Los Angeles ? The rich might be getting richer, but their lives are hardly trouble-free. In Southern California, there aren’t enough servants to go around.

Wealthy families need more chefs to prepare meals, more maids and butlers to serve them, more housekeepers to keep mansions tidy, and more nannies and night nurses to tend offspring.

All this demand is putting Peggy Gardiner in a pretty position. She’s a professionally trained cook, good with children, an expert on laundry. She can do light bookkeeping and boss others. In her last gig, she oversaw a staff of six on a $15 million estate near San Diego.

“My job is like being the best, most organized wife,” Gardiner says. “I’ll do almost anything to make you comfortable.”

Some of her virtues aren’t immediately obvious. She’s respectful of wealth but not awed by it. She’s tight with a buck, something the wealthy always appreciate and frequently require. At 61, happily married with four grandsons and a few extra pounds, she won’t be a temptation to the man of the house or a threat to the woman.

She’s looking for a minimum of $80,000 a year, plus housing, health insurance, three weeks’ paid vacation and what she calls “good vibes,” which means she doesn’t want to work for a manic-depressive again, which she briefly did in Silicon Valley.

“I won’t settle for less,” Gardiner says.

She probably won’t have to, given the thriving market for what the government calls “private household workers.”

“I just filled nine positions, and I could have filled another nine immediately,” says Christopher Baker, who runs Christopher Baker Staffing in Los Angeles.

“The wealthy are living larger than ever. Forget about second homes. Now you have a third home, a fourth home. And these aren’t little shacks. They need staffs.”

The number of private household workers jumped 67 percent in Southern California over the last five years to nearly 150,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This total doesn’t include illegal-immigrant nannies and gardeners or anyone paid off the books.

Dennis Meyers, principal economist at the California Department of Finance, says such strong growth isn’t surprising.

“We have so many new millionaires,” he says.

More than a quarter-million households in the Southland have incomes exceeding $200,000 a year, according to census data, up 45 percent since 1999. There are multiple reasons for the rise, including a robust stock market, President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, the recent real-estate boom and an entrepreneurial economy good at creating wealth.

The burgeoning service industry now has its own glossy magazine, CelebStaff: Managing Mansions and Estates. Its offices are in Beverly Hills.

“For the average Joe, this type of lifestyle is unimaginable,” write the CelebStaff editors, “but those that live it will have it no other way!”

If the average Joe only knew, those in the field say, he could be upgrading his own life by working for the wealthy.

“He could be making $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year at a mansion in Bel Air with museum-quality furnishings rather than cooped up as a $9-an-hour computer programmer in a cubicle in Mid-Wilshire,” says Baker, who started his company in 2004 after a stint as a recruiter for a search firm.

Peggy Gardiner didn’t grow up aspiring to be “staff.” Her life took an upward turn when she married her second husband, Richard, who ran a real-estate investment firm. Before, she went straight for the sales rack. Then Richard said, “Someone should pay retail, and it should be us.” She got a 5-carat diamond ring.

Richard’s business eventually collapsed. Having rejoined the ranks of the working class, Gardiner signed up with Starkey International Institute for Household Management in Denver.

Founded in 1989 by Mary Louise Starkey, it’s one of the few comprehensive training programs for what Starkey, in another terminology upgrade, calls “household or estate managers.” Cost of the eight-week course: $13,000.

Starkey also acts as a placement agency. She says the demand for trained household managers is so great she could immediately find jobs for “hundreds of thousands” of them.

“You don’t have to belittle yourself or degrade yourself to serve,” Starkey says. “Someone is the giver, someone is the receiver. They’re very equal roles.”

There is a lingering stigma to working as a servant, Starkey concedes.

“The roots of household management are in slavery,” she says. “When you go home and tell mom and dad you’re going to take a course in this, they’ll say, ‘You’re nuts to pay $13,000 to be a slave or servant.'”