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INTRODUCTION

“Care can never be valued if its givers are exploited.”—Michael Lyon, San Francisco Gray Panthers and Hand in Hand

Chevy Chase, Maryland, is a charming, upper-crust town of just under one thousand residents. Maple and oak trees line the streets, and houses are worth nearly a million dollars. The median family income is about $140,000 per year. It was here that Fatima Cortessi, at the age of twenty, landed after leaving her home country of Paraguay in 2011.¹

The deal that brought Fatima to America seemed—as it so often does for domestic workers—solid: $1,000 per month to clean, cook, and care for the children of a couple living in the United States. The first few months went smoothly, with Fatima settling into her new country. Though she spoke no English, the couple she was working for promised to help her enroll in English classes and possibly attend college.

Around month four of her new life in the United States, however, things began to fall apart for Fatima. First, the husband, also a native of Paraguay, became emotionally abusive. “You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. You owe me,” he started telling her on a regular basis. In addition, the couple wouldn’t always pay her regularly. When she asked for her money, Fatima would receive $100 or $150 at most. Not that Fatima had any time to spend her money, as her days began at six in the morning, when she fed the children and got them ready for school. After the kids left, Fatima would spend the rest of the morning cleaning the house and caring for the family dog. At two o’clock, the children would come home from school and Fatima would take care of them, cook for the family in the evening, and then clean up after everyone. If she was lucky, she’d be in bed by nine thirty or ten o’clock. She slept on a sofa in the basement, which she shared with the dog. And she worked weekends as well.

At some point, the couple Fatima was working for separated and moved into different homes. Fatima’s job became twice as hard, as she was now responsible for cleaning both houses, for the same amount of money. Since she had never been taught how to use the local public transit system, she was required to ride a bike from one house to the other—while taking the dog with her.

This situation continued for a year and a half, at which point the couple said they could no longer afford to pay Fatima the same amount of money; she was forced to find work cleaning other homes while still working for her original family part-time. Eventually, she shared her story with one of her new employers. “They can’t do this to you,” the woman said, after Fatima revealed the saga of the past eighteen months of her life. The woman told Fatima about Casa de Maryland, an immigrant rights organization. It was there that Fatima met attorney Sheena Wadhawan. And that was when Fatima’s life began to change.

Advocates from Casa de Maryland helped Fatima move out of the home she had been living in for the past eighteen months. Wadhawan determined that the couple owed Fatima upward of $30,000, and Fatima sued for unpaid wages and overtime. Of critical importance to Fatima’s case, Maryland law does not exclude domestic workers from overtime pay—as a number of states do. The couple offered to settle for $10,000, and Fatima ultimately accepted their offer. Tired of letting this couple control her life, Fatima just wanted to move on. She now lives a life free of abuse, earns money cleaning houses, and is learning English through classes organized by Casa de Maryland. She also attends weekly meetings with other women who have experienced this type of employment abuse. “I had such low self-esteem because of this situation,” Fatima says. “And Casa de Maryland helped me regain my self-confidence.”

Casa de Maryland has been working on immigrant rights issues since its founding in 1985 by Central American refugees. In response to a growing need among immigrant populations, the organization now focuses extensively on low-income workers, with a special concentration on women.² Casa de Maryland is among the many multiethnic community organizing and legal aid nonprofits throughout the country that have built the foundation of today’s domestic workers’ movement—acting as “domestic insurgents,” as one article dubbed them.³

Not all domestic workers’ experiences are rife with mistreatment, as Fatima Cortessi’s was. Like most sectors, domestic work encompasses a range of situations and environments. Fatima’s experience was far different, for example, from that of Tania, a nineteen-year-old nanny in Oakland, California. “For Tania, we are like her extended family,” says Meg Yardley, Tania’s employer and a member of Hand in Hand, a national network of employers of nannies, house cleaners and home attendants. Tania cares for Meg’s two children, her four-year-old daughter, Laurel, and her four-month-old son, Owen.⁴ “Tania would come over for work and Laurel would be so happy to see Tania that her whole body would wiggle,” Meg says. “I need to work to earn enough for my family, and I really like my job. So it feels good to leave my children with someone they love.” Tania is now expecting her first baby. When the child comes, she will care for Meg’s children along with her own.

