In a Day's Work Page 9

  Olivo asked Barrett to speak about sexual harassment in domestic work, but the caregiver was not initially inclined to do it. She gave it some thought and decided to set aside her trepidations after thinking of all of her friends in the industry who had been sexually harassed or worse—especially one friend who had felt pressured into sleeping with her boss. “I wanted to talk about it so that other people would talk about it,” Barrett says.

  On the day of the event, Barrett remembers walking to the microphone at the front of the room without notes because she intended to speak from the most honest place she could muster. She was nervous, but she began by expressing what she was feeling: “I’m so happy to be here,” she said. “When women come together to organize for change, there is something very powerful about that.”

  The audience applauded, giving Barrett the confidence to continue. She launched into the story about the employer who had asked her to lie down with him and then embarked on a relentless campaign to touch her crotch and her breasts. She described how demeaning it had felt and said it shouldn’t be tolerated as just part of the job. When she finished, the crowd applauded again, and Barrett says she could feel that the audience appreciated how much it had taken to share her story.

  The feeling that came to Barrett in that moment surprised her. “I felt liberated,” she says. “I had carried that shame that I had allowed this to happen. I felt I had allowed it to happen to earn money.”

  Saying it all aloud had excised that shame. “It’s completely gone,” she says.

  By taking steps toward winning new protections for domestic workers at the local level, the Miami Workers Center is following a strategy that has been successful nationwide.

  Changing the laws, state by state—sometimes starting with a single county or a city—has led to slow but steady gains for domestic workers. It’s an approach promoted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which organizes nationally and acts as a strategic support group for the local organizations that are running the bills.

  So far, eight states have adopted a so-called Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, leading to improvements in pay and working conditions. Because the alliance believes that the legislation should be generated by the workers themselves and fought for from the ground up, each of these bills has been tailored to the specific needs and political climate of each state. Together, these grassroots legislative fixes have created a range of protections and benefits, such as mandates for overtime pay, rest breaks, written contracts, and paid time off, as well as safeguards from sexual harassment and labor trafficking.

  This movement for law-based reform had its start in the late 1990s in New York City when Southeast Asian domestic workers banded together with Caribbean and Latina caregivers to start a worker-led advocacy group called Domestic Workers United.

  Allison Julien, the nanny from New York City, has been on the front line of the organization’s work since those early days. She had come to the United States in the 1990s from Barbados when she was in her late teens. When she started working as a caregiver in Manhattan, there was no overtime, no paid vacation and no enforceable law against sexual harassment for domestic workers.

  She heard about Domestic Workers United in 2001, as the group started making noise about the industry’s poor working conditions. The organization hosted rallies and public events where women talked about the incredible workloads they managed, how little they were paid, and sometimes the ways that their bosses had abused them. At first, Julien did not turn up for any of these events. “I never found out about these events until after they happened,” she says.

  Then one afternoon in the spring of 2002, she was at a park on the Upper West Side with the children that she babysat when an organizer from Domestic Workers United named Ai-jen Poo approached her. Poo would go on to become one of the founders of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, but that day, she was handing out flyers for Domestic Workers United’s monthly meeting. Poo told Julien that the group was fighting for a proposed local ordinance that would make it easier for domestic workers to understand their rights on the job. She said that it was a step toward improving the work life of domestic workers, a way to begin growing employment rights by rewriting the law. For Julien, “it was a light bulb going on,” and the nanny immediately joined the organization.

  By then, Julien had experienced what many caregivers in the country know—that even good jobs with thoughtful families involve inevitable battles over things that most workers take for granted, such as vacation, sick time, and overtime.

  One family in particular had made this clear to Julien. In 1997, she had been hired to care for the family’s two young children, and after they were struck with the flu, Julien got sick, too. Feeling miserable, Julien took a couple of days off to recuperate. When she returned to work, her employer was upset and complained about what a problem it had been for the family that Julien had taken time off. “I remember saying to this employer, ‘Next time I get sick, I’ll ask God to make me sick on a Saturday or Sunday so as to not inconvenience you,’” Julien says.

