We tried to hire servants in several agencies that are recruiting for the rich and famous residents of Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway. At the same time, we learned the tendencies of the maid market for successful people. It turns out that if earlier it was fashionable to order butlers from the Ivor Spencer Butler School in London (considered the best in the world) with a salary 40 thousand dollars per year, then in a crisis it is considered a luxury. Therefore, English butlers were replaced by Russians with an average salary. 2 thousand dollars (112 thousand rubles) per month. Their duties include the management of the entire household and the staff of servants.

But most often now the control over the household in the house is carried out by married couples from Ukraine or separately hired workers. They live in a servants' house or an annex to the house. A man manages plumbing, solves household issues, deals with minor repairs, engineering communications. A woman monitors the cleanliness in the house: she cleans, washes windows, is responsible for the cleanliness of clothes. The average monthly salary of such employees is 60 - 70 thousand rubles. They live on the territory of the owners, have one day off a week. The services of a cook who comes to prepare lunch and dinner for the day are assessed 3 thousand rubles if this specialist has regalia, then his entry to work can cost from 5 thousand. The visiting gardener 20 - 30 thousand rubles per month.

The guard who accompanies the star receives from 90 thousand rubles per month, depending on qualifications, the driver - from 80 thousand. Nannies on Rublyovka often work "with accommodation", wealthy parents hire people with recommendations, pay them on70 - 80 thousand rubles per month.

Stories from the life of stars

The housekeeper who was forgiven by everything

40 years next to Edita Piekha, her assistant Vera Mikhailovna. A girl with a bouquet of flowers rose on the stage during Piekha's concert, Edita Stanislavovna saw her hands in blisters and wounds, became emotional and decided to help - she called after the performance in the dressing room. I found out that Vera was from an orphanage, worked at a factory, oxidizedTV parts.

“I took her to my job: I taught her to iron clothes, wash floors, cook. Vera has a difficult character, sometimes she is lazy and forgets about my assignments. I have a punishment for such cases: she is a fan of football and hockey, if she doesn’t do something, I don’t allow her to watch, ”says the singer. Edita Piekha says that Vera has already become a member of her family: they are friends and do not swear.

Once Vera brought a friend Kirill to the house, he played with a dog and under the bed, where the ball rolled away, he found a stash of stars worth 25 thousand dollars. The money was not returned to the singer, the man was imprisoned for three years. Although Piekha was against it. And the tenant forgave Vera Mikhailovna for the uninvited guests in the house.

Bitter experience Khilkevich

Filipina - best friend child

Filipino nannies are hired because they won’t gossip with their friends about the life of Russian stars, they speak English with the child, they know how to keep their distance, they are always positive, they don’t get irritated and don’t freak out at work.

I'm glad Sasha knows English language. For example, while walking in the yard, he communicates with the guys in English: many of our neighbors have nannies, like ours, Filipinos, so they talk to children in English, - Anastasia Stotskaya notes in an interview with TV program magazine.

Ksenia Borodina has two children, two nannies (not Filipinos) help manage them, to keep the situation under control, Borodina installed a video surveillance program and you can see on your smartphone what happens to the children in her absence. The TV presenter is a very responsible mother, so she decided the issue of child safety. “I am a hyperactive mother and I always want to be aware of what the children are doing in my absence, what and when they eat, do they sleep according to the regime? Now with a video nanny, I look after my family from an iPhone. I'm sure they're safe, records are archived. I got rid of 1000 questions in my head and worries, ”Borodin shared with fans.

The housekeeper is the main heiress

The housekeeper of the People's Artist of the USSR Tatyana Peltzer worked for her for 22 years. Anna Kukina was the closest person to Peltzer, and the actress signed an apartment for her (Peltzer had no close relatives).

And how are they?

— Housekeepers Reese Witherspoon they are proud of the hostess: she does not litter, her house is so clean that cleaning is a real pleasure. The servant of the actress receives as a gift bags of clothes from last year's collections.

— Cindy Crawford once, on the set of an advertisement, they presented a car, having arrived home, she immediately gave it to the housekeeper, as she knew that the girl was “without wheels”.

- They say that Madonna pays little and demands a lot from servants. For example, she needs to be awakened six times a night and given water to drink.

