I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.

This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.

I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.

I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.

If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).

The downside is that they get no benefits.

It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.

I grew up with servants (in Subsaharan Africa and Morocco).

However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.

>$12 USD a day which is not a bad deal

For the owner or the servant?

Not a bad deal for who?

The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.

The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?

Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.

I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.

Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.

(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)

How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.