The Employer Who Slanders - Heartland Caregivers Inc.

The Domestic Herald - Resources for Household Staff & Employers

The Employer Who Slanders

By: Karen Ryan, President
Heartland Caregivers, Inc.

More Articles: Hiring a Live-in Nanny

You take the position on good faith that your new employer values the work you are willing to do, will pay you as promised, and that the job you applied for is the job you are taking. The position includes housing, health benefits and a vehicle. You have now become completely dependent on your employer for shelter, transportation, access to medical care and income. Knowing that private service is not 8 to 5 work but instead any hours your employer requires your labor you are more than eager to provide that type of flexibility--yet you trust your new employer will be reasonable and understand that you too have the right to some type of schedule that allows you to have "a life" outside of work. At Heartland, we tell new clients that the salary paid should reflect up to a 50-hour week. That is not to mean they can't use you 70-80 hours one week if circumstances demand, but to compensate with extra down time--or extra pay--when the demand for service ebbs, i.e., employers are away, so that within a year it balances out to decent working hours.

Domestic employment falls into tremendous gray areas when it comes to the employee's rights under law. Only a handful of states require that Workman's Compensation be paid to household employees and fewer state labor boards will even address your work grievances. This is truly AT WILL employment. You can be let go at any moment, the housing immediately removed and you are down the road. Frankly, as an agency owner, I support an employer's right to immediately let someone go if his or her comfort level is gone. After all, you have full access to their house and grounds--their sanctuary--and if they have any doubt at all as to your trustworthiness, then they should be able to request termination with no complications from government. Having said that, I also completely support your right to severance and relocation pay if the chemistry is not right. If you are caught stealing or impaired on the job then I have no sympathy for your post-employment needs or the suddenness of your termination.

Fortunately, I have rarely placed someone who turned out to be not who they said they were: sober, honest, hardworking. "Service heart" is how Mary Starkey of Starkey International describes the number one attribute needed to do in-home work. It is what we screen for and what your former employers tell us you have. You are in this work because you love to be of service. If you are entry level--have not been paid to work in a private home before, it is what your former corporate employers and even those who have observed you in your own home tell us about you that encourages us to present you to our clients. In other words, no one is presented by an agency who comes trailing bad references. We are not social workers. It is not our job to help you finally turn the tide on a lifetime of doing poorly.

You come to an agency with all the trust and enthusiasm and solid work history that a "service heart" has given you and the agency finds you a job--what turns out to be a very bad job. Whether you are in an apartment over the garage, a suite off the kitchen or a lovely carriage house on the back 40 acres, you are fully engaged in your new position and working very hard. It becomes clear that your employer neither values your work, or has any understanding of the time and effort you exert to meet their needs. I see three major flaws that employers can fall into: 1) They are consumed with paranoia that no one has their best interests at heart 2) They do not value the work that they require to live in comfort 3) They have no idea the time and effort required to complete the tasks they require on a daily basis. Any employer that wraps themselves in just one of these flaws will have trouble keeping help. But you stick it out because you know that job-hopping is the kiss of death in this industry. Hopeful your employer will do the right thing and acknowledge the good work you did, you ask for a reference when you finally decide this position is not the long term one you had in mind. Maybe you hung in there for five years, a decade, at far below industry pay, at far above industry hours, accepting without defense continual verbal abuse. You (and fortunately I) know that this employer would have never fired you but now that you have run up the white flag the employer can find absolutely nothing positive to say about you. In fact, the employer can find many things to blame you for that were completely out of your control: your reference becomes completely soiled by the employer's resentment that you dare to leave.

How did you get in this mess, and who can help you justify that the caliber of your work was actually quite good? Before you fault agencies for not screening clients as well as they screen you, accept the reality that this is how the work world is. Say you were a job hunting corporate executive: You may research the company you are applying to but once accepted, how were you to discover that your direct supervisor within the corporate monolith was an unreasonable ogre? A responsible agency should share with you everything they know about the position, including how much turnover the job had--if they know. Many clients will simply refuse to disclose any former employees or will say they are unfindable. It is to the great credit of most domestic employees that they are more than willing to work for someone "difficult" if the facts only be known upfront.

