In a Day's Work Page 8

  He was aware that employing an undocumented worker was a risky proposition. It is illegal to hire undocumented immigrants, and though the government has historically focused on deporting workers rather than punishing employers, the consequences for companies and bosses include financial penalties and in some cases, criminal prosecution.1

  Meanwhile workers in any industry who don’t have the proper papers to work in the United States—whether they are hired to harvest vegetables or vacuum office buildings—operate from a position of economic precariousness. “To get work undocumented, it was difficult,” Barrett says.

  The challenge of finding a job without valid work papers was what kept janitors like Georgina Hernández or farmworkers like Blanca Alfaro tethered to their jobs even if they were mistreated or abused. Barrett found a way out of her predicament when her sister, Judy, came to the rescue. Her twin was living and working in Florida as a domestic worker, and she helped Barrett find a temporary live-in gig in Miami. Barrett took a Greyhound bus from the Northeast to Florida. The job would give her room and board for a few months, but it didn’t pay. While this type of arrangement is not uncommon in domestic work, it flouts minimum wage laws.

  Nevertheless, the job bought Barrett some time to figure out her next move. It also forced her to confront a discordant reality: as a domestic worker in search of the American Dream, she had taken one in only a handful of jobs in the United States that has been excluded from laws meant to shield workers from abuse.

  Laws that protect workers in the United States from exploitation date back to the federal programs launched in the 1930s under the New Deal. Among the key legislative reforms were the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gave workers the right to form unions and to bargain collectively for improved working conditions. Then came the Federal Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established requirements for minimum wage and overtime.

  As these laws were being drafted, domestic workers and farmworkers were purposely excluded, a development that scholars attribute to the fact that they were jobs primarily done by African Americans.

  As the country’s most fundamental labor laws were crafted, white Southern legislators steeped in the legacy of slavery sought to maintain the racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South and resisted extending worker protections to African American laborers. Knowing that Northern legislators would not approve—and federal law would prohibit—overt racial exclusions from these laws, excluding specific categories of work served as the next best option. “Since most southern blacks were employed as agricultural and domestic laborers, that occupational classification became an ostensibly race-neutral way to exclude blacks by proxy,” Juan F. Perea, a law professor with Loyola University School of Law in Chicago, wrote in a paper about worker-related New Deal legislation.2

  As labor done disproportionately by African American women, domestic work was further devalued and marginalized on the bases of both race and gender. Legal scholars Hina Shah and Marci Seville have argued that “the racial disdain for the black servant—‘a despised race to a despised calling’—justified labeling the work as ‘nigger’s work.’ As such, society easily disregarded domestic labor as not being real work, worthy of fair and equal treatment.”3 Premilla Nadasen, a historian and author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, similarly describes paid household work as a “degraded occupation” because it was work done in the domestic sphere by women of color.4

  As federal protections for American workers have expanded, domestic workers have continued to be excluded. Today the vast majority of American workers receive paid family or medical leave, but these benefits are not extended to domestic workers. Caregivers, for the most part, still have no legal recourse from the federal government if they are discriminated against because of their age, disability, race, religion, or sex—which some enforcement agencies have recently interpreted to include gender identity and sexual orientation.5

  There have been some improvements, however. Federal laws now include domestic workers when it comes to paying minimum wage and overtime, a reform that emerged out of overlooked but critical activism by African American domestic workers in the mid-1970s, the first movement to “put the issue of domestic workers’ labor rights on the national political agenda,” according to Nadasen.

  Nadasen writes that this effort had some seemingly unlikely origins. It began with the National Committee on Household Employment, a group of liberal professional women who employed domestic workers. In 1969, the organization reoriented itself toward the interests of domestic workers themselves when black feminist Edith Barksdale-Sloan took on a leadership role. She and the National Committee on Household Employment brought local domestic worker groups together to create the Household Technicians of America.

  To make the case that domestic workers should be included in federal minimum wage laws, the Household Technicians of America argued that they deserved fair treatment and pay because their work was like any other kind of honest day’s work, an approach that garnered the support of labor union officials. Still, it took several legislative attempts before domestic worker organizers were able to overcome the opposition by congressmen who saw a bill regulating pay rates of household workers as an intrusion into personal domestic affairs. Nadasen writes that the male legislators were “fearful not only of ‘irate’ housewives but also a disruption of the gender division of labor and its consequences.”6 In other words, while legislators were dismissive of the domestic labor that their female partners did, they also simultaneously worried that increased wages would mean that it would be harder to find workers to do the cleaning and cooking that they personally didn’t want to do.7

  Nadasen notes that in the end, domestic workers took advantage of the inherent contradiction in the legislators’ arguments. Their argument was compelling in its pragmatism: Failing to increase wages for household workers would create a shortage of them, and the liberated working women who employed them were unlikely to pick up the slack. That domestic labor, Nadasen writes, would likely fall on middle-class men like the legislators who had the power to decide the bill’s fate.8

  In 1974, after four years of trying, domestic workers were formally provided with federal minimum-wage benefits. More recently, in 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor extended federal minimum-wage and overtime protections to home-care workers.

