The author.
The author. Courtesy of Ty Messiah

I’ve been working as a nanny in Seattle for about two years. I enjoy being a nanny because I enjoy working with children and becoming a part of a family outside of my own. It can be demanding at times, but it’s never boring. Unfortunately, the job doesn’t come with any retirement benefits.

But I’m definitely going to need taking care of in retirement, just like everyone else. That’s why I’m organizing with my fellow nannies for higher standards and better benefits in our industry.

And it’s why I was happy to hear about Mayor Burgess’s proposal for a Seattle Retirement Savings Plan, which would ensure more people working in our city have an option to save for retirement.

I’ve been working in childcare for a while now. Before I started working as a nanny, I was an au pair overseas for about a year, and before that I worked at a preschool for a year and a half. Back when I worked in the pre-school, I had a 401k plan for retirement. That made me feel like my community respected me and took care of me because I was taking care of the youth.

Now, I am still taking care of kids as a nanny but I’m not getting a retirement plan from my employer. It feels like my community doesn’t want to take care of me.

And I’m not the only one.

Right now, approximately 200,000 Seattle workers don’t get any retirement at work. That's about 40 percent of workers in the city. It’s even more common for people who work at smaller employers and in certain fields, including domestic work.

That’s why Mayor Burgess’s plan would be a great step forward. I like that it’s designed so signing up would be simple and automatic for employees and employers alike. And just like other kinds of workers, nannies can change jobs fairly often, as kids’ needs change. It’s great that the benefit would be portable so it can follow you from employer to employer.

As a nanny, I love being a part of the developmental process of growth within kids’ minds and within their hearts. Being with the kids makes me feel like a kid again, and I'm able to tap into my inner excitements and childlike joyfulness. That's probably the best part about being a nanny, but that doesn’t mean I should be working for the rest of my life.

Right now, a retirement plan isn’t even really an option for nannies. Even if a family employing a nanny wanted to provide retirement, it wouldn’t be very practical to set up an entire plan for a single employee. That’s why it so important that these things happen across the whole industry or the whole city, as the mayor has proposed.

You may think of being a nanny as something you just do when you can’t find “a real job”, but this is a profession. We just don’t have the standards to match. I know people who have been working in this field as a career for decades, and having a way to save for retirement will make a big difference in getting us the respect we deserve.

Mayor Burgess’s plan is an important step, but I know it won’t solve every problem with retirement. We still need to make sure more people are paid enough to afford to save even a little bit from each paycheck. I’d love to see the plan become more universal, so it covers people who are classified as independent contractors and so my benefits don’t depend on where my employer happens to be located from one job to the next. And while I understand that right now federal law says that employers can’t contribute to these kinds of plans, I’m hoping we can change that law some day too!

Retirement access won’t solve every problem for nannies either. That’s why I’m organizing with others in my industry to form the Seattle Domestic Workers Alliance with Working Washington—so we can raise standards across the board.

Nannies like me work every day providing care for people who need it. We need to be cared for too. And so does everyone who works in our city.

The Seattle Retirement Savings Plan is a bold step forward. Let’s get it passed, and then build on that foundation.

Ty Messiah works as a nanny in Ballard and is a leader in the Seattle Domestic Workers Alliance.