— servant Kim Kardashian adores her: the star gives assistants computers and phones, pays them well. Kim has a fad: she is very demanding on bed linen - it must be silk, it needs to be changed daily.

Hierarchy of servants in large houses

Readers of historical novels are familiar with those who were hired as servants in large houses. These people did all the necessary work and kept the house clean and tidy. On the estates of some people there were whole armies of servants who worked on the plot (gardeners, huntsmen, grooms), and the same army of household staff.

In the Victorian era, not only aristocrats had servants. The bourgeoisie of the middle class appeared in the cities. The presence of servants was a sign of respectability. However, the lower middle class, who had less money, could only afford one maid - maid who did all the work.

Victorian era author Mrs Beeton in her bestselling book "Home Management Book" pities such a maid: “The general maid, or the maid for all work, is the only one of the whole class who deserves compassion. She lives the life of a hermit, is lonely and her work is never done.”

The male staff was higher in rank than the female and non-livery servants. Those who did not wear a uniform were ranked above those who were required to be in uniform.

I must say, the clothes of servants in the 18th century were somewhat more individual. The black dress, white apron, and white cap worn by maids in the 19th century were designed in the Victorian era to hide the identities of the staff.

highest status among the male servants (who in a sense were more of a professional than really a servant) possessed estate manager. Some managers were also trustees of their owners, lived in separate houses and ran their own business. The estate manager hired and fired workers, settled tenant complaints/grievances, oversaw the harvest, collected rents, and kept all financial records. Wealthy landowners who owned more than one estate had several managers.

Some rich houses had butlers. The Butler also acted as a manager. In particular, he was responsible for the keys. Only he had access to buffets where food was stored, wine cellars and pantries. Those who needed access to these rooms should ask for his permission. He let them into the pantries and then locked the door again. In addition, he was responsible for repairing the premises and for hiring seamstresses and laundresses.

Next in status among the male servants was butler. Butler duties varied depending on the size of the house. He was in charge of the wine cellars, responsible for silver and gold dishes, chinaware and crystal. His duties included cleaning valuable silver and gold instruments and guarding them from thieves. As time went on, the position of the butler became more and more prestigious, until he reached the top rung of the hierarchy in the Victorian era. Although the butler did not wear liveries, his clothes are working time changed only slightly: for example, he wore a black tie, not a white one. Thus, the butler could not be mistaken for a gentleman.

After the butler, next in status was valet. He looked after the clothes of the master of the house, polished his shoes and boots, cut his hair and shaved his beard, and looked after the appearance of the gentleman as a whole. The valet was supposed to look good, but at the same time not overshadow his master. When a gentleman went shopping or on a journey, a valet accompanied him, as some men literally could not get dressed or undressed without assistance.

A high status among domestic staff was also footmen. The footman did a lot of housework, both inside and outside. In the house, he set the table, waited at the table, served tea, opened the door for guests and helped the butler. In addition, he carried luggage, accompanied the lady when she went to visit, carried a lantern to scare off thieves when the owners went out into the street at night, carried and brought letters.

Page was a servant's apprentice. He performed various tasks and assignments. Sometimes a dark-skinned boy was taken to the pages, who was dressed in a deliberately bright livery and who was treated more like a piece of furniture.

Women were not valued as highly as men and their wages were lower despite the fact that often their work was much harder. While the footman carried the letters, the maid often had to climb ladders with baskets of coal for the fireplaces or canisters of water for the bath.

For the lady of the house ordinary deed to change the name of the maid, if it seemed too pretentious to her, to a more appropriate name, such as Mary or Jane.

senior in status among the female staff housekeeper. She kept the keys to the pantries, she supervised the work of the maids and the cook. She was the butler's right hand. She kept records and budgeted for the upkeep of the house, ordered food and other supplies. By and large, she led the practical part of the economy.

The next in status was personal maid, or maid. She helped the lady dress and undress, cleaned, ironed and mended her clothes, cleaned her hair. In the Victorian era, when clothing was very heavy and layered (with buttons and laces down the back), women literally couldn't dress and undress themselves. The maids also looked after the decorations and served as a companion and trusted hostess.

