The Auction Block, Professionalized

I keep thinking about Octavia Spencer’s character Minny.

Not because The Help is a perfect representation of domestic labor. It isn't. And I’m not arguing that a modern nanny agency is literally the same institution as an overseer under slavery (although...if you wanted to dig a little, you could absolutely find some overlap)

But I'm interested in something more uncomfortable:

Who gets to control a woman's access to domestic work?

Minny is extraordinarily good at her job. She knows how to care for children. She knows how to run a household. She is experienced, capable, and valuable.

But she is also expected to know her place.

When Minny refuses to play along with the bullshit around her, she becomes a problem. The women who employ and socially regulate domestic workers can make her employment harder. Eventually, she ends up working for Celia Foote, another woman the white women around her have effectively rejected.

Minnie hasn't suddenly become less capable.

She has become inconvenient to the people controlling the gate.

That’s the part of Minny's story I keep coming back to.

Because domestic work has always had a strange relationship with unbalanced (and quite often, unchecked) power.

Black women were forced, coerced, or economically driven into domestic labor for generations while wealthy white households depended upon their labor to raise children, cook food, clean homes, and make it possible for someone else to live a life of leisure.

The labor was essential.

The woman performing it was not given equivalent power.

Then we (they) professionalized it.

We created agencies. Training programs. Certifications. Placement systems. Candidate profiles. Professional standards. Background checks. Matching services. Industry associations.

We gave the system a much nicer vocabulary.

Candidate. Client. Placement. Screening. Matching. Professionalism.

But I keep wondering what actually changed for the woman standing on the other side of the gate.

Who decides whether she gets through?

Who decides what information follows her?

Who decides what belongs in her professional record?

Who gets to tell a family something about her?

Who gets to decide whether she is “a good fit”?

And if somebody decides she isn't, what happens to her next?

Because the person holding the gate has enormous power when the woman on the other side needs the job to pay her bills, maintain her housing, support her children, or simply survive.

And that’s not a historical question.

It’s my life.

I have now experienced homelessness three times following circumstances involving my employment. I have watched employment opportunities disappear after I had already made major life decisions in reliance on them. And I have spent the last year trying to reconstruct what happened when a nanny placement took me across international borders and ultimately left me trying to determine who was responsible for my safety.

And I'm not telling this story because I think every agency is malicious.

I'm telling it because it continues to raise a very basic question:

Who protects the nanny?

And the answers I have received have raised more questions than they have resolved.

In 2023, I was working with an agency regarding a nanny position I was preparing to take.

Two days before I was supposed to begin, the position disappeared.

I had already made significant changes to my life in reliance on the job.

When I called Catherine Whyte, British American Household Staffing COO, to ask what had happened, she told me something I had never been told before.

According to Catherine, agencies belonging to the Association of Premier Nanny Agencies shared information with one another.

She told me another agency had provided her agency with an alternate résumé of mine, along with correspondence and other information from that agency's file. She also referenced information involving Chicago Police Department and what she described as police or non-contact orders.

I asked whether I could see the information because it was about me.

She said no.

She also told me that the information was concerning and that her agency had to investigate it. She ultimately explained that they could not proceed with the position.

I recorded the conversation.

I have the transcript.

And years later, I asked APNA about it.

The answer I received was very different.

Kim Winblood told me:

“APNA does not have any policy that we share information with other agencies.”

She said that information-sharing between agencies did not fall under APNA's guidelines or best practices.

So I had a very simple question:

If that isn't how APNA agencies are supposed to operate, what exactly happened to me?

I wasn't asking APNA to declare that Catherine had committed some crime.

I wasn't asking APNA to investigate the entire nanny industry.

I was asking them to reconcile their current position with what an APNA-affiliated agency representative had previously told me.

That question remains unanswered.

My later experience involved Lindsay Thomason of The Nanny League.

Lindsay communicated with an employer in Montreal who had not hired me through The Nanny League and with whom The Nanny League had no placement relationship.

When I first asked Lindsay about the communication, her written response stated that she had not communicated with the employer “about me or my working conditions.”

Later, Lindsay clarified that the employer had mentioned hiring someone named “Britt,” and Lindsay asked whether she meant Britt Ashe because Lindsay recognized my name from my previous registration with The Nanny League.

And that clarification matters.

Because now the factual question is no longer whether communication occurred.

It did.

The question became:

Why was a nanny agency identifying a former candidate to an employer with whom it had no placement relationship?

I wrote to APNA about exactly that.

I was very careful about what I claimed.

I didn’t assign Lindsay a motive I could not establish.

I did not claim to know everything that was said during that conversation.

