time job. I mean, impossible’.

While some turned to au pairing because they struggled to find work in other sectors, others thought au pairing sounded like more desirable, safer, and better-paid work than in agriculture, fruit-picking, cleaning, or hospitality. In particular, several migrants described how au pairing helped them to circumnavigate the legal requirement to work in a regional or rural area in order to have their working holiday visa renewed for a second or third year (Department of Home Affairs, Australian Government 2022a, 3, see also 2022b, 2022c). They would do by finding a family who had a farm who would hire them as an au pair but would still ‘sign off’ on their papers without them in fact doing any farming work.

Several interviewees had been au pairs multiple times in different countries and had used au pairing as a means to facilitate their short-term migration and mobility. For example, Francis from Eastern Europe described how she was ‘really into travelling’, but ‘of course, I wasn’t able, with the money, to just travel, you know, just like this’. She relied on au pairing to make it financially possible for her to live overseas and to overcome her inability to acquire a skilled visa. This use of au pairing to facilitate circular migration has been observed in the wider literature on au pairing, in particular how ‘highly mobile migration strategies and the associated lifestyles and cultures [of au pairs] transcend our common understanding of migration as a unidirectional process of emigration and immigration’ (Hess and Puckhaber Reference Hess and Puckhaber2004, 77). Without the option of applying for a skilled visa, using a temporary student or working holiday visa was the most practical means to live abroad for an extended period with the right to work.

Interviewees were often acutely aware of their limited permanent migrant options due to their nationality, age, or level of recognised qualifications. For example, Diana, who was formerly a primary school teacher, described how ‘because of my age, you can’t just get [more] working holiday visas [in Australia]’. Clara from Latin America described how, ‘you want to stay. Why get out of this country?’ but at the same time knew that ‘I’m not Australian … I’m never going to be an Australian’. Despite these difficulties, many still expressed desires and hopes for longer-term migration in Australia or elsewhere. Thus, while au pairing is portrayed as resolutely ‘temporary’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009), it was often a stepping-stone for more ambitious plans. For example, Eloise from Eastern Europe ‘realised that Australia is a really good place to live’. Highly dissatisfied with the working conditions and pay in the care sector in her home country, she began to take steps to extend her stay in Australia:

Transitioning to student visas was a common strategy, not only to secure residency and work rights in the shorter term but also to try to navigate a path towards continued residency. Several interviewees had enrolled, or planned to enrol, in early childhood and care courses because this stood out as a viable pathway towards a sponsored work visa. For example, Francis reflected that au pairing ‘got [her] into the children mood’ and so she had also started studying a diploma in childcare, even though she ‘never thought that I [would] want to actually … work in childcare or enjoy it that much’. Liana, a care worker from Western Europe, similarly explained that she planned to ‘switch to a student visa’, possibly by doing a course in nursing. Informal care work in au pairing therefore emerged as a pipeline towards work in formal care sectors, reflecting the broader ways in which ‘migrant labour is surreptitiously channelled into non-professional care’ (Howe et al Reference Howe, Charlesworth and Brennan2019; Overgaard et al Reference Overgaard, Withers and Mcdermott2022, 666).

The pandemic had a profound impact on temporary migrants’ ability to find secure housing and work. Many could not, or did not want to, return to their country of nationality, given that the situation was often even worse there, borders were already closed, or flights were cancelled or unaffordable (Berg et al Reference Berg, Farbenblum, Huang, Lee, Saleh, Sharma and Kintominas2020, 6). As Liana put it, ‘there’s no point to go back home in the middle of the pandemic, without a job, without a place to live’. A number of interviewees therefore turned to au pairing for their survival. For example, Clara, in her mid-30s, had been working in hospitality before the pandemic. However, she lost her job when the city went into lockdown. She was in a precarious, urgent situation, ‘when you’re stuck in a country that is very expensive and you don’t have job’. Clara emphatically realised: ‘if I don’t get inside of an Australian family, I’m fucked’. Diana likewise recalled:

In summary, even prior to the pandemic, migrants’ pathways into au pairing work were diverse within the small qualitative sample and did not always align with the stereotype of a temporary cultural sojourn. While some women had organised placements in advance, they did not necessarily remain in the same job for their entire stay; meanwhile, others had turned to au pairing when they were looking for practical work options as a temporary migrant. Others had engaged in au pairing as a mobility strategy to live abroad multiple times or had ambitions to remain in Australia for the longer term (usually by staying in care work).

Au pairs’ roles and working conditions

Au pairs described how both before and during the pandemic they had responsibilities for the care of infants, children, and sometimes children with disabilities. In addition, many were also responsible for grocery shopping, cooking, housekeeping, laundry, ironing, ‘light cleaning’, gardening, and the logistical and emotional labour involved in running a household. Au pairing work thus traversed both the ‘everyday mundane and taken-for-granted activities’ of running a household, as well as more complex and intimate work of ‘sentient care’ (Eldén and Anving Reference Eldén and Anving2016, 616). While some resented where it ‘just made the whole experience [feel] like … I’m just a housekeeper’ (Eloise), ‘basically like a maid’ (Francesca), others felt deeply connected to and responsible to their families, worrying about how their employers navigated the ‘challenge to be a mum and a worker’ (Beatriz).