I'm currently dealing with something highly unusual--fortunately, most employers want and appreciate good in-home help--but the few that don't cause us much grief. Everyone seems to want an Alice from the Brady Bunch or a Jeeves so lets call this couple I'm going to tell you about Alice and Jeeves Heart. I first placed the Hearts as a couple team on an estate with young children back in the mid 80s. They cooked, cleaned, cared for three children and kept up the immense and gorgeous grounds of this busy estate for close to a decade until the children were grown and the parents divorced, thus selling the estate and moving on to their own separate and greatly diminished quarters. Alice and Jeeves received glowing references from these very reasonable employers. They found the next position on their own--at far less money but in the same area, which they had grown to love so they accepted and put in four very hard years working for an employer who completely exploited them--basically 24-7 duty at 20 grand less than their former position. Finally, they gave a long notice and Heartland found them another position. Outraged they would leave; their reference from the employer became complete slander. How do I know? Alice and Jeeves provided me with many names and phone numbers and written letters of reference from others who observed their work. I'm sure it would outrage their employer to know that his corporate personal assistant gave them a glowing reference, as did others who either worked on the large estate, ended up buying chunks of it or lived across the road. Private service work is fairly easy to
evaluate: mint condition of property, excellent cuisine sampled by others, even conversations with the employer regarding "the help," while the help is still willing to be there fill in the gaps of an employer who is unethical enough to slander.

This is why we urge you, the caregiver, to continually update your references with any and all people who observe your work. It might even be the fed-ex man who arrives daily and marvels at the exquisite formal garden where he always sees you laboring. It might be the chef in the kitchen who knows how well you maintain the large home. And, in rare cases, it might be the father of the woman of the house who cannot understand why his daughter is so ungrateful for the unstinting service you provided.

Yes, it is tricky to ask for references from those close to your employer. One never wants to raise flags that one might be thinking of folding one's tent and moving on. I suggest you make it a policy up front with your new employer that you would like a quarterly evaluation of your work and you would like to extend that evaluation to others who observe your work on a regular basis. We even provide the form for that. So, if after a fistful of positive quarterly reports you finally decide you need to seek another position and the reference suddenly goes sour, you have many quarters of positives to compensate.

Well, Alice and Jeeves moved on to their next position which within four months proved to be an impossible job due to the flagrant substance abuse of their new employer who was either completely forgetful, paranoid or downright mean at any given moment. Who knew? We certainly didn't because this client told us she had never hired for this position before. Turns out she went through them like a hot knife through butter. We tried checking with other agencies but up to now she had always used illegals--the desperate and disfranchised that make up the underbelly of domestic employment in the U.S.

Alice and Jeeves tried to give an appropriate length of notice, were immediately canned and kicked out of their housing and suddenly they are thieves, wastrels, slackers! Whoa. What's an agency to do? No, the employer wasn't bringing any charges, but the Holy Grail--The Reference--was gone forever. Fortunately, we garnered many other good references from this brief employment and subsequent verification of the employer's shortcomings from other agency owners who provided more butter after our innocent foray into this mess.

When I started my business almost 20 years ago, my brother, a founding partner of a large law firm gave me this advice: Never withhold any information and you probably won't be sued. Dear reader, you must know that an agency has tremendous exposure if they place the ax murderer or even the ax breaker, certainly the ax stealer! That is why we usually err on the side of caution and if there is anything murky in an applicant's background we move on to other applicants. This is probably why agencies get some resumes that may list a year caring for a sick aunt when in fact, the caregiver had the employer from hell and doesn't have the guts to level with us. We are continually sorting through backgrounds. If you read my bio at my website (www.heartlandcaregivers.com) know that I believe with all my heart what I say in the last paragraph -- Truth is my goal in all things and I firmly believe that if all facts can be known things make perfect sense.

Following my brother's advice, I choose to present Alice and Jeeves to other clients with the full disclosure that the Hearts were being slandered by two previous employers and I shared in detail that slander. Then I chose to disclose that I would NOT disclose the names or phone numbers of the slanderers. If the new clients wanted to pass on this exceptional couple, that was their call, but I would not give these previous employers any kind of soap box to inflict their unethical cruelty towards a couple who had only their employers' best interests at heart.

If you go through Heartland please don't use the sick aunt to cover for a bad year. Give us the full disclosure and we will help you justify your leaving a place of bad employment.

Private service with a fair and reasonable employer is great work. If the employer picks up the tab for housing, insurance and sometimes a vehicle, you obviously have little overhead -- a prime motivator for many who go into this line of work. Many employers have bent over backwards to accommodate their home staff and have been much abused in the process. That's fodder for another article.

Please note that The Domestic Herald ™ is not a domestic employment agency, nor are we affiliated with any particular domestic placement service. The Domestic Herald ™ is an Internet community that caters to Household Employers and Staff by providing a self-service Domestic Employment Referral web site and related information for domestics and others.