Fatima and Tania’s contrasting stories reflect the uncertainty and luck inherent in domestic labor. Whether a domestic worker will be treated with fairness and dignity or exploited and abused depends on the whims, character, and awareness of her employer as well as where in the world she happens to be. And what exacerbates this uncertainty encourages this subjectivity is the variable legal status of the work itself: domestic workers are far less likely to be protected by the laws that regulate most other sectors of employment. Globally, more than 40 percent of domestic workers are not legally entitled to earn a minimum wage, while one-third are not eligible for maternity leave.⁵ And this is despite the fact that domestic work is a swiftly expanding sector of the global economy, having grown from thirty-two million domestic workers worldwide in 1999 to eighty to one hundred million today, fifteen million of whom are children.⁶ Nearly 85 percent of domestic workers today are women. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), approximately one in thirteen wage-earning women in the world are domestic laborers.⁷

In the United States alone, numerous key labor and employment regulations, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and various occupational safety regulations, have historically excluded domestic workers. The nearly two million domestic workers in the United States—and the millions worldwide—are treated as a casual, ancillary part of the workforce, neglected by labor laws, even as they take on the most crucial work for families and communities, cleaning homes and caring for children and the elderly.⁸ Even when there are protections in place, many domestic workers like Fatima are from foreign countries, do not speak the local language well, face challenges negotiating wages and terms of employment, and are often unaware of their rights. Love and compassion are a central part of being a nanny or caregiver, yet many live and labor in subpar conditions and receive little or no respect for their work, in addition to being excluded from legal protections.

A movement to establish labor protections for domestic workers, and to render them visible in political and economic terms, has gained impressive momentum worldwide over the last fifteen years. Multiple actors in the feminist-labor-activist realms—including nonprofit advocacy and legal organizations like Casa de Maryland, traditional labor unions, lawyers, and policymakers representing many diverse ethnic groups—have deepened their advocacy on behalf of domestic workers, appealing directly to the public to build support. These efforts have resulted in concrete policy and cultural changes, bringing to light the value of domestic work and the systemic exclusion of domestic workers from labor protections. The first major victory of the movement was the passage of New York State’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in 2010, which affected an estimated two hundred thousand domestic workers. California and Hawaii have since followed suit.⁹

Activism in the United States is fostering change at the international level as well, evidenced by the ILO passing the Domestic Workers Convention, along with increased activism among domestic workers in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and Singapore.¹⁰ Activism abroad is perhaps even more crucial, given that the situation of domestic workers in non-Western countries is often far more dire than that of domestic workers in the United States.¹¹ Despite some significant setbacks along the way—including Governor Jerry Brown’s veto of California’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in 2012—the movement for domestic workers’ rights has quickly achieved policy reforms and has the potential to transform over the long term the ways in which domestic labor is valued throughout the world.

Above all else, the movement is cultivating the leadership of domestic workers themselves, who have been central to the lobbying and legislative activities being undertaken on their behalf. “Know-your-rights” trainings and community organizing are becoming common practices among domestic workers in many cities in the United States, as well as globally. The movement is also an illustration of how labor law has evolved, with change no longer driven by behemoth legislation like the NLRA but by smaller-scale, group-based advocacy. The movement’s objective does not end with more regulations; the overarching goal is achieving empowerment and justice for a vulnerable population of workers, revealing domestic labor’s value to the broader economy, and establishing its social and cultural dignity.

This book focuses on the ways in which the current movement empowers domestic workers in the United States and globally to advocate for themselves. Beginning with an analysis of domestic labor’s roots in slavery, this book explores the specific ways in which preeminent labor laws have failed to recognize domestic labor historically, as well as early attempts by domestic workers to address these failures. Subsequent chapters focus on the emergence of the current domestic workers’ movement, in particular its strategies and leadership. Finally, this book analyzes the domestic workers’ movement in the broader context of modern labor trends and considers the implications of immigration reform and the waning influence of traditional unions. Fundamentally, this is a book about activism; about the vision and leadership of that activism, the ways that activism is influencing policy in the United States, and the impact of US-based activism on workers in the rest of the world.