  Loopholes remain. Live-in domestic workers are not entitled to overtime, and those who provide companion care by providing nonmedical emotional and logistical help to disabled or elderly clients are exempted from both minimum-wage and overtime requirements.

  The lack of regulations has not benefited the immigrant women who make up the majority of the industry’s workforce today. Studies and surveys have found that domestic workers experience a range of job abuses related to pay, workload, and treatment.9 There’s no limit, for example, to what an employer can put on a domestic worker’s to-do list, because the day-to-day of living is messy and variable. And because there isn’t widespread agreement about how much a domestic worker ought to be paid, some employers exploit the lack of uniformity by illegally failing to provide the federal minimum wage.

  Scholars Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo of the University of Southern California and Mary Romero of Arizona State University have each interviewed dozens of domestic workers in California and Colorado and found that domestic workers are subject to a wide range of treatment by their employers. For every thoughtful employer like June Barrett’s boss, there are employers who are exacting and punitive, and the intersection of the private sphere and the workplace can be tense and confusing.

  Myrla Baldonado, a former domestic worker who’s now an organizer for the Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles, puts it this way: “I’ve had nice experiences but it’s hard to get because there are no rules. There’s no floor and no ceiling. You can do anything. It’s just luck.”

  With the majority of the country’s more than 2 million domestic worker
s migrating from regions such as Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, exploitative employers sometimes use workers’ tenuous immigration status to facilitate abuse. At its most extreme, domestic workers are being trafficked to the United States and coerced to work for physically and sexually abusive employers for little or no pay.10

  In a case that resulted in a federal criminal trial in 2010, a Texas couple was found guilty of trafficking a domestic worker from Nigeria and then subjecting her to horrific abuses—including repeated rapes by the husband—for about a decade. She had been unable to escape because the couple had restricted her communications, taken away her passport, and isolated her to such an extent that she was almost unseen.11

  At the end of the trial, the federal judge presiding over the case didn’t hide his shock at how the crime had been hidden for so long behind closed doors. “It is frightening,” the judge said. “This woman was in the country for over ten years, and nobody was even curious about her situation.”12

  Live-in domestic workers like the woman trafficked from Nigeria are the most susceptible to abuses. As documented in various academic studies and industry reports, these workers report feeling that they are on the clock twenty-four hours a day because they can’t ignore the early-morning cries of a child or refuse to assist an elderly client in the middle of the night.13 Some have reported being forced to sleep in closets or on the floor in bedrooms of children they were caring for. Caregivers also say they are not given time to eat or even personal access to the kitchen where they prepare their employers’ meals.

  In 2012 the National Domestic Workers Alliance conducted a first-of-its-kind survey of more than two thousand workers from all over the country and found grave abuses related to workload, hours, and pay. The resulting report, “Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work,” also identified problems related to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.14

  “In some situations, abuse is laced with racial slurs or threats regarding immigration status,” the report said. “In other instances, verbal abuse escalates into physical violence. And in far too many cases, it takes the form of sexual harassment and even sexual assault.”

  Echoing the concerns of night-shift janitors and farmworkers, few of these abused domestic workers complained, because they didn’t want to lose their jobs, the survey found. Undocumented workers added that they worried that their immigration status would be used against them.

  For domestic worker advocates, physical abuse like sexual harassment and assault has been difficult to bring up and address. “We’re silent because of the mentality of servitude,” says Allison Julien, a domestic worker organizer and a New York City nanny. “Your role is to be of service. Very few of us are taught to share our stories. That’s why workers don’t come forward even though we know there is sexual violence in the workplace.”

  Julien is a worker-leader who has organized domestic workers for more than a decade, and she says sexual abuse on the job is one of the hardest topics to broach. “We’ll talk about overtime, but physical violence and sexual violence we find are hard topics to raise up because of the shame and judgment,” she says. “There’s such silence, and employers know that.”

  Sexual harassment is especially hard to pinpoint because domestic work is intimate work done in someone else’s home, where uncomfortable and offensive moments can be hard to parse and define. To deal with the situation, some workers actively normalize sexual harassment. “There is a numbing-out aspect to this in order to survive,” Julien says. “So the thinking is, ‘It’s not that bad.’ That’s why they keep going back to work.”

  Domestic workers who experience sexual harassment also find themselves without a strong legal safety net. Title VII, the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that makes workplace sexual harassment illegal, applies only to employers who have more than fifteen employees, rarities in domestic work.

