A Seattle household-staff agency rewrote its rule about nights. Then it wrote one down about phones.
Larchcombe’s new Residence Code follows a former house manager’s claim over on-call hours. It also puts in writing a practice former staff described last year: handing personal phones to the house manager for the whole working day.
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SEATTLE — Larchcombe, the Queen Anne agency that places nannies, house managers and other live-in staff with wealthy households, published the fifth edition of its Residence Code on March 10. It is the first since a former house manager filed a claim last year saying a single sentence in the code had kept her on call, unpaid, for seven years.
That sentence, which said a member of staff who lives in is “part of the household’s night as well as its day,” is gone. In its place, staff who live in may be called on outside their hours in an emergency, and such calls are to be recorded and paid. When Larchcombe answered the claim last June, it said the old line had never meant that staff must work at night. The claim has not been resolved.
The new edition also adds a rule. Where a household requires it, staff hand their personal phone and any other personal device to the house manager at the start of their working hours and collect them at the end. The house manager keeps them and “does not open them,” the code says, and gives the staff member’s family a number at which they can be reached on duty. In a note on the new edition, Larchcombe said the section sets down what households had long asked for and many house managers already did.
For live-in nannies, working hours can run from breakfast to bedtime. Four people who have worked through the agency told The Overseen their phones were held for 12 hours or more on most days. One said she had once waited until 10 p.m. to learn that her father had been taken to hospital that morning. The message had reached the house; it had not reached her.
Larchcombe did not respond to questions about how many of its households hold staff phones, or whether it had considered changing the rule. The agency says every member of staff it places reads and signs the code.
Last September a nanny the agency had placed with a family in Medina left the house one evening and has not been found. Larchcombe has not said whether her phone was held, and police have still not released her name.