Cook valued more if taught by a male cook. Many were looking for just such a cook, since not everyone had enough money to hire a male cook. The cook had many assistants who helped her cope with the amount of work that needed to be done. There were always dishwashers in the kitchen (they were lower in status than all other women), whose duties included cleaning pots and pans. The girls worked all day with their hands in their hot water and hard soda for washing dishes. After a big party, hundreds of greasy pots and pans could be left to clean out before going to bed.

There were other maids: they made beds, cleaned cabinets and the like. These women swept the floor, dusted, polished surfaces, cleaned, washed, brought and carried away from early morning until late at night. The work schedule for the maids was from 6:30 am to 10 pm, and they were supposed to have half a day off a week. They were cleaning the house and polishing the furniture without being able to use anything that could make cleaning easier. For example, there was no such thing as a ready-made polishing solution. The polish was made from linseed oil, turpentine and beeswax.

Carpets had to be brushed by hand or taken outside and slapped. Lamps had to be cleaned and filled, fires had to be lit and maintained. The duties of the maids also included lifting containers of coal up the stairs to all the fireplaces in the house. One can imagine how many fireplaces there were in a huge estate that was not equipped with central heating.

The maids had two kinds of dresses. In the morning, when most of the hard work was done, they wore patterned cotton dresses and aprons. Later in the day they changed into black dresses with a white pleated apron and caps with ribbons.

The servants worked in an intensive schedule: in fact everyone woke up at 5 a.m. and didn't go to bed until their master went to bed.

The era of large estates with many servants ended after the First World War. For a long time, the job of a maid was considered the only respectable job a young woman could get, but with the availability of work in offices and factories, few people wanted to spend long hours at work with low pay and little or no personal control. life. The emergence of new jobs, the reduction of the area of ​​​​houses and the appearance of devices that facilitate labor, put an end to the huge number of servants hired on estates.

The Village continues to find out how much people of different professions earn and what they spend money on. In the new issue - a housekeeper. Ten years ago, it was believed that only representatives of the upper middle class could afford an au pair, but now, despite the crisis, many people with average earnings have housekeepers. Their services no longer seem prohibitively expensive, but they save a lot of time and effort. An assistant to rich Muscovites told The Village how she lives, how much she earns and how much she spends.

PROFESSION

Housekeeper

SALARY

48 000 rubles

per month

Expenses

20 000 RUBLES

providing for a son

400 RUBLES

phone payment

10 000 RUBLES

refueling and car repair

3 000 RUBLES

8 000 RUBLES

3 000 RUBLES

vitamins

1 000 RUBLES

2 000 RUBLES

cosmetics

600 RUBLES

transport

How to become a housekeeper

My name is Natalia, I am 51 years old. By education, I am a technologist of leather products, I worked in a leather haberdashery association, first as a seamstress, and then as a master. I didn’t even think about becoming a housekeeper until last year, when my son began to live in Moscow with his father, and I, a resident of Pushchino, wanted to be closer to him. Then I began to look for a job with accommodation in the capital.

I have always liked doing housework, so I decided to try myself in this area. Turning first to one agency, then to the second, I did not get a real result. Everywhere they took money, offered to undergo training, but there was no sense. Then I began to look for ads directly. After writing a response to the vacancy of a housekeeper and indicating in the questionnaire that I had no work experience, I immediately received a response with an invitation to an interview. This surprised me, because everyone is looking for people with experience. Subsequently, I learned that my employers, Alexander and Natalia, were impressed by the fact that I spoke in such detail and honestly about myself in the questionnaire.

It seems to me that a housekeeper is chosen based on intuition: the client either likes the candidate or not. In addition, employers give preference to women of Slavic appearance. Often they even write that Russian citizenship is required to get a job. As a rule, those who do not have enough money and have nowhere to live go to housekeepers. For them, such work is serving time. But if a person gets a job helping around the house only because he has no money, if it is difficult and unpleasant for him to do this work, the client will feel it.

Housekeeping is really interesting to me, and I went to work not because I needed money, but because I needed to occupy myself with something and, probably, feel needed. I lived for myself for so long that I wanted to become useful to other people. I consider myself an assistant: I help when a person has no time. Doing what I love, I also earn good money.

