Employers who now earn salaries rather than living off land still picture themselves caught between a feudal past and a modern present. The feudal past serves as a source of nostalgia and supplies lasting assumptions, such as that no household can be run well without servants, while the modern ideal is what they feel they ought to live by.
When household service shifts from lifelong retainers to paid, part-time workers, employers adopt the language of contracts but keep the old language of affection alongside it. The rhetoric of the modern wage contract only partially replaces the rhetoric of love, so the worker is treated as both an employee and 'part of the family' whenever each suits the employer.
Employers establish themselves as middle or upper class through how they hire, manage, and keep servants, not just through income. Having domestic workers is a status marker, and the household becomes a daily site where class differences are produced and reproduced.
The arrangement depends on servants accepting a built-in difference in rank, and that is the premise servants themselves challenge most. Employers experience workers' awareness of their rights as a problem; a servant who knows them is 'difficult to maintain.' Servants in turn judge their employers as people who will not change.
Because domestic work happens inside the home, relations of domination, dependency, and inequality come to feel ordinary and natural. Shifting from live-in loyalty to wage work changes the form of the relationship but leaves the class inequality at its core intact, a pattern found in many other societies.