I asked who communicated with whom, why, what information was available, what information about me was accessed or disclosed, and whether the conduct was consistent with APNA's professional standards.

I even separated this question from the larger circumstances I was reporting to government agencies.

I wasn't asking APNA to determine whether I had been trafficked.

I was asking an industry association to evaluate the conduct of its member.

And then I learned what “professional standards” meant

At first, APNA told me that whenever an ethics submission was received, they began an investigation and that the process started with a conversation with the person who submitted it.

Once I began providing context, the boundaries became increasingly specific.

APNA told me it could only evaluate Lindsay's conduct.

Fine.

I accepted that.

I narrowed my questions to Lindsay.

Then I was told I needed to identify exactly what Lindsay had done that violated APNA's standards.

I did.

Then I was told I needed to identify the particular provision of the Code of Ethics I believed had been violated and provide supporting documentation.

I understood that too.

But there was something I couldn't get past.

I had gone to the industry's professional association because I was trying to understand whether the industry's own standards actually protected the nanny.

Instead, I found myself repeatedly being asked to define, categorize, document, and prove my own experience before the organization would meaningfully evaluate it.

Eventually Kim wrote:

“Until then, there's no review for us to do.”

I had not asked APNA to solve my life.

I had asked a professional association to tell me what its professional standards meant when one of its members communicated about a former candidate to an unrelated employer.

And I had asked why what I was previously told about APNA agencies sharing information was so different from what APNA was now telling me.

I decided I no longer trusted the process enough to provide more.

So I stopped.

This is bigger than Catherine. It is bigger than Lindsay. It is bigger than me.

I'm not interested in pretending that every agency is secretly coordinating against every nanny.

I don't have evidence for that.

What I do have is a collection of experiences that keep bringing me back to the same structural question.

What power does a nanny have over the people who control her access to work?

The agency can screen the nanny.

The agency can investigate the nanny.

The agency can maintain information about the nanny.

The agency can decide which families see the nanny.

The agency can communicate with families.

The agency can influence how the nanny is represented.

The agency can decide whether it will continue working with the nanny.

But what does the nanny have?

Can she see what information is being circulated about her?

Can she correct it?

Can she challenge an agency's characterization of her?

Can she find out why another agency has information about her?

Can she obtain the information being used to make decisions about her livelihood?

And when an international placement goes catastrophically wrong, who is responsible for getting her home?

Who advocates for her?

Who investigates the agency?

Who protects her from retaliation?

Who protects her reputation while the facts are being established?

Who protects the worker?

Professionalization isn't the same thing as protection

This is where I keep returning to Minnie.

Minnie didn't need someone to teach her how to work.

She already knew how.

What she lacked was power.

And perhaps that is the question we should be asking about modern domestic work.

We have become very good at professionalizing the worker.

We have résumés.

Certifications.

Background checks.

Training.

Placement agencies.

Candidate profiles.

Professional associations.

Industry standards.

But have we professionalized protection? These parents? Their home-team-heirachies?

Because those are not the same things.`

A nanny can be highly trained and still be vulnerable.

She can have an impeccable résumé and still have information circulating about her that she cannot see.

She can be an extraordinary caregiver and still depend upon someone else deciding whether she is employable.

She can cross an international border for work through a professional placement system and still find herself asking who is responsible when everything goes wrong.

And if losing a job means losing housing, income, immigration stability, or the ability to support your children, then the person controlling access to that job holds far more power than the word “placement” suggests.

That is why I keep using the word gatekeeper.

And sometimes, when I look at the history of domestic labor, I think about the word overseer.

Not because a nanny agency is literally a plantation.

It isn't- but auction block tends to come to mind when I consider the role of 'Candidate' in regards to the process.

But because I think we should be willing to examine what happens when an intermediary acquires the power to control access to work, information, reputation, and opportunity for women whose labor remains economically necessary but whose power within the system remains limited.

Especially when we talk about Black women.

The history of American domestic labor was built on the backs of Black women whose labor was treated as necessary while their humanity, autonomy, and economic power were systematically denied.

Now that labor has been packaged, credentialed, marketed, and professionalized.

But who gets to define the profession?

Who runs the institutions?

Who writes the standards?

Who controls access to the families with money?

And who is still standing outside the gate asking for work?

I don't think the answer can simply be:

The same system that controls the gate will also tell us whether the gate is fair.

I think the nanny deserves a seat on the other side of that conversation.

Not as a candidate.

Not as a commodity.

Not as a résumé.

Not as a placement.

As a worker. As an autonomous person who deserves care and protection.

And perhaps that is the question the modern nanny industry has been avoiding for a very long time:

Who protects the woman who takes care of everyone else's children and household? Does the industry even believe that we are people deserving of care or protection?