No-maid-in-Beijing problem leaves families stresse

For most Chinese people, the annual Spring Festival holiday, which marks the Lunar New Year, is the most important festival of the year and traditionally involves family reunions.

But for Chen Lei's family and the other middle class families in Beijing, it also means doing household chores as their maids return to their home provinces for the two-week holiday, leaving their pampered employers to take care of themselves.

Li Jianmei, a nanny working with Chen's family for the past three months, went back to her home in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region for the Lunar New Year, despite Chen offering a bonus worth half Li's monthly salary if the maid decided to stay.

Before working with Chen's family Li used to make 1,400 yuan a month and in previous years opted to stay in the city and earn an extra 1,000 yuan, rather than go home during Spring Festival.

But this year was different, said Li. "I had worked in Beijing and never returned home for two years, and I missed two family reunions during the Spring Festival," Li said.

This year's Spring Festival, which started on Feb 14, was especially important because it coincided with her son's birthday. Her 12-year-old son was also born in a Year of the Tiger, she added.

"Even though the bonus is very attractive to me, I would have missed this year's family reunion and my son's birthday," she said.

The demand for live-in maids has far outpaced supply in the capital in recent years as the number of high-income and middle class families with two full-time working parents increased drastically, leading to an acute shortage of domestic helpers.

The undersupply of maids becomes dramatic during Spring Festival since most maids are from less-affluent inland provinces and the festival is the only time they can see their extended families.

The Beijing Homemaking Service Association forecast before the Spring Festival that 160,000 families in Beijing would have difficulty findings maids to do household chores during the festival, a time when many families want domestic helpers to cook for family reunions and keep apartments clean before guests visit.

"Our maid going away makes our lives much harder," said Chen.

Chen said she was stressed taking care of her one-year-old boy alone until a housekeeping agency found someone to replace Li during the two-week holiday.

"The boy is getting naughtier and I desperately need someone to help me with baby-sitting," she said.

She said she signed a one-year contract with the housekeeping agency, which guarantees her family will be taken care of by their nannies year round.

But those without such a contract must be self-sufficient during the break.

"The shortage lasted until late February but things started getting better after the third day of the holiday," said a manager surnamed Wang from Jiahe Housekeeper Co. According to Wang, his company, which has about 300 contracted nannies, ran short of 60 nannies during the Spring Festival holiday.

Recently the company had more than ten prospective customers a day asking about maids but almost no nannies were available to work in the weeks before and during Spring Festival, Wang said.

Most of Jiahe's nannies went home for the festival and no new ones are looking for jobs at this time of year, said Wang, who has been involved in the maid business for two years.

But many housekeeping companies try to entice at least some of their nannies to keep working through the festival. Most of the few Jiahe maids who stay in Beijing for the festival month will get an extra 400 yuan in monthly salary, said Wang.

Arrangements for the nannies who stay are made months in advance and Jiahe canvases heavily for any potential recruits who might want to work over the festival, added Wang.

"We try our best to ensure service for customers who have signed contracts but must give up some potential new customers," Wang said.

"We recruited maids from Shaanxi and other places before Spring Festival to relieve the shortage," said an official surnamed Xue with Chuanmeizi Housekeeping Co.

Chuanmeizi organized 27 maids from Shaanxi province, to fill in for nannies leaving Beijing, on Jan 26. But the effort was only a partial success since the company needed more than 70 maids.

Some housekeeping companies are turning to college students to plug the Spring Festival gap.

Coleclub, one of the biggest housekeeping companies in Beijing, hired about 20 college students from Hebei Vocational College of Foreign Language, who are homemaking majors, to provide service in Beijing.

The average age of the students was 21, with the youngest only 19 years old. "It is not a shameful job to us, because we know that the service industry has great potential in the future," said Meng Ying, one of the students.

"It's my first time to be a real housekeeper and the family was really nice to me. I feel confident about the future of the industry," said Zhang Xue, another of the students.

But some students could be taken advantage of by housekeeping agencies, said Han Huimin, who works for the Migrant Women's Club, a nongovernmental organization that helps migrant women.

"We have helped many college students who couldn't get payment from some small housekeeping companies," said Han.

Han said that many maids do not have much training, which exacerbates the nanny shortage, since many families prefer an experienced housekeeper.

Du Juan contributed to the story.