Foreign Visitor, Exchange Student, or Family Member? A Study of Au Pair Policies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Approaches to state provision of childcare have typically focused on the relative weight of state or market provision. In this article we follow a new institutional approach to the relationship between states and markets to examine the au pair industry, emphasising the role of states in the creation of markets for childcare. Research on the market provision of childcare has focused on the ambiguity in defining caring as work, which has led to the low value of care work. In this article we propose that those ambiguities also exist at the state level and impact the creation of the market for foreign childcare. Examining the development of au pair policies in the US, UK, and Australia, we find three strategies that involve defining au pairs not as employees, but rather as foreign visitors, exchange students, or family members. These strategies allow for by passing restrictions on immigration, increasing the supply of care providers, and circumventing compliance with labour regulations, thereby reducing the cost to families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".