I, as a citizen of Russia, do not need a patent, it is necessary only for visitors from other countries. But I work unofficially, because for official registration you need to open an individual entrepreneur for the provision of services. Then I will pay taxes, and I will have seniority. But in order to open an individual entrepreneur, you need to find a person who understands accounting, because for me this is a distant area. My hosts are not against this payment format, but how else? I have never heard of housekeepers opening individual entrepreneurs, although in the future I would like to do this: in five years I am retiring, and seniority is important to me.

Features of work

When I first arrived at the four-story house that I am currently cleaning, the hostess Natalya told me about her cleaning preferences. The entire first floor of this mansion is reserved for an entrance hall and a garage, on the second floor there is a living room, a dining room and a kitchen, on the third floor there is a hall and three bedrooms, and on the fourth, attic, there is one large playroom for children. There are two adults and two children living in the house. Despite the fact that the structure has four levels, it is very compact. In the hall on the third floor there is a simulator, which the owners periodically work out on. When no one is at home and I want to take a break from cleaning, I also use it - Alexander and Natalya do not mind.
I live on the territory of the mansion in a separate guest house. This is a one-story building with a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, where I have a computer and a router.

Every day I clean only bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and stairs. Otherwise, my duties include cleaning one floor per day. I also have cooking, so I have enough to do. The beginning of my working day is not clearly defined in terms of time: if the owners need breakfast, I can come at 07:30. But since they rarely order breakfast, I usually start work at nine or ten in the morning by cleaning the kitchen after the family has already had breakfast. I work until two or three in the afternoon, then I go on a break, and at four or five in the evening I return to business, put things in order where necessary, and cook dinner. At 19:00 I go to my room and return only at 21:00 to clean the kitchen after dinner. This is where my work day ends. In my free time, I do what I want, surf the Internet, watch movies.

My employers do not consider themselves superior to those who help them. Perhaps we have such a relationship because they were not always rich: they used to live in an ordinary Moscow apartment, and when the owner began to earn good money, they bought this house. We are very similar in character to them, and we immediately established a trusting relationship, as if some kind of soul mate. I try not to interfere in the personal life of my owners. Alexander has some kind of business, he runs it from home. His wife does not work and devotes herself entirely to children.

Salary

When I first got a job, I was offered 25,000 rubles a month. I went for such a salary because I knew that I had no work experience, and without it they would not take anywhere. Two months later, Alexander raised my salary to 40 thousand. At first I worked six days a week, then I realized that it was a lot for me, and we agreed that I would work four days. For such a download, I get 24 thousand rubles a month.

I decided to use the weekend for a part-time job and found a family that needs cleaning once a week. Their house is located within the city, its owner is a high-ranking official, he is rarely at home, and his wife takes care of the children and does not work. They have their own security service there, and they checked me when I got a job.

The house itself is two-story, but very long. On the ground floor there is a gym and a sauna in one wing, and a large dining room and kitchen in the second. On the second floor in one wing - an adult bedroom and an office, and in the other - children's rooms and a nurse's room. I simply don’t have the opportunity to work out in the gym in this house: I clean up from morning to evening.

There is a lot of glass in this house, all the ramps and stairs are made of it. Cleaning there is actually washing several windows. It is difficult to put all this in order in a day, and I get very tired. When I came to them, they immediately told me: because of the amount of work, you will have a ten-hour working day. When I began to manage to do all this faster, they began to add work to me, not taking into account that, having removed everything that was supposed to, I was already tired. After such a hard day, I need another day to recover. Working in this house is hard for me not only physically, but also mentally. The owners do not have such trusting relationships with me as in the first family, and in their house I feel tense. But this part-time job brings me another 24 thousand rubles a month.

spending

Of course, costs change every month. My son is studying at the institute, I help him with money, so the lion's share of my budget (about half) goes to him.

I have a car. Now I ride it more often than public transport. It takes about 10 thousand rubles a month to refuel and repair it, and about 600 rubles to travel by minibus and metro.

With clothes, everything is very simple for me, I'm not picky, and it takes an average of 3 thousand per month. It’s more difficult with food: I don’t always eat what my owners eat, I have my own preferences, so part of my budget goes to food - fruits, vegetables and dairy. Another part of the cost goes to vitamins: in our lifetime we can’t do without them.