What Is Domestic Work, and Why Isn’t It Valued?

A key premise of this book is that domestic labor is generally believed to be void of economic value, and that the current movement for domestic workers’ rights is doing critical work to change this perception. But before delving more deeply into this idea, it is worth discussing what “domestic work” is, why it should be included within labor protections, and how it contributes to the economy.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance issued a report in 2012 presenting survey data about the treatment of domestic workers nationally. The report’s foreword, written by author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, describes exactly what domestic work is and why it is unique:

Domestic work is, by necessity, intensely personal in nature. A nanny is entrusted with the care and wellbeing of the employers’ most precious loved ones. She is a witness to all the family’s foibles and dysfunctions, sometimes even a confidante to her employers. Though a housecleaner may make little verbal contact with her employers, they have few secrets from her. She changes their sheets, dusts their desktops, scrubs their bathroom counters, and sometimes overhears their quarrels. The caretaker for an elderly or disabled person often functions explicitly as a companion, providing conversation and emotional support, as well as help with dressing and bathing.¹²

The report goes on to point out the differences between “reproductive”—work performed within the domestic or private sphere—and “productive” economies, and how each one is valued, or devalued:

Domestic work is unseen in the way that most work dedicated to cleaning and caring is unseen. At the end of the domestic worker’s day, no durable goods or consumer products have been created or distributed; neither the flow of capital nor the accumulation of profits has been directly served. Instead, a child is another day older and still safe and healthy. An elderly parent is well fed and attended to. The absence of dirt on a kitchen floor is silent witness to a laboring hand. In a capital-dominant world, work that does not appear to produce value or facilitate its exchange is devalued and rendered socially invisible. Yet this labor, whether performed by a family member or by an employee, supports and subsidizes all other productive work.¹³

Consistent with the invisible nature of “women’s work,” the legal history of domestic work has been one of exclusion from protection and recognition. What is at the root of this sweeping, global, systemic failure of law and policy to protect people who take on the caring responsibilities for homes, children, and elders? What causes ordinarily “upstanding” people of means to mistreat other human beings so egregiously? Unfortunately, contemporary feminist dialogue has failed to provide us with a better understanding of these questions. Until relatively recently, not many feminist thinkers and writers focused on this issue. In a 2013 article in Dissent titled “Trickle-Down Feminism,” author Sarah Jaffe wrote about how feminist energy has been misplaced, with writers devoting countless articles to dissecting the every move of wealthy superwomen like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer instead of the economic trends that impact so many more women’s lives, such as the rapid growth of domestic work.¹⁴

Despite this gap in modern-day feminist writing, decades of feminist theory have addressed this question of how to value reproductive labor through an examination of the economics of the public and private spheres, and our socio-cultural perceptions of each. The intimacy inherent to domestic work is sometimes given as the argument for why domestic work should not be included within labor protections: it is supposed to be work that comes from the heart, rooted in love, an extension of a woman’s “natural” tendencies—thus not necessarily worthy of compensation or labor protections.¹⁵ However, the fallacy of this framework has been clear to feminists for years. Writers from Gloria Steinem to Angela Harris to Mariarosa Dalla Costa have shed light on the view that domestic labor is labor worthy of economic value. A confluence of contemporary circumstances is finally enabling theories and understandings of the domestic sphere to take shape as policy and cultural change.

Historically, feminist theory helped establish the framework within which domestic labor is now being recognized in law and policy, and which guides the consciousness of many domestic workers’ rights advocates today. Take Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, a pamphlet published in 1972.¹⁶ By using a “feminist reading of Marx to challenge the left orthodoxy on the role of women,” Dalla Costa and James were among the first to apply Marxism to the gendered division of labor, analyzing how domestic labor has always been completely invisible to capital markets:

Serving men and children in wageless isolation had hidden that we were serving capital. Now we know that we are not only indispensable to capitalist production in those countries where we are 45% of their waged labour force. We are always their indispensable workforce, at home, cleaning, washing and ironing; making, disciplining and bringing up babies; servicing men physically, sexually and emotionally.¹⁷

