Ministry Of Magic Pioneers Ethical Use Of House Elves
Across all income brackets, wizarding families report higher levels of stress from having less personal time to spend on themselves and loved ones.
Compounding all this is housework, because coming home from work is just a prelude to the never-ending tasks of homemaking like cooking, cleaning and looking after children.
To remove the burden of housework for Wizarding families, the Ministry of Magic is launching the Strategic Labour Allocation and Validation for Elves (S.L.A.V.E) initiative today!
What is S.L.A.V.E?
S.L.A.V.E is the nationalization of all house elves into a centrally managed, for-profit Housework-as-a-service (HaaS) platform that will be run by the Ministry’s Department of Welfare.
This platform serves as a clearing house, matching supply and demand for housework and connecting excess house elf capacity with the needs of our wizards and witches.
Working class wizards and witches are the heart of our magical community and by democratizing access to house elves, we ensure no one has to spend time on housework ever again.
How does S.L.A.V.E work?
All you need to do is download our app (note: you will need to provide all your personal information to sign up), select the housekeeping service you want and watch as our professionally trained house elves immediately apparate in and take care of all your housework. It’s as simple as that!
Wizards and witches can seamlessly choose from a variety of flexible, affordable monthly plans:
Bronze Tier (ʛ100/month): Covers basic cleaning and tidying
Silver Tier (ʛ200/month): Includes all Bronze services plus laundry and basic meal preparation
Gold Tier (ʛ300/month): Our premium offering for discerning wizards and witches, including gourmet cooking, childcare, and priority access to our most highly-rated elves and a ‘no-questions-asked’ replacement policy
After each task is completed, you’ll be prompted to rate your house elf on a five-star scale. This feedback ensures a consistently magical experience.
There is also a semi-annual review process where our house elves are performance managed based on clear, transparent KPIs; underperformers receive additional capability building to get them up to par.
All house elves have quarters on Ministry grounds, which allows us to provide a standard of care that was hard to enforce when they were still private property.
Now as public property, house elves are better off than ever before.
Every house elf is guaranteed shelter, food, and care - they have everything they need to stay alive when not working. Crucially, living with other house elves lets them build community in a way that was impossible before.
Together, they can try to find meaning in a life dedicated to eternal, uncompensated and never-ending servitude.
Why would the house elves agree to this?
Even though house elves are sentient, conscious living beings that can feel emotions like pain and guilt and are intelligent enough to converse with us, it is morally wrong and ethically reprehensible to assume they do not want to live a life of eternal slavery.
Organizations like S.P.E.W have revealed the consequences of such bigoted, muggle-headed projections. We have documented multiple cases of severe depression and other mental health issues when house elves are freed because they are forced to self-actualize.
At the Ministry, we take pride in resisting the insidious tug of human empathy from seeing sentient living things capable of experiencing pain in perpetual servitude.
However, we do draw the line at undocumented disciplinary actions like physical abuse and beheadings, so the S.L.A.V.E programme is our way of protecting house elves from the privations of uncaring owners.
By making sure they are alive and always healthy enough to work, we empower house elves to fully live their life’s purpose of serving humans.
If anything, we are building on the admirable, if misguided, efforts for house elf emancipation through this massive consolidation of managed, enslaved magical labour.
S.L.A.V.E provides the structured master-slave dialectic house elves psychologically crave, all housed within a progressive, safe, and economically dynamic system.
We aren’t taking away their purpose - we are optimizing it.
With this programme, house elves will never need to worry about being free ever again.
Closing
At the Ministry of Magic, we believe in corporate innovation with a conscience.
With S.L.A.V.E, we are democratizing access to domestic help that was simply not available before. No longer will house elf labor be the reserve of the privileged few, taken for granted by the social elite.
It is now a transparent, standardized service sector forming a vibrant pillar of our magical economy.
For our conservative constituents who might misconstrue this as “nationalizing slavery”, know that house elves are better off than ever before.