I do not like decorative cosmetics, so I almost do not spend money on it.
For ordinary cosmetics, maintaining skin tone, it takes 2-3 thousand rubles a month.

The owners pay for the Internet, and I only spend money on paying for a cell phone - only 300-400 rubles a month. I also enjoy reading business magazines. On average, they spend a thousand rubles a month.

On the whims of clients

I worked in many families, I had to meet with the quirks of rich people. In the house of a family of musicians, in which I worked for about two months, the bathroom was decorated in the style of "golden toilets": white faience is covered with gilded drawings. In my opinion, a gilded toilet is an unnecessary show-off, because such a design is short-lived. Yes, and cleaning such places is much more difficult than ordinary bathrooms: on the one hand, everything is in gold, and on the other, in calcium stains from water.

Usually clients treat me with respect, but anything happened. In one family, for example, a lunch break was not provided for a housekeeper.
Where and how I will eat, they did not really care. There, standing in the laundry compartment, I was not very pleased.

Once I got a job in a family of lawyers - a lawyer and her daughter. They had two cats, and there was an incredible amount of wool in the house. It became unbearable for me to come in order to clean up after the cats, then I said to myself: I will not serve the cats. If a person gets a cat, this is his whim, not mine, and therefore the person must take care of him himself. I help people when they really need the help of a housekeeper, and when they just don't feel like doing it themselves, an internal protest arises in me. For this reason, I soon left this family.

There are many women in our country who love to do housework, but nevertheless they sit within four walls and do not know what to do with themselves. If at least twice a week they help someone, it will be useful for them both financially and in terms of realizing their usefulness. But more and more visitors from other cities and countries are becoming housekeepers, it is still difficult for our women to overcome their pride and become an au pair. Although there is nothing shameful in this work, and I perceive it as mutual assistance: clients have the opportunity to help me financially, and I have the opportunity to help them with housekeeping. My own family does not require much attention from me now, so my home is the home of the families where I work.

illustrations: Dasha Koshkina

To raise money for training at a dance school in New York, Lizzy Feidelson had to get a job in a cleaning company and experience all the hardships of this profession in her own skin. The girl even collected several candid stories, which she designed in the form of an essay. The confessions of the maid were so impressive that they immediately became one of the most discussed and quoted.

Photo: frame from the film "Madame Maid"

1. They have a ton of promotional clothing.

It would seem that the rich and famous will not stoop to even look at something that does not have a Prada or Armani label. But it wasn't all that impressive! In addition to a whole bunch of branded outfits, in the wardrobe of really wealthy people one could find a lot of T-shirts with the logos of various conferences, baseball caps of the same origin and other promotional clothing. At the same time, these things either hung on their shoulders among luxurious jackets and shirts, or lay in a pile on the shelves.

2. They are not that clean.

Lizzie remembered that one of her clients (a very wealthy lady, by the way) had instructed her to find an expensive earring that she had dropped somewhere in the bathroom. The girl had to deal with cat hair, the remains of toilet filler and shreds of hair stuck in the drain (who knows, suddenly the earring fell right there), and then wash every inch of the bathroom, removing the same hair and cat hair along the way. As a result, the decoration was found behind the toilet bowl, and it’s completely unclear how it got there.

3. They don't keep their clothes clean

The girl also admits that she was always shocked when the owners returned with purchases and could throw new clothes on the dirty floor (even before the cleaning process ended). As a result, the outfits ended up in dust, hair, sparkles, and it took a lot of time to put them in order again. At the same time, unpleasant expressions were poured towards Lizzie, why suddenly there were debris or hairs on the clothes (which are not particularly cleaned with anything).

4. Stick to your diet

Lizzie was especially impressed by one case when it turned out in a “perfect”, it would seem, house that the little son of the owners had to strictly adhere to a certain menu. At the same time, all products were placed in containers, on the lids of which the name of the baby and the hours of taking a particular product were signed with a marker. And as a snack (if the child suddenly rebels and starts demanding normal food), a hard-boiled egg was offered.

5. Careless about documents

Another fact that surprised the representative of the cleaning company is that often the clients did not even try to hide important information (documents, bills, etc.) from the maid, mistaking her not for an outsider, but for a family member. Therefore, they recklessly left their data even on the refrigerator (after attaching it with a magnet).