Dalla Costa and James also praised the ideas of Malcolm X and other black intellectuals who tied together the relationship between racial injustice and labor inequality; they applied all these principles to their organizing work, reflected in the International Wages for Housework Campaign, founded by James, which demanded that the government compensate work that took place inside the home. Dalla Costa and James’s relevance is clear today, with the domestic workers’ movement slowly shifting legal, societal, and cultural opinions about what type of labor ought to be valued, who performs the labor that is valued, and why some labor is generally invisible to capital markets. Barbara Ehrenreich remarked upon their work in 2000, stating that “Marxist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James proposed in 1972 that the home was in fact an economically productive and significant workplace, an extension of the actual factory, since housework served to ‘reproduce the labor power’ of others, particularly men.”¹⁸

In her 1994 essay “Revaluing Economics,” Gloria Steinem argued that labor is valued in accordance with prevailing social constructs about race, sex, and class. Jobs in high finance are valued with comfortable compensation, for example, while the work of caring for people is often deemed unworthy of a minimum wage. “Categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require—or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market—than by the sex, race and class of most of their workers,” Steinem wrote.¹⁹ The sex, race, and class of domestic workers are overwhelmingly female, non-white, and low-income or poor.

Consistent with Steinem’s analysis, America’s relationship to those who work within the domestic sphere has long been troubled and generally starved of the political will to protect and regulate. Slavery, which was legal in the United States until 1865 and still exists globally to varying degrees, has influenced how domestic laborers are currently treated. In addition to having no legal freedom or power over their own lives, slaves who labored in American homes were subject to unspeakable cruelty, sexual assault, and abuse. As the United States has evolved away from slavery to New Deal–era labor policies and to an economy influenced by globalization, the line connecting slavery to paid domestic work continues to be deeply intertwined. The blog Gender Across Borders corroborates this idea, noting, “In patriarchal power dynamics, domestic work is typically assigned to a woman of the household. In a society with great income disparities, if this woman is rich, she can delegate her domestic work to another, poorer woman.”²⁰

Scholar V. Spike Peterson discusses the economic value of “subject formation,” which is what rearing children and caring for adults is all about:

Feminists have long argued that subject formation matters structurally for economic relations. It produces individuals who are then able to “work” and this unpaid reproductive labour saves capital the costs of producing key inputs. It also instills attitudes, identities and belief systems that enable societies to function.²¹

Peterson goes on to discuss the irony of how pro-family ideology and the romanticization of childbirth and rearing does not equate to economic support for these activities:

In spite of romanticised motherhood and a glut of pro-family rhetoric, neoliberal globalisation reduces the emotional, cultural and material resources necessary for the wellbeing of most women and families…. Women everywhere are increasing the time they spend on reproductive labour, in ensuring food availability and health maintenance for the family, in providing emotional support and taking responsibility for young, ill and elderly dependents. Mothers often curtail their own consumption and healthcare in favour of serving family needs, and daughters (more often than sons) forfeit educational opportunities when extra labour is needed at home.²²

Peterson points out that this enhanced stress and pressure to serve the domestic sphere, and the lack of resources in support of that service, impacts whole families and communities:

The effects are not limited to women because the increased burdens they bear are inevitably translated into costs to their families, and hence to societies more generally.

Peterson also explains domestic work in the context of the “informal economy” and its impact on the “formal” or “productive” economy:

Domestic labor, or social reproduction, produces labor power (workers) upon which the formal economy depends. One important effect is that this “free” (unpaid) labor benefits employers, who do not have to pay the full costs of producing the labor force.

