From Riches to Rags

On TikTok users' complaints about no longer having servants falling on deaf ears.

A once-popular sound on TikTok was the theme song from the Disney Junior show Sofia the First, specifically the line “I was a girl in the village doing alright / Then I became a princess overnight”.

The sound has now been flipped so that it says “I was a princess doing alright / Then I became a girl in the village overnight”, and is largely being used by people who moved from countries in the Global South to western countries to lament the loss of access to cheap servants.

The first video posted under the sound, which has 423 videos at the time of writing, was posted by user dianaaajomaa on February 6th, but the sound didn’t really gain traction until this week.

The text in the video says, “When I go from having our own khademi in lebanon to unloading my own dishwasher”. The struggle is real.

Other highlights include, “When I was happily living in dubai by the beach going to my happy little private school and had my live in nanny who did every single thing for me, a chef, chauffeur for daddys beautiful bmw n then moved to america w no luxuries n need to be completely independent”, and “When we had a driver and a cook in Pakistan and were related to the President and now I live in Southwest VA”. Okay, she’s pulling at my heartstrings there, I wouldn’t wish living in Virginia on anyone.

Fortunately for my sanity, other users were quick to point out what exactly the users were lamenting in their videos: the lack of access to a severely underpaid and often exploited labour class.

“The rich latinos under this sound bragging about their maids/butlers that were probably underpaid and brown/black… y’all are very weird” said one user, while another said, “Not the Saudi girlies flexing ab their servants under this sound like they weren’t forcing them to work for unlivable wages or else they’d get deported and hiding their passports so they couldn’t leave.”

This video from a Mexican creator, lucy.thinks.aloud, is particularly worth watching – she observes, “Why will light-skin Latinas make a whole ass trend under this sound bragging about how they grew up with domestic servants, and then pretend that there is no racism in Latin America? Just one question guys: were all of them dark-skinned Indigenous people?”

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This journal article from 2011 discusses the human rights and health disparities between migrant workers in the UAE, 450,000 of whom are domestic workers, and locals. Domestic workers in the UAE are often victims of debt bondage and are severely underpaid and exploited, as well as experiencing high rates of physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

One TikTok user shared this article from 2017 about an Ethiopian maid in Kuwait who begged for help from her employers before falling from a window ledge. Her employers filmed her instead. Fortunately, she survived.

During COVID, migrant workers in Dubai who had no salaries and no means of getting home found themselves trapped in crowded labour camps.

Circumstances for domestic workers in Latin America aren’t any better. Where many domestic workers in the Middle East come from neighbouring countries, particularly in South Asia and Africa, many in Latin America move from rural areas to cities in order to find work. Many of them, particularly women like Carolina Hernández, are still teenagers when they make the move.

Domestic workers in Mexico are often paid as little as $4 a day, under the table, with no benefits or job security. This was made apparent when COVID hit and many workers were suddenly let go with no notice, or found themselves confined to their employers’ homes and unable to visit their own families.

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Many users pointed out the similarities between the videos and the infamous Tumblr user Sixpenceee. For those not steeped in Tumblr lore, Sixpenceee was a teenager who offered to listen to people’s problems for the low low price of $30. Being a teenager, she didn’t have any training or expertise in this area, leading to other users mocking her project, which she’d dubbed Sixpenceee Heals.

The controversy eventually gained enough traction that people discovered that her family, who she was visiting and staying with in Bangladesh, had a child slave. When asked why she was condoning child labour, she responded:

Trust me if I had control over anything I’d prevent it, but ask any of your Asian friends whether they are from the Philippines or India and they will tell you that their families hire these child labourers. That’s the custom there. They take underprivileged children to work for them and in exchange their families get money. It really sucks, I wish our 8 year old was in school, but that’s what they do here, not just my family but every slightly wealthy family.

Perhaps the nature of online discourse and cultural memory means that every microgeneration is doomed to have their own Sixpenceee. How grim.

My advice for teenagers on TikTok is to read the room, and maybe save the complaints about how hard it is to find good (and underpaid) help for lunch at the country club, and not the internet where anyone can see.