  “I saw the way that employers saw us,” she says of that experience. “It is work that is overlooked and overshadowed and you are expected to perform without a complaint or without needing time to be with your family or see doctors.”

  In May 2003, nearly a year after Julien met Ai-jen Poo at the Upper West Side park, the New York City council voted in favor of the policy to improve domestic workers’ awareness of their employment rights. With a victory and momentum, the group sought to improve conditions for domestic workers throughout the state.

  An expanded group of organizations formed the New York Domestic Workers Justice Coalition to launch a campaign for a statewide bill that would provide the type of worker protections not offered to them through federal laws.15 To set the priorities for the state bill, the group organized a convention in New York City. About three hundred domestic workers turned up to discuss the benefits that they wanted to fight for, such as paid time off, sick days, severance pay, health care, and protection from sexual harassment. The legislation, which the coalition called the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, was introduced in 2004.

  To galvanize support, the group hosted marches and rallies where domestic workers described some of the working conditions they were forced to endure. At a 2004 event that was covered by the New York Times, a caregiver from Zambia named Estella Ng’ambi spoke about working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and getting paid $250 a month.16 She wasn’t given a bedroom and was forced to sleep on the floor behind the living room couch.

  Ng’ambi’s story wasn’t unique. “There’s a lot of abuse,” Domestic Workers United organizer Erline Browne told the newspaper. “There’s a lot of Estellas out there.”

  Even with the force of hundreds of workers lobbying for the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, combined with a growing public consciousness about the abuses domestic workers faced on the job, it took more than six years of political work before the bill passed in 2010. Julien, by then an activated organizer, was there at every step. Looking back, she says that the fundamental challenge that contributed to the long political battle had to do with the fact that policy makers did not initially see domestic work as real work. Lawmakers also had little incentive to push for domestic worker rights because some were undocumented and they were not viewed as a significant voting bloc.

  So the coalition began to build alliances. It tapped sympathetic employers, as well as religious and student groups, to show support for the bill at hearings and events. “We brought in people who had the power to vote,” Julien says. “It started to shift the legislators who didn’t know where they stood on this.”

  Still, the bill hit repeated political headwinds, and the legislation had to be introduced three times. Throughout the process, the domestic worker coalition was relentless. Its members made regular lobbying visits to the state capitol, and as the years passed, the crowd grew stronger, from a couple
dozen domestic workers arriving in cargo vans to hundreds of them turning up by the busload. “I can only think they were hoping we would go away but that was not going to happen,” Julien says of the legislators. “We were called crazy a million times.”

  In 2010, the legislation cleared both houses of the state legislature and governor David Paterson said that he would sign the bill if it made it to his desk. When the bill was presented to him, he kept his word. “For me, personally, I exhaled,” Julien says.

  The efforts on the East Coast were infectious. As New York domestic workers fought for legislation, a grassroots organization of Latina immigrant women named Mujeres Unidas y Activas, and La Raza Centro Legal, a legal services organization dedicated to immigrant and low-income clients, were strategizing over the best way to support domestic workers in San Francisco.

  They began with research. To learn more about what workers needed and wanted, the groups partnered with the San Francisco Public Health Department and a social-justice research organization called DataCenter, which trained immigrant women to conduct hour-long surveys of their peers—domestic workers they encountered in parks, on buses, and at laundromats. In 2007, the groups published a report, based on conversations with nearly 250 domestic workers, which found that many domestic workers don’t get rest breaks or overtime and suffer emotional and physical abuse from their employers. The report concluded that domestic work “is a very vulnerable industry. Rampant abuses of household workers must be addressed.”17

  Even before the report was completed, worker advocates realized that the problems surfacing from the research were rooted in the fact that domestic workers are excluded from various federal and state labor laws. The California groups decided to pursue an approach similar to the one taken by New York domestic workers.18 “It became clear that some kind of state policy to right historical wrongs was really important,” says Andrea Cristina Mercado, who was then an organizer with Mujeres Unidas y Activas and later with the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