  Abused domestic workers can choose to file criminal charges, but the gap in workplace civil rights laws leaves most caregivers without clear legal recourse in civil courts. Some counties or states—but certainly not all—fill in this gap with local ordinances or laws.

  Florida, which doesn’t have a state department of labor, is one place where domestic workers have no direct way of bringing a workplace sexual harassment claim. So when a previous employer groped and grabbed June Barrett in his Miami home, the domestic worker wasn’t wrong when she thought that she just had to put up with it.

  Before Barrett landed her current job with Raymond and Marjorie, she passed through a number of households that showed her just how many ways she could be dehumanized at work. After the stopgap job in Miami that didn’t pay, Barrett took a live-in job that involved taking care of a woman’s aging parents.

  The job was a lifesaver, but she was on call around the clock. She rarely had time for uninterrupted sleep, and when she was given a day off—which usually required a bit of cajoling and begging—she would check herself into a hotel so she could get some rest.

  The elderly couple she cared for were verbally abusive. The husband shouted at her to work faster. The wife made racist remarks like, “Make sure you don’t touch me, you cotton-pickin’ nigger.”

  But quitting suddenly wasn’t a real option. “I had anxiety attacks because, where am I going to go?” she said. “I would be homeless in Miami. So you have to stick it out and you go to your room and cry.”

  In search of a way out, Barrett went to a placement agency, which are largely unregulated and have a reputation among workers for turning a blind eye to complaints and concerns. Nevertheless, they offer a convenient way for employers and workers to find each other, and Barrett was sick from stress and desperate to escape the couple she was working for.

  It was a relief when the agency finally placed her in a new live-in job caring for an elderly man with vision problems. The workload was more reasonable, but in the end, the job was no improvement.

  The warning signs came immediately, on her first night on the job. Barrett was helping her employer into bed when he ordered her to lie down with him. She declined and told him that he was being unprofessional. Unrepentant, he told Barrett that other caregivers had done it and she would be no different. Barrett walked out and went to her room, confused and unnerved.

  The exchange turned out to be a prelude to a pattern of sexual harassment and assault. The next morning, as Barrett helped her new client in the bathroom, he grabbed her crotch. She protested and tried to shame him into stopping, but he didn’t mind. Over the next few months, he took every opportunity to grab, grope, and kiss her.

  Her employer’s daughter witnessed the harassment but didn’t take the problem seriously. Watching her father grab Barrett’s breast, she treated it like a joke. “I couldn’t believe it,” Barrett says. “She was laughing. Because I was just a piece of meat, just the caregiver, I was nothing.”

  The job was stable and it paid well, but Barrett didn’t know how long she could put up with her boss. She was confident that she could overpower his physical advances if necessary, but their interactions filled her with disgust. She called her sister Judy frequently for moral support, and they agreed that Barrett had to be practical about resolving the problem. For a time at least, she would just have to find a way to manage.

  Barrett purposely didn’t tell the agency what was happening because they were her lifeline to future work. “I didn’t want them to think I was a whiner,” she says.

  Her strategy of saying nothing worked. By keeping her mouth shut about the sexual abuse for a few months, Barrett was able to secure fill-in domestic work through the agency, which was enough to keep her afloat until she found a job with regular hours.

  As she searched for better work, Barrett found solace at the Miami Workers Center, an advocacy organization that promotes economic, gender, and racial equality. She had become a regular at workshops on topics such as women’s empowerment, self-care, and dealing with racism. In 2012, she stepped up her commitment to the org
anization after the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in a neighborhood just a few hours from where she lived. The center had taken a vocal role in demanding justice for the teen, which the group ultimately saw as a matter of racial and economic justice. “I saw the power of organizing,” Barrett says. “I was impressed.”

  Her work situation finally improved in December 2013, when her sister connected Barrett with her current job caring for Raymond and Marjorie. The family not only offered a job on fair terms; they also encouraged her activism.

  The year before, the Miami Workers Center had become the permanent home for the Workplace Justice Project, a collaboration launched at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center with support from organizations like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They were pushing to improve the working conditions for domestic workers, and the project was receiving guidance from the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Barrett had jumped at the chance to get involved.

  She began putting the paid vacation days she received from her job with Raymond and Marjorie toward events related to improving conditions for domestic workers. Her conviction inspired her boss, Judy Aberman, to support her activism with financial donations and by attending events where the employer gave impromptu speeches about the importance of treating workers fairly.

  In the summer of 2016, the center hosted South Florida’s inaugural Domestic Workers Assembly, which was attended by politicians, journalists, and two hundred domestic workers. The conference organizer, Marcia Olivo, says she wanted government officials and the public to become aware of the full range of problems domestic workers face so that they could begin to seek public policy responses.

  “People don’t see domestic work as real work and they don’t recognize the things that happen in the industry,” says Olivo, the center’s executive director, “and part of what is going to help win more protections for them is to make people more respectful of the work.”