A key feature of au pairs’ roles was to provide flexible care. For example, au pairs were relied upon outside of standard working hours (weekends, evenings, overnight) and were on-call for unscheduled care if children were sick or the parents were delayed at work. For example, Francesca was left with the couple’s older children for several days when they went into the hospital to give birth to their youngest child. Mary described how she was paid for only three hours of work per day, but these hours were not fixed, so she needed to be on-call for whenever she might be needed to help: ‘those three hours literally were decided the day before … I feel like I’m a puppet’.

With the onset of the pandemic, au pairs’ roles often shifted to encompass more intensive work in facilitating children’s learning when schools closed or providing round-the-clock care when childcare centres closed. As Clara explained:

The pandemic therefore created conditions for vulnerability and exploitation as some migrants took on more intensive and longer hours of work, particularly while schools and childcare centres were closed as cities cycled in and out of lockdowns. For example, Anthea ‘took over a lot more tasks than I originally should have. Like I did all of the boy’s schoolwork with him and … So I was kind of his teacher in all the different subjects’.

Some were not paid for their extra hours and responsibilities in homeschooling children and looking after them seven days a week. In addition, several interviewees had their pay reduced or stopped. This often happened when parents – generally mothers – lost their own jobs during the lockdowns and market shocks. For example, Nina’s employer’s business suffered during the pandemic and was told her hours would be halved. She recalled how she ‘assumed that my pay would be halved. But … I didn’t get paid for three weeks’. Nina needed to navigate asking the parents about being paid again. In other instances, au pairs volunteered themselves to have their pay reduced. For example, Ursula described, ‘I didn’t want her [a single mother] to pay…. [when] corona [COVID] came, she lost her job, and I told her, “Hey, I’m fine with $250 a week [instead of $350]”’.

Others navigated new tensions in trying to manage childcare with their employers working from home. Alejandra recalled how the children she looked after were excited to see more of their father, who was not usually home so much, and that she struggled to keep them ‘out of his way’. She recalled him yelling at her: ‘“I pay you, you need … to entertain … the kids…’ and that ‘he was very rude with me’. The pandemic also exacerbated pre-existing issues regarding freedom of movement and control of day-to-day life characteristic of live-in employment. Alejandra recalled how even before the lockdown began, the family wanted her to stop using public transport and leaving the house to go to her college classes:

On the other hand, one parent recalled how she faced the challenge of her au pair engaging in ‘what we considered unsafe behaviour … she’s out doing things, that are kind of legally allowed at the time, but definitely not ok’ (Zoe). The pandemic therefore raised sensitive issues around risk and safety for families and au pairs to negotiate. Without the opportunity to leave the house during lockdown, au pairs were unable to create any physical distance between themselves and their workplace or the children they looked after.

Alongside these heightened risks of exploitation, a context of profound mutual vulnerability created some moments of solidarity. For example, Beatriz described her host family delivered her some basic supplies while she was in quarantine before she had met them, reaching out to make sure she was ok in a way that felt like they were ‘real family’. When loved ones died overseas or conditions worsened in their home cities, this sometimes brought migrants closer to their host families, who supported and cared for them.

Shifts in the market

At the onset of the pandemic, as temporary migrants lost work in other sectors, there were more migrants looking for au pairing placements than there were families searching for au pairs. Many interviewees recalled struggling to find an au pairing placement or losing their jobs. Anthea described how ‘the mother of that family lost her job. So that’s why after some time they kind of said … “Oh well I can do the school pick up, and drop offs myself, and we don’t really, we don’t really need you anymore”’. Beatriz likewise lost her placement when her employer lost her own job as a flight attendant, and ‘it was really hard to find [another] family at that time’.

Given the competition to find an au pairing placement, interviewees feared they would become homeless and without a safety net from the government. This compelled migrants to take on whatever placements they could find with limited alternatives or negotiating power. Clara described how her negotiations with her prospective employer were desperate. She recalled telling them: ‘I really need the job because I have no job and no savings to survive through COVID. So anything that you are going to offer me, I’m going to say yes’. Similarly, although Anthea was very unhappy with her au pair arrangement, especially due to the amount of cleaning involved, her long hours, and the low ‘pocket money’ wage, she decided to stay with her current employer:

Emergency measures implemented by the government had significant impacts on the market for au pairing labour. In the early days of the pandemic, rather extraordinarily in the context of decades of marketisation, Australian governments temporarily made childcare free. Between 6 April 2020 and 12 July 2020, the federal government made formal early education and care services universal or ‘fee-free’ for all families via a three-month federal subsidy scheme for care service providers which temporarily replaced the existing child care subsidy (Child Care Subsidy Amendment [Coronavirus Response Measures No 2] Minister’s Rules 2020 [Cth]). In September 2020, the federal government introduced a further A$305.6 million dollar ‘Childcare Recovery Package’ providing transitional payments for care providers at risk of closure and later a ‘Viability Support Package’ in August 2021 as well as other support packages to cover gap fees when children were absent with COVID-19 until June 2023 (Department of Education, Australian Government 2025a). Additional measures were also taken by some state governments, including gap fee waivers, additional allowable absences, and ‘business continuity payments’ (Department of Education, Australian Government 2025b; NSW Education Standards Authority 2020; The Hon James Merlino MP, Deputy Premier, Minister for the Coordination of Education and Training – COVID-19, Minister for Education, 2020).

