“Part of the household’s night”: a house manager says a Seattle agency’s rules kept her on call for seven years
A former house manager placed by Larchcombe with an Eastside family has filed a claim against the family and the agency over the hours she says she worked at night without pay. Larchcombe says one sentence in its code has been misread.
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SEATTLE — For seven years, from 2017 to 2024, she ran a large house on the Eastside for a family she had been placed with by Larchcombe, a Queen Anne agency that has supplied household staff to wealthy families since 1961. She lived in a room off the back stairs. Last month she filed a claim against the family and against the agency over the hours she says she spent on call.
At the center of the claim is one sentence in the Residence Code, the rules that Larchcombe says every member of staff it has placed since 2011 has read and signed. A member of staff who lives in, it says, “is part of the household’s night as well as its day.”
In practice, the former house manager told The Overseen, that meant a phone on her pillow. She says she was called when an alarm went off, when a guest arrived late from the airport, when a child woke from a nightmare and the parents were away, and when the family wanted something from the kitchen after midnight. None of it, she says, was recorded as work. She estimates that she was woken more than 400 times in her last three years.
She agreed to speak about her own hours, which she says her twenty-year confidentiality agreement does not cover. Larchcombe has written that its agreements do not cover “a member of staff’s own employment.” The Overseen is not naming her because she fears it would end her chances of another placement.
In a statement on June 24, Larchcombe said it does not discuss placements. It said every live-in agreement it has arranged since 1987 sets out hours of work, hours of rest, days off and the rate for further hours, and that the sentence in the code has been read by some as a requirement to work at night. “It is not, and has never been,” the agency wrote, adding that the next edition would say so in plainer words. It is defending the claim.
Three other people who worked live-in through Larchcombe, two of them in the past five years, described similar nights. One, a former nanny, said she had never been paid for a night hour in four years. “Nobody told you to answer the phone,” she said. “Nobody had to.”
Lawyers for the family did not respond to requests for comment.