As billionaires and millionaires multiply, private staffing, nannies, chefs, house managers, personal assistants, chauffeurs, have become a fast-growing, high-paying sector that is attracting Gen Z. But beneath the perks is a structural triangle: extreme power asymmetry, the commodification of intimate care, and a legal gap that leaves workers exposed.
Business Insider reports that when Cassidy O’Hagan looked out over the Maldives in December, she didn’t feel like a tourist; she felt like she’d found a career. At 28, the Colorado native was living in a private villa, earning a six-figure salary, and taking home benefits like a 401(k), healthcare, PTO, and chef-cooked meals.
How Intimacy Creates Extreme Power Asymmetry
Working in private households often means living in the same rhythms as the employer. Cassidy describes it plainly, “You’re not just working for a family, you’re living alongside them, immersed in their rhythms, dynamics, and private moments.”
That closeness produces enormous employer control over hours, privacy, movement, and even off-duty life. Many roles require NDAs and “squeaky clean” social media, curating staff as part of the family brand.
The industry reinforces this imbalance structurally. Brian Daniel, who founded the Celebrity Personal Assistant Network, points out that each ultrawealthy principal “employs small armies of people to cater to their every whim,” which concentrates employer power in private hands.
When a worker lives on site, answers late messages, or is expected to step into unexpected crises, the private employer’s rules become the worker’s schedule.
That dynamic converts personal boundaries into contractual grey areas. The job ad that promises “covered meals” can translate into a full in-house chef feeding staff and family alike; “rotational nanny” can mean constant availability across properties.
Workers exchange conventional workplace protections for close access, and the employer gains outsized control over intimate, everyday moments.
Personality- First Priority
Private staffing prizes a particular kind of worker: discreet, socially fluent, and brand-ready. Agencies and principals increasingly select for “curatorial fit”, a person whose Instagram is clean, whose demeanour is measured, and whose emotional labour blends into the household aesthetic.
That is a form of branding: the worker becomes part of the family’s public and private stage. As Daniel notes, the sector now attracts college-educated entrants, even PhDs and lawyers, who are expected to match the principal’s lifestyle.
Emotional labour is central. Staff must modulate temperament, manage household tensions, and often perform caregiving that is deeply personal.
Cassidy’s experience, spending holidays, birthdays, and celebrations with employers rather than her own family, shows how the requirement to be emotionally present can become a 24/7 demand. The consequence is real loneliness and blurred boundaries, despite the pay.
That “fit” economy also makes workers replaceable and simultaneously hyper-valuable. The better the fit, the higher the pay and perks; the wrong social media post or boundary bump can cost a job. Human beings become branded service roles, valued for personality as much as for skill.
Gen Z’s Rejection Of The Corporate Dream
The market for elite private service hasn’t grown by accident. The number of billionaires has exploded since 2000 (Forbes counted 322 in 2000 and more than 3,000 today), and UBS calls out a parallel boom in everyday millionaires, people with $1–5 million in investable assets quadrupling to about 52 million over 25 years.
Brian Daniel estimates roughly 1,000 private staffing agencies worldwide (about 500 in the U.S.) to meet that demand.
Those billions create many high-paying roles. Staffing listings spotlight the sums: Tiger Recruitment posted openings with head-of-personal-assistants roles paying $250k–$280k, directors of residences at $200k–$250k, nannies up to $150k, and housekeepers up to $120k.
For many young people, those salaries eclipse entry-level corporate pay. Cassidy moved from $65k in medical sales to an instant $40k bump and the lifestyle perks she’d been missing.
Gen Z is responding. A 2025 Deloitte survey found that only 6% of Gen Zers say their primary career goal is to become a workplace leader; many now prioritise autonomy, balance, and meaning.
At the same time, an Empower survey shows Gen Z’s definition of financial success skews high (around $600,000). Private staffing answers both impulses: high pay, mobility, and work that feels relational rather than corporate.
Also Read: This Generation Chooses Working As Nannies Over Corporate Jobs
Why This Care Economy Needs Legal Protection
High pay and perks mask sharp legal gaps. Private household work often sits outside the clear protections of standard workplaces. Many roles are technically domestic, live-in, or intermittently gig-like.