Being torn apart by dogs, long hours of work and mask shows are just some of what people who decide to get a job as housekeepers for wealthy Russians have to go through. The market of Russian servants, apparently, is not much different from the slave market, its volumes are unclear, wage statistics are vague, and the rights of workers are practically not protected in any way. At the request of samizdat “My friend, you are a transformer”, the editor of L’Officiel Russia, Irina Shcherbakova, learned firsthand what life is like for butlers, maids, housekeepers and nannies who serve wealthy people.

“The most common mistake is to make friends with someone from the staff and start to perceive this person as a family member,” says gallery owner and daughter of businessman Oleg Baibakov, Maria, in a column she wrote for Tatler magazine. - Nothing good comes out of it. As a rule, you lose a good maid, but you don’t gain a sister or a friend.”

Baibakova's column was published in Tatler three years ago. Maria generously shared her experience: how to competently dismiss a servant (“quickly and in front of witnesses”), who has the right to sit at the same table with the mistress of the house (only her son’s tutor) and why it is impossible to give the maid “Prada trousers from the season before last”, and the old “Louboutins” it’s just right to give if the maid has a daughter. In the crisis of 1914, these home economics tips outraged everyone at once - from the pro-government media and the former Nashi press secretary Christina Potupchik, who threatened Baibakova with a "wolf ticket", to the most progressive part of the Russian Facebook. Pretty soon, the scandal took on an international dimension: the London Times, for example, broke into an article headlined "Tatler teaches oligarchs to fire maids." It even got to the point that BuzzFeed released the Top 13 Life Hacks on How to Treat Servants. A few days later, Baibakova apologized for the Facebook column, saying that the text was "heavily edited" and that when she "translated it into English, she could see how indifferent and rude it turned out."

However, not a single piece of advice - even the most rude and indifferent - from Baibakova's scandalous column has anything to do with the conditions under which servants actually work in Russia. The "ethical management" that the gallery owner calls for is an unknown thing for most Russians who can afford a housekeeper. And if a film or series were made about a Russian house with servants, it would not be Downton Abbey, which Baibakov mentions, but rather a fresh Zvyagintsev or the old Coen brothers. Why, we will explain below.

Echpochmaki and recruitment agency Lada Dance

A house in a spa town in Spain, owned by a family from Russia; in the kitchen, cooks in white uniforms prepare Tatar food - echpochmaki, belish, meat soup. The mistress of the house, a regal woman of about fifty, shouts across the room: she does not like how the table was wiped, and the echpochmaks came out inauthentic. The cook, a tall Georgian woman in her early thirties, apologizes in a low voice. After dinner, the cook tells me her story: divorced, a schoolboy son is waiting at home, she has been working in the family for several years. Her case is indicative, but far from the most difficult. A maid who worked for a Russian banker in the late 1990s and early 2000s recalls: “He gave receptions at the dacha, sometimes a hundred and sixty people. At first we were forced to cook, but then the servants began to come from the Mario restaurant. Everyone was terribly afraid of the owner. When there was a mistake, they didn’t come up like that, they didn’t serve food to the guest - that’s it, right behind the fence. We were picked up every morning by a car at Kuntsevskaya. And the driver could take it and say: “But you are not going today.” You don't work anymore. In my presence, four or five people were fired like that.”

The situation has changed little since then. They still prefer to hire servants in the house unofficially: agreements are oral, wages are in an envelope. This makes it possible to dismiss in one day, without compensation, and labor legislation does not work here. The main channel of employment is personal connections. Most often, domestic staff is taken on the recommendation of friends, neighbors or relatives.

Wealthier homeowners often use agencies. fun fact: one of these agencies, "Irreproachable Personnel", has been run by the singer Lada Dance since 2006. Dance is proud of the fact that “carefully checks the biographies of employees” and declares that she was able to pick up a nanny for Andrey Grigoriev-Apollonov and a driver for Dmitry Kharatyan.

Banknotes in trunks and salary in envelopes

In the nineties and even in the first half of the 2000s, the work of individual housekeepers was paid higher than the average music reviewer. “The salary was $600,” recalls the heroine, who worked as a nurse before becoming a maid. - With this money it was possible, if you saved up for six months, to buy a good one-room apartment. And after two or three months, they added another fifty dollars to me. Money was delivered to the person I worked for in such checkered trunks. Several bags at once, at night.