Feminist scholars have also pointed out the exclusion of domestic workers from New Deal–era labor rights legislation under the FLSA, the NLRA, the Social Security Act, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As Angela Harris has noted:

The creation of the idea of two spheres, private and public, is integral to a structural liberalism framework that continues to redistribute wealth and power upwards. The creation of a private sphere that should be free from government intervention is at the heart of the continued subjugation of domestic workers. It is a distinction invented by White supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and codified into law in key locations that facilitate the exploitation of Black and immigrant women.²³

Labor patterns that emerged during the Industrial Revolution illustrate Peterson’s and Harris’s assertions. Attorney and scholar Terri Nilliasca also points out that

domestic work is women’s work. The Industrial Revolution led to a restructuring of the family that required a new, gendered division of work. Work dealing with the reproduction of labor such as child care, food preparation, household maintenance, and elder care was relegated to the “private” unpaid sphere…. The “cult of domesticity” arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, solidifying boundaries between the “public” and the “private” home sphere. The heterosexual family became sanctified as a respite from the competitive industrial world, and women became responsible for the creation of that sanctuary. The resulting regulatory and legal frameworks furthered this social construction, treating “housework as indistinguishable from other private family matters while treating paid labor as relevant to legal doctrine.”²⁴

The consequence of this exclusion is that private-sphere laborers exist in an underworld unattached by the regulations, codes, and mores that govern public-sphere work. Legal scholar Janie A. Chuang wrote in a 2010 essay that “labeling housework as ‘care’ signals that work in the home is divorced from economic entitlements. Labor rights considered normal in the formal economy (e.g., minimum wage, days off, vacation, and fixed working hours) are not viewed as necessary or even appropriate in the context of work in a private household.”²⁵

The Current Political Surge

With feminist theory serving as a philosophical foundation, the social movement for greater awareness about domestic workers’ rights is growing, building alliances with feminist and political leaders of a variety of stripes, and effectively utilizing social media. It is clear that setbacks—such as Governor Brown’s 2012 veto in California—do not deter the tenacious organizers at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Caring Across Generations, Jobs with Justice, and other groups that are mobilizing domestic workers around the country, advocating for state and federal policy changes, and raising awareness among employers and high-profile leaders within a wide range of movements.

This book will explore the roots of this rising movement, its strategies and successes, as well as why, after such a long history of exclusion, the conditions are ripe for expanded protections and standards for domestic workers. Against the backdrop of the current economy—rife with unemployment, part-time employment, and contract and freelance work, and with fewer and fewer opportunities for security or chances to climb out of poverty—many of the themes that these advocates are fighting for bleed into the experiences of American workers generally. Sick days, paid vacation, and paid family leave continue to be rarities for many workers. The domestic workers’ rights movement is helping to elevate American consciousness about how the individual worker ought to be treated—and how our policies can evolve to match this aspiration. The movement is multiethnic, reflective of not only the changing immigrant and racial demographics of America but specifically the impact of feminist ideology on women of color and how race, gender, and ideology are intersecting.

Why, after centuries of exclusion, is this surge of activism occurring at this point in time (rather than, for example, during the New Deal era, when workers in America were first claiming their rights)? Priscilla Gonzalez, who for ten years was the leader of Domestic Workers United, believes the reason is “intersectional feminist thought coupled with the increase of women of color and immigrant women in the US feminist community.”²⁶ Intersectional feminist analysis has evolved in the United States to the point where feminist women of color, often the children of immigrants, are putting forward a vision for justice that is winning funding, political and cultural allies, and major legislative reforms that for the first time recognize and include domestic work. As this book will note, though domestic workers have organized before, the recent surge of sustained and successful activism is unprecedented. “This iteration of organizing domestic workers has been most sustained, and I feel like in general, a lot of organizing efforts were hard to sustain in prior time periods,” says Gonzalez, adding, “And this is in part because our vision is not limited to just wanting to win rights for domestic workers.” According to Gonzalez, movement leaders like Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, are third-wave feminists who understand intersectional analysis and how domestic workers are not just women, are not just workers, are not just immigrants, are not just women of color, but are all of these things. “Ai-jen and the other leaders of this movement understand that we needed to move on many different fronts: in the labor spaces, in the women’s rights spaces,” Gonzalez says. “We have never believed in silos. We have always made these natural bridges. We do not compartmentalize identities. There is a key shift among feminists of color in this country. That is one important piece that is generating the current domestic workers’ movement.”

Intersectional feminist thinking and practice is the most important influence in this movement for dignity and basic standards for workers who care for people young, ill, and old. In addition to grasping the importance of asserting their personal identities, domestic workers know the importance of love and compassion in their work—and they are now joining with their fellow domestic workers to harness this love and compassion to improve their lives.