NDAs, clean social media clauses, and amorphous “on-call” expectations complicate the enforceability of basic rights: overtime pay, predictable leave, transparent grievance procedures, and data privacy.
Ruth Edwards, a recruiter at Tiger, warns that many staff must be on call outside a 9-to-5 and work long hours; the industry’s flexibility can easily become exploitative.
The human cost shows up in real ways. Daniel once described stepping to the hospital after a panic attack triggered by a high-stress day as an assistant, a striking reminder that emotional cost can exceed Wall Street stress.
Even when families offer benefits like a 401(k) or guaranteed hours, enforcement and recourse are inconsistent. Who investigates if a principal violates the terms of employment when their home is private and shielded by NDAs? Where does a live-in nanny raise a grievance?
Absent stronger regulation, the industry creates two tiers: principals with the means to supply decent contracts and small teams, and a far larger pool of workers whose terms are informal and enforceable only through reputation or agency placement. That gap invites exploitation and leaves workers with limited legal remedies.
Turning Family Roles Into Salaried Services
Care used to be embedded in kinship and community networks. As private staffing professionalises care, selling meal prep, childcare, elder support, and household management for six-figure sums, those tasks become market transactions.
The immediate result: more choice, better pay for some, and the ability for families to outsource intense labour. But commodification also strips away informal supports that once made care sustainable.
When a care task is packaged and priced, its moral and social framing changes. Children’s care becomes a billable service with performance standards, holidays become contractual hours, and intimacy becomes a deliverable.
For workers, this can create clarity (a defined role and pay) but also pressure: once caregiving is a commodity, clients expect consistent, measurable results, and may treat setbacks (sick kids, emotional days) as service failures rather than shared human experience.
There’s another irony: commodifying care expands work while shrinking public policy responses. As demand for private staff soars alongside the rise of high-net-worth households, governments and labour regulators lag in adapting rules that treat caregiving as essential labour needing protections, not a luxury amenity.
Expanding Care Economy
If private staffing is a fast-expanding slice of the care economy, it needs fit-for-purpose rules. First, labour law must catch up: portable benefits for live-in staff, enforceable overtime, clear leave entitlements, and accessible grievance channels that work across private homes.
Registration or licensing of placements and agencies could help, not to deter entry, but to set baseline standards for contracts, data privacy, and dispute resolution.
Second, industry practices must evolve. Ethical hiring practices, transparent pay bands (like those Tiger-style listings provide), written scopes of work, limits on off-hour expectations, and explicit data/privacy clauses in NDAs would reduce ambiguity.
Agencies can build accreditation programs that certify both staff training and employer standards, and foster collective bargaining possibilities for roles that are repeated across properties (yacht crews, travel nannies, residence directors).
Third, new business models can align incentives: portable retirement and healthcare tied to agency placement; pooled grievance services; and digital platforms that record hours and contracts without exposing workers to reputational risks.
Cassidy’s plan to start an agency and coaching business points to an organic solution, workers building institutions that professionalise care rather than leaving it ad hoc.
The private staffing boom is a clear symptom of two big trends: an explosion of concentrated wealth, and a generation recalibrating what work should be. For Gen Z, swapping a corporate ladder for the globe-trotting, high-paying intimacy of private service can be smart and liberating.
But it also exposes a troubling structural mix: extreme employer power over personal life, the emotional and branding forces that make humans into curated service roles, and an underregulated market that can slip into exploitation.
The fix is threefold. Acknowledge the power asymmetry, close legal gaps so intimate labour has basic rights, and design ethical industry practices and business models that treat care as essential work, not just a luxury to be bought.
If those pieces come together, private staffing can be a decent, dignified career, not only for a few Cassidys who “made it,” but for the hundreds of thousands providing the quiet labour behind our wealthiest lives.
Images: Google Images
Sources: Business Insider, The Guardian, The Times of India
Find the blogger: Katyayani Joshi
This post is tagged under: mental health, gen z trends, care economy, emotional labour, india youth, digital wellbeing, relationship dynamics, therapy culture, modern dating, adulting struggles, gen z lifestyle, india perspectives, work life balance, wellness economy, social media impact, youth culture india, personal growth, modern relationships, mental health awareness, gen z conversations
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