The size of the domestic worker market is not well understood. The Rus2Web publication, for example, cited the following statistics, referring to the FMS: in 2015, the agency issued about 1.8 million patents, while 450,000 people received them in the capital. In theory, the procedure for issuing patents was developed just for those who are employed as servants in the house of individuals, but today those who work for legal entities also receive them - simply because such a patent is easier to obtain than a full work permit.

Wages have gone down, but the number of household staff hasn't gone down. By 2010, according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development, there were twenty million people in the country. According to last year's data from the Center for Migration Research, seven million migrants work as housekeepers, maids and nannies in Russia. The average salary of a housekeeper is 30-60 thousand rubles. Some work in several houses at once. For example, Wednesday and Friday are cleaning of a three-room apartment in the historical center where an employee of the Moscow City Hall lives, and Tuesday and Thursday are visits to the producer, who, in addition to everything, asks to look after her schoolgirl daughter: sometimes she needs to be picked up from lessons or taken to the cinema . Housemaids who are taken "with accommodation" are often paid less. So on the website arinarodionovna.com, a family without children and animals is looking for a housekeeper with a salary of 30,000 rubles in a house on Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway. Requirements: "Dry and wet cleaning, cleaning of bathrooms, washing the refrigerator, dishes, seasonal window washing, laundry, ironing with a steam generator." We need a woman from forty to fifty-five years old, “who knows how to cook well, work with household appliances: a vacuum cleaner, an iron, a slow cooker, a double boiler, an electric grill, a microwave oven, an oven, a juicer, an electric bed linen press, a washing machine and a dryer. Responsible, punctual, observing subordination. For comparison: the site editor in a lifestyle publication, who works remotely and part-time, earns about the same. And the average salary in Moscow, according to Rosstat, is 59 thousand.

Mask shows and mad dogs (no, not Tarantino)

The homes of some wealthy clients are raided, and the staff often comes under suspicion. “There was a case, they put on mask shows for us,” says a Moscow housekeeper who wished to remain anonymous. - They came at night, I was generally in shorts. No one was allowed out of the house, neither the hostess, nor mother, no one. The investigators sat down in the kitchen. I got dressed and cautiously went out to them, asked if they could have tea or coffee. One:
- You can have tea.

The other looked at him like that and asked:
"Aren't you afraid of poison?"

Unofficially hired personnel are not protected from anything, and being fired suddenly without explanation or an investigator catching you in your underpants is far from the worst thing that can happen. Injuries at work are sometimes not compensated in any way, and if they are compensated, it is not enough. “The mistress of the house,” says the same housekeeper, “terribly loved dogs. Well, it's just terrible. And she constantly bought these dogs, collected, or something: she saw, wanted, took away, and then all the care for them fell on us. Kurzhaars, German shepherds, lap dogs - the house was large, the former residence of Shevardnadze on Rublyovka, there the guards drove around the territory in a jeep, so there was enough space. No one cared much about the dogs, they were angry and twitchy. The owner sometimes kicked them when she got angry, and she also bought collars with electric shocks, and the son of the animals used electric shock when he was bored. And then one day I take out bowls of food for big dogs - and I see a small one running across the whole yard. I think, no matter how they eat it, I grab it, but they rush at me. When the guards came running, I was gnawed by three kurtshaars and one German shepherd. A small dog, they say, was torn apart, there was not even anything left of it. And I even had stitches on my scalp. I spent ten days in the hospital, I was paid for a junior suite, and that's it. The stitches were removed and redone. Even when everything began to heal, it was still terrible. I looked out the window and realized that I could not go outside. I was afraid of the air. I was helped by a psychologist who went to the owner's mother. The psychologist came, I closed my eyes, clung to him, and together we stepped over the threshold of the hospital. I thought the hostess brought the psychologist, but it turned out that he himself heard what had happened and came. Do you know what the owner said when he found out that the guards had to shoot the dogs? “Well, how will we return, but no one will meet us? ..” And not a word about me. And only later, when I quit, they told me that he and his wife said that I myself was to blame.