the title 'how to manage house maids' intrigued me..... i think the concept of effective management is alien to domestic help in general, and certainly in Chennai! None of your HR rules that work in your office work here.... you can motivate them, encourage, feed, nurture, but in general the story is the same..... maids these days have become savvy... they know the standard of living of an average Chennaite has gone up substantially, i speak of areas like Besant nagar, Annanagar, Tnagar, Raja Annamalaipuram etc...they know that we depend on them totally to be able to run a smooth household... so the exploitation goes on..... actually the exploitation by the maids is not half as bad as that of the socalled agencies who supply maids, ayahs, et al... they are the crooks and need to be exposed.... for those of you who may not know this, the domestic help agencies regularly do this - send you a maid, you pay the month's salary to the agency, the maid stays for a week or two, and leaves, you ring the agency, they send you another (free as this is part of the contract) the secone one leaves in another couple of weeks, they send you a third one, this one too leaves in short time... and your conract ends and you have coughed up some 2500 rupees to the aency and probably given the maid an advance on salary of some 1200 rupees or more... and at the end of the 2 month you are back to square one.... so ladies, opt for the good old, neighbourhood network ...
Oh My goodness!!! So I am not the only lone soul who has gone through this process with these "AGENCIES".... And yes I have called our old maid back paying her a little extra, managing to smile when she doesnt turn up 1 or 2 days a week, and she doesnt do even a average cleaning job and she takes a bath probably once in 2 days. She is reliable and she loves my kids,cannot ask for too much I guess.!!!
Thanks a ton for all these posts. So.. I am not the only one. I also went to an agency in Chennai paying one month salary. But I notice that they uniformly send substandard people who have their father/mother /brother falling sick/etc etc after one month of working. Then comes another maid and the same thing continues. I guess the best is to probably rely on daily maids from neighborhood. I live in Neelangarai. Does of the IL living around here suggest a maid and a cook? (Two separate people are fine). Regards, Harini
I had the same problem when my son was 1 year old and I had to study for some exams... the agencies did the same thing, send maids one after the other and they would leave in 2-4 weeks ... the agencies need to be exposed..
My God! Your experiance is stunning. God! If my husband had got a letter I would have a slapped her and thrown her things out of the house. How dare she? I sincerly hope that you and I get a good maid.
