Can $7-an-hour nannies spur a baby boom? One city aims to find out

Children play on a playground as a woman watches

Oct. 23, 2024 2 AM PT

SEOUL — The latest government plan in South Korea to encourage couples to have more children and prevent a devastating population decline: low-wage immigrant nannies.

In August, the Seoul government launched a program matching 100 Filipino nannies with 169 households that have children under 12 or are expecting a baby. The nannies work full-time or part-time and earn the minimum wage of about $7 an hour.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has billed the service as a “win-win” for migrant workers and South Korean parents.

“I wanted to give a new option for the many dual-income couples who are giving up on having children because of the costs,” he said when the test program was announced last year.

It hasn’t gone well. Last month, two of the Filipino workers deserted their posts and reported poor working conditions to the Philippine government’s Department of Migrant Workers.

The women were later detained by South Korean immigration authorities in the port city of Busan, where they had found under-the-table jobs as cleaners, before being deported last week.

At a hearing session held by the government after the incident, other Filipino workers in the program reported that having to commute between multiple households stretched them so thin they had to eat meals in subway stations. They also complained that they were subject to a 10 p.m. curfew in their dormitories.

“Because we’re adults, I think we should have this freedom to decide how we’re going to spend our time,” one young worker named Joan testified.

Amid the outpouring of criticism that followed, the city abolished the curfew and announced improvements that included paying them every two weeks and shortening commuting distances.

“I would like people to understand that we are in the process of identifying any shortcomings,” Oh said in response to his critics, adding that he was exploring expanding the program to Cambodia and other poor Southeast Asian countries.

But experts say the mayor’s vision of cheap, outsourced child care is little more than a Band-Aid fix for a problem with far deeper roots.

More than the lack of available caretakers, they say, the issue is the disproportionate child-care burden placed on South Korean women that is discouraging them from having children.

In South Korea, the average number of babies the average woman has over her lifetime — ha

“If anything, I think that this plan might actually make things worse,” said Lee Joo-hee, a sociologist who studies care work at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “All it does is reinforce the idea that domestic work is something so trivial you can just outsource to ‘foreign aunties.’ These perceptions will only push men further away from doing their part of domestic labor.”

Lee noted that the term “aunties,” which is common parlance for domestic workers in South Korea, underscores these gender prejudices.

“It reflects this attitude that assumes care work is solely a woman’s duty,” she said.

South Korea’s fertility rate — the average number of babies a woman has over her lifetime — has been steadily falling for decades and last year hit a record low of 0.72, the lowest in the world. At that rate, the population would fall from 52 million to 36 million over the next three decades.

The population decline is already causing labor shortages in agriculture and manufacturing, and South Korea has reluctantly turned to workers from less developed Asian countries to help plug the gap.

Advocates of Oh’s plan have argued that the child-care and domestic help industry is also in desperate need of reinforcements.

The number of domestic helpers in the country has halved in the last decade, from 22,600 in 2014 to just over 10,000 last year, according to the government.

Critics of the nanny pilot program, however, have pointed out that there is no realistic way to make it affordable enough for widespread adoption for the middle-class families that would need it the most.

“This is only a solution for the upper class, not a plan that can address the problem of care work for the larger public,” Chang Ha-na, secretary general of the women’s rights group Political Mamas, said.

Households participating in the program pay around $1,700 a month for eight hours of help a day. Although slightly cheaper than local services, that is still nearly half the average monthly household income of newlywed couples.

To bring down these costs, Oh and his supporters have called for another controversial solution: reclassifying migrant domestic workers so they no longer fall under minimum-wage laws.

But the labor minister, Kim Moon-soo, said not only might that violate national and international law, but it would result in more deserters.

“We’ve already had two workers desert their jobs,” Kim said recently. “We will end up with a problem several hundred times worse.”