  Similar conversations were happening in Southern California at community organizations that promote economic justice, like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and Filipino Advocates for Justice. In all, seven groups throughout the state joined together to advance an agenda to augment the rights of domestic workers. Like the conference in New York City that had jump-started the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, the California organizers began with a convening of domestic workers. At that meeting, the group came up with a list of more than a dozen priority items, ranging from overtime pay to family and medical leave, which became the blueprint for the legislation that the coalition would propose.

  The reality of the legislative process hit the group fast. Most of these items, such as workers compensation or antidiscrimination measures, were not deemed politically viable by their legislative allies and were dropped by the time the California bill was introduced in 2006. The legislation instead focused exclusively on granting overtime and minimum wage to household workers.

  Like their colleagues in New York, the California domestic workers faced a years-long political fight. Moreover, the California caregivers faced an unexpected adversary. Advocates of disability rights pushed back on the bill because they were worried that it would make in-home care unaffordable. To quell these concerns, the bill language was revised to clarify that the proposed law would not apply to casual babysitting or personal attendants working for the elderly or disabled.

  With these changes, the bill cleared both houses of the state legislature, leaving the domestic worker advocates hopeful. The bill went to the governor for his signature, but a month later, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger upset the worker advocates by vetoing it. In his veto message, it became clear that the domestic worker coalition had not yet done enough to address the concerns of the disability advocates. Schwarzenegger declined to sign the bill because it “subjects seniors and the severely disabled who hire household workers to a new cause for civil litigation,” he wrote.

  With new insights into the legislative process, the coalition decided to try again when Democrat Jerry Brown became California’s governor in 2011. They reached out to disability rights advocates to find common ground. They continued to meet with legislators to explain why the bill was important. And they connected with labor organizations with similar political interests. “We learned that domestic workers can’t do it by themselves,” Mercado says.

  In 2011, a bill dubbed the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights was introduced. It called for overtime pay, rest breaks, paid vacation and sick leave, and protection from certain abuses. Once again, workers turned up in force to lobby for the bill at the state capitol. They worked with a lobbyist, and now they had the explicit support of legislators and labor unions.

  The campaign also got a pop culture boost when Amy Poehler, the actress of Saturday Night Live and Parks and Recreation fame, agreed to do a public service announcement in favor of the legislation. Poehler had been vocal about her appreciation for the caregivers that make it possible to do her own job, and in a video distributed online, she asked viewers to support the bill for the same reason. “Many people ask me how I balance it all and the truth is it wouldn’t be possible for me to do all those things without the help I get in my home every day,” Poehler said in the video. “Every day, so many working women get to do what they do because there are wonderful people in their home, helping them. These workers, who inspire and influence our children, who take care of our loved ones and our homes, have been excluded from basic labor protections for generations.”

  With this momentum, the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passed both houses of the state legislature and was forwarded to the governor’s desk, which was now occupied by Brown, a pro-labor democrat.

  Just like his Republican predecessor, however, Brown vetoed the bill because of lingering questions about how the legislation would affect the disabled and elderly. “It was shocking,” Mercado says, “because all the disability rights groups have removed their opposition.”

  The proponents of the bill refused to accept defeat. They decided to introduce the bill again in the following legislative session three months later. This time, they developed broader statewide support from areas beyond San Francisco and Los Angeles. They also continued to talk to legislators about the reasons the bill was necessary and rehired the lobbyist to refine their strategy. They were also more proactive and disciplined about explaining to the public why the legislation was needed. “We complemented the grassroots strategy with insider strategy,” Mercado says.

  In 2013, another bill—the third try at California legislation to better the working conditions of domestic workers—was proposed. Its scope had been narrowed; it called simply for overtime pay for domestic workers who worked more than nