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2. “No Deal” for Domestic Workers: Activism Before, During, and After the New Deal

“A code for maids! I hope it fails. . . . I work far harder now than my maid does, and longer hours. Besides, no home that is a home, with children and frequent guests, can run strictly by the clock.”—Mid-twentieth-century employer of domestic workers¹

“We mean business this week or no washing.” This was the no-nonsense message from laundry workers to their employers in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881. The women had just formed the Atlanta Washing Society and announced that their members would strike unless given a raise to one dollar per dozen pounds of laundry.² Though the workers washed clothes inside of homes—sometimes inside their own homes—in isolation from other workers, the members of the Atlanta Washing Society evangelized their cause in churches, seeking solidarity among other washerwomen. (The group would grow to as many as three thousand members.)³ Within three weeks of its formation, its demands unmet, the Atlanta Washing Society began a strike.

The city of Atlanta responded to the strike and the group’s recruitment of new members by arresting and fining Washing Society members for disorderly conduct, taxing the group’s membership, and encouraging local businesses to stop hiring women who belonged to the society.⁴ Despite this pressure, the society pushed on, telling the city:

We are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so we can control the washing for the city. We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.⁵

Eventually, the Atlanta city council rejected the idea of imposing fees on the society. Ultimately, as historian Tera W. Hunter of Princeton University has written, the strike resulted in “a greater appreciation for the fact that these women should not be taken for granted because of the role they played in the city’s economy.”⁶

In the decades that followed, domestic workers organized unions and associations to improve their working conditions and to generate solidarity. From 1870 to 1940, there were twenty domestic workers’ unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, in various parts of the country.⁷ Domestic workers also joined the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of the most successful efforts to unionize domestic workers during this time was led by Jane Street and the Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union, IWW Local No. 113, founded in 1916 in Denver, Colorado. Street’s vision for the union was larger than the traditional demands for better wages and shorter hours; she saw the union as a vehicle to “rebalance the power dynamic between mistress and servant.” With its innovative strategies, including the creation of an alternative placement agency, the IWW Local made real gains in increasing wages and improving working conditions.⁸ Similarly, in Harlem, New York, Dora Lee Jones created the Domestic Workers’ Union, organizing seventy-five thousand African American domestic workers in the area.⁹ The group secured a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per week and a maximum workday of ten hours. Jones’s organizing inspired the formation of similar groups in New Jersey and Washington, DC.

One of the more well-known efforts of this period was that of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). At the time, the notion that one couldn’t find “good help” was becoming widespread. In response, the YWCA—comprised primarily of white, middle-class women who wanted to professionalize the industry rather than necessarily be worker advocates—sought, according to Hina Shah and Marci Seville of the Golden Gate University School of Law, to “re-conceptualize the mistress/maid relationship from a feudal one to a modern business contractual relationship, hoping to make the job more desirable for white working women.”¹⁰ The YWCA convened a national conference in 1928, which resulted in the formation of the National Council on Household Employment (NCHE), the goal of which was to “coordinate educational and research activities in the hopes of educating employers and workers, and to gradually work out standards for household employment.”¹¹ The “code for maids” that the NCHE developed—which included overtime, paid time off, and limits on work hours—spread across the country during the 1930s and 1940s. The YWCA also attempted to bring domestic workers’ issues to the attention of the Roosevelt administration, writing proposals to support New Deal protections for domestic workers. The National Recovery Administration, a preeminent New Deal agency, declined, stating that “the homes of individual citizens cannot be made the subject of regulations or restrictions and even if this were feasible, the question of enforcement would be virtually impossible.”¹²

A major flaw in the YWCA’s overall strategy was that its membership and leadership was not comprised of domestic workers. Instead, it was spearheaded by social workers and social scientists. In addition, the NCHE did not garner enough support among employers of domestic workers.¹³ Though, according to Shah and Seville, the organization did begin to “[lay] the groundwork for justifying labor protection in the home as it changed the public’s perception of the home as a place that could not be regulated and standardized,” by 1945 the organization had fallen away.¹⁴ Nevertheless, many of the YWCA’s strategies and end goals are still relevant to today’s movement, including the pursuit of overtime, days of rest, paid time off, and limits on work hours.¹⁵

The New Deal and the Exclusion of Domestic Workers

The New Deal ushered in a progressive ethical and legal framework for the treatment of the American worker, along with a host of federal and state laws regulating minimum wage, overtime, hiring practices, child labor policies, and other working conditions. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932 and ending in the early 1970s, the New Deal era was an outlier from the laissez-faire economics of the 1920s and the neoliberalism and economic deregulation that would follow it beginning in the 1980s.¹⁶ William L. Niemi and David J. Plante of Western State College of Colorado argue:

At its core, the New Deal regime aspired to a political economy with public (i.e., democratic) accountability in the financial system, in the corporate economy more generally, greater citizen equality with a real increase in life opportunities for the poor, women, and minorities (looking forward toward the politics of the 1960s), and hence, greater freedom as equal access to the political, economic, and cultural resources necessary to self-development.¹⁷

Unfortunately, the “life opportunities” the New Deal offered resulted mainly in protections for white workers. Most of the regulations explicitly or implicitly excluded domestic as well as agricultural workers, many of whom were African American. John P. Davis, founder of the National Negro Congress, testified before Congress in 1935 that the decision to exclude particular employees from New Deal legislation would leave black Americans helpless in the face of employers’ abuses and discrimination:

There is not a single thing [in the New Deal legislation] that will prevent the same type of ruthless exploitation of Negro workers. . . . [New Deal legislation] is supposed to be intended to help those workers whose lack of collective bargaining power renders them capable of exploitation by employers. As it stands, it does no such thing. . . . The economic crisis has not lifted for the Negro people. Because they are largely unskilled workers, reemployment for them has been slight. Negro domestic and agricultural laborers—representing the bulk of Negro labor—have had no benefits from the...protective legislation.¹⁸

Domestic workers even made a direct plea to Eleanor Roosevelt, when “Fifteen Weary Housemaids” wrote to the first lady about the Fair Labor Standards Act: “We have read in history books and other books about slavery of long ago, but the way the housemaids must work now from morning till night is too much for any human being. I think we girls should get some consideration as every other labor class has, even though it is housework.”¹⁹

Thus, the New Deal’s commitment to improving conditions for workers did not include all workers, but only a subset whose lives were deemed worthy of protection, regulation, and dignity. Examining two pillars of the New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, reveals how and why certain workers were excluded.

The National Labor Relations Act

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which established the right of workers to organize, bargain collectively, and elect union representatives.²⁰ The law also established the National Labor Relations Board, a regulatory body that conducts elections for union representatives and investigates allegations of unfair labor practices.²¹ Though politics have chipped away at its power and scope over the years, the NLRA continues to play an important role in protecting workers’ ability to organize and collectively bargain.²² However, from the beginning, the NLRA has excluded domestic workers.²³

President Roosevelt did not want the NLRA to exclude any workers.²⁴ The first draft of the act, as introduced by Senator Robert Wagner, defined “employee” as “any person employed by an employer under any contract of hire, oral or written, express or implied, including all contracts entered into by helpers and assistants of employees, whether paid by employer or employee, if employed with the knowledge, actual or constructive, of the employer.”²⁵ During hearings on the bill, Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts pointed out that the law would be challenging for farmers, as “it would permit an organization of employees who work on a farm, and would require the farmer to actually recognize their representatives, and deal with them in the matter of collective bargaining.”²⁶ Subsequent drafts of the bill excluded agricultural and domestic labor, amending the language to state that “the term ‘employee’ shall include any employee . . . but shall not include any individual employed as an agricultural laborer, or in the domestic service of any family or person at his home” (emphasis added).²⁷ When the NLRA ultimately passed the Senate by a vote of sixty-three to twelve, agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from its protections.

This exclusion was the result of a deal struck between Roosevelt and legislators from the Southern states. Roosevelt knew that passage of the NLRA and other New Deal legislation required the support of Southern politicians, which was contingent on the ability of the region’s political economy to continue without limitation—in other words, on the continued supply of the cheap labor of black Americans. The compromise position between FDR and Southern politicians was, in the words of Juan F. Perea of the Loyola University of Chicago School of Law, “race-neutral language that both accommodated the southern desire to exclude blacks but did not alienate northern liberals nor blacks in the way that an explicit racial exclusion would.”²⁸ In the mid-1930s, most black workers in the South were engaged in either domestic work or farm labor. Excluding both types of work from the NLRA guaranteed that these workers could not form unions, reinforcing a racial regime of white domination, and a labor regime of extreme exploitation.

The legislative history of the NLRA does not show overt evidence of racial prejudice. Rather, it reveals concern about the administrative difficulty of extending coverage to agricultural and domestic workers.²⁹ However, Perea argues that this history does in fact have clear racial overtones, and that this racial discrimination renders the NLRA unconstitutional. Evidence of the racial component, he says, is in the exclusion itself: the law could have exempted small businesses, including farms, but instead explicitly excluded specific classes of employees, a decision rooted in Southern legislators’ desire to maintain the economic way of life of the region, which depended on continued exploitation of the African American worker. Though slavery was unconstitutional after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the exploitation of black workers continued for decades in both domestic and agricultural labor, as it was considered essential to the Southern economy.

According to Perea, the NLRA aimed to protect workers’ attempts to bargain collectively mainly for the purpose of avoiding strikes and their resulting costs to business. (The NLRA legislative history notes that over a two-year period, thirty-two million working days were lost to strikes.³⁰) Thus, the real objective of the NLRA was to equalize bargaining power between wage earners and large industrialists, in order to avoid strikes and the resulting disruption of the national economy. But the NLRA set an unfortunate precedent: the exclusion of domestic workers became consistent through all labor legislation of the New Deal era.

Fair Labor Standards Act

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which required a minimum wage, maximum working hours, and overtime pay for workers. Although FLSA ended regional wage differences and began the process of standardizing the way most employees were treated under the law, it applied a narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause to exclude numerous employees either explicitly, like agricultural workers, or implicitly, like domestic workers.³¹ Since private enterprise was not seen as affecting interstate commerce, and domestic work was considered a purely private enterprise, Shah and Seville explain, “domestic work was seen as not affecting interstate commerce...and thus the work was originally considered as not part of FLSA’s coverage.”³²

Like the NLRA, the FLSA excluded domestic workers primarily because Southern legislators wanted to keep wages for black Americans low, with one legislator stating that “agricultural laborers have been explicitly excluded from participation in any of the benefits of New Deal legislation…for the simple and effective reason that it has been deemed politically certain that their inclusion would have spelled death of the legislation in Congress.”³³ Unlike the NLRA, FLSA’s discriminatory intent was much more open and apparent. During the hearings on the legislation, Senator “Cotton” Ed Smith of South Carolina complained about the decay of America as a result of the introduction of African Americans into political society, saying, “I shall not attempt to use the proper adjective to designate, in my opinion, this bill [the FLSA]! Any man on this floor who has sense enough to read the English language knows that the main object of this bill is, by human legislation, to overcome the splendid gifts of God to the South.”³⁴

The concept of equal pay as established by FLSA was just too radical for this era’s racial politics. Enforcing equal pay would have put workers of color on equal footing with white workers.³⁵ Representative J. Mark Wilcox of Florida stated: “You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same [economic] basis and get away with it. Not only would such a situation result in grave social and racial conflicts but it would also result in throwing the Negro out of employment and in making him a public charge. There just is not any sense in intensifying this racial problem in the South, and this bill cannot help but produce such a result.”³⁶

Thus, domestic workers were wholly left out of the first major worker protections the United States had ever seen. The exclusion was so clearly rooted in both racism and sexism that the entanglement of both in rendering domestic work invisible under the law is deeply evident.

Post–New Deal Domestic Worker Policy and Activism

During the mid-part of the twentieth century, pockets of domestic worker activism remained but did not emerge as a major force in the civil rights movement. Preeminent legislation of the era such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in employment but applied only to employers of fifteen or more people.³⁷ This naturally excluded households, as most would not employ that many nannies or caregivers. The Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act included similar employee-number thresholds.³⁸