Parents were therefore prompted by these measures to rely more readily on formal and institutional forms for childcare provision. For example, one parent had initially described strong preferences for in-home care but decided ‘we could leave the kids in daycare much more just because it was free’ (Deidre). With this change to public childcare services, au pairs in turn described how they were no longer needed. For example, Beatriz lost her au pair job at the time when childcare was made free – and stated that this had happened to other au pairs that she knew too.

However, a clear shift in dynamics emerged as the pandemic wore on. In particular, federal and state governments wound back temporary relief measures for universal free childcare. Thus, the federal government’s seemingly radical federal subsidy ended up as a temporary ‘bail out’ scheme to prevent market collapse rather than one that fundamentally overhauled the country’s heavily marketised model of childcare delivery (Hunkin and Alsen Reference Hunkin and Alsen2024). Meanwhile, the longer that international borders stayed closed, the more time passed without temporary migrants arriving to do low-wage work. The supply of migrant labour available for au pairing work therefore dried up, while care demands remained high, and temporary relief measures, such as universal free childcare, were withdrawn. In response to growing workforce shortages in ‘essential work’, the government (temporarily) lifted restrictions around migrants’ visas. Student visa work restrictions were relaxed for some sectors (e.g. in supermarkets, ‘to keep Aussie shelves stocked’ [The Hon Dan Tehan MP and The Hon Alan Tudge MP, 2020]) early in the pandemic and then completely removed in January 2022 until they were reintroduced in July 2023 (at an increased rate of 48 hours per fortnight) (Department of Home Affairs, Australian Government 2023; see also The Hon Alex Hawke MP, Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs 2021a, 2021b). This also helped to shift bargaining positions for migrants in the job market, by giving those on student visas access to less precarious work with longer hours.

In the later days of the pandemic, most parents were simply unable to find temporary migrant workers willing to work as au pairs or were worried they would not be able to find someone after their placement ended. As Deidre explained, ‘people [families] are posting now and no one is replying because there are no more … backpackers who want those jobs’. Because of this ‘everyone gave up on au pairing, because there’s none’. Another parent, Eileen, described how ‘we’ve been lucky to still get au pairs … there’s definitely … an imbalance in the demand and supply’. Other parents recounted stories of families trying to recruit ‘au pairs’ from New Zealand, or Australian citizens from regional or rural areas wanting to move to major cities.

This ‘massive deficit of au pairs available’ (Helen) gave those temporary migrants who stayed on in Australia more scope to negotiate better conditions and wages in their au pairing arrangements. For example, Mary described:

Migrants such as Mary therefore felt more confident at this point to negotiate higher rates of pay or to be able to do other jobs on the side because it was now a changing market that worked more in their favour. Helen described how, although she didn’t feel comfortable pressuring the family for more pay, she knew she at least had ‘a bit more security working with the family – I know there’s not going to be this quick turn over’.

Other temporary migrants took the opportunity to look for more secure and higher-paying employment and therefore moved away from au pairing, as well as other low-wage work in other forms of care (such as nannying) and cleaning altogether. Clara described how she left her au pairing placement at the end of the lockdown in search of higher-paying opportunities that used her skills, qualifications, and professional experience from abroad. Although her former employer wanted to find a replacement, the family was unable to find anyone willing to take on the au pair position:

The COVID-19 pandemic therefore generated a dramatic social experiment in the migrant au pairing labour market and led to an extraordinary shift from high labour market saturation to labour market scarcity. At the start of the pandemic, temporary migrants lost work in a range of industries, which led to a wave of migrants desperate for work and housing. Au pairing therefore emerged as a form of survival work for people experiencing significant housing and food insecurity while they were excluded from emergency relief measures. There were more migrants than placements available, and temporary migrants were compelled to take on placements with low pay and long hours and had little ability to separate their home and work. Yet as the pandemic wore on, borders remained closed, and free childcare was withdrawn, while intensive homeschooling and childcare work continued. The once fungible supply of temporary migrants available for low-wage, informal work across a range of industries began to disappear. This led to a dramatic power shift in au pairs’ favour, which allowed temporary migrants to negotiate higher wages and better conditions or to leave the sector altogether. These shifts in the provision of care across the domains of the family/household, public sector/the state, the market, and the community/not-for-profit sectors reflect Shahra Razavi’s notion of the moving axes of the ‘care diamond’ (Razavi Reference Razavi2007, Reference Razavi2015). As Razavi argues, ‘boundaries of the responsibility mix often shift in response to the claims of social networks and organised interest groups … as well as through state action … [and] countries often move back and forth across different sectors’ (Razavi Reference Razavi2007, iv).