Who Protects the Nanny?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether to publish this.
Not because I don't have documentation. I have plenty.
I've hesitated because the nanny industry is small, agencies talk to each other, and there is an obvious professional cost to publicly questioning the systems that employ and place domestic workers.
At this point, I'm less interested in protecting my access to those systems than I am in asking why the systems need so much protecting from scrutiny in the first place.
In September 2025, I accepted an international nanny placement through Morgan & Mallet international.
What followed in Montreal (Istanbul, Malta, Gozo, and Munich) became one of the most destabilizing experiences of my professional life.
This isn't going to be a post asking you to take my word for it.
I'm publishing the documentation alongside the blog.
That includes messages I sent to recruiter Jonathan while I was actively asking for help, including me repeatedly trying to understand what the agency could do for me.
It includes a recording of a conversation in which I was told, in substance, that the agency does nothing in this situation.
My mother also made a call to the agency while this was happening. I have that recording as well. I haven't published or characterized that conversation yet because I am listening to it carefully before I decide what it establishes.
And after everything was over, Morgan Richez, CEO reached out to say that this was NOT their problem and that I had to provide more information to prove that it was. I responded again after additional information came to light.
Then came the silence.
And that matters.
Because this isn't simply a story about one difficult placement or one employer.
It is a story about what happens when a nanny needs the organization that placed her to actually intervene.
And it left me with a question I can't shake:
Who protects the nanny?
Families have resources.
Employers have contracts.
Agencies have businesses to protect.
But when a nanny is in an international placement and something goes seriously wrong, where is the independent protection for the worker?
Who is responsible for helping her get somewhere safe?
Who is responsible for making sure she understands her options?
Who is responsible for intervening when the placement itself has broken down?
Who does she call when the people who placed her there are no longer helping?
And what happens when the agency's relationship with the paying client is fundamentally different from its relationship with the worker?
I don't think those questions should be controversial.
I think they should be basic.
This experience is one of the reasons I began developing the Safety & Autonomy Standards™ Domestic Worker Experience Project & Workplace Conditions Survey.
The standards didn't appear out of nowhere.
They came out of asking what protections a professional domestic worker should reasonably be able to expect before, during, and after a placement.
They came from realizing that “reputable agency” and “protected worker” are not necessarily the same thing.
And they came from realizing that if we don't actually ask domestic workers what happens to them when the system fails, we can keep congratulating ourselves on having a professionalized industry that was built on the backs of black women, while never examining the conditions underneath it.
So I'm asking the question publicly now.
Who protects the nanny?
I'm sharing my experience, the documentation, and the work that grew out of it because I don't want this to end with another private complaint disappearing into another inbox.
I want to understand what protections domestic workers actually have.
And if the answer is that those protections are inadequate, then we need to be honest enough to say so.
This is not about getting another agency to like me.
It's about figuring out what happens to the people who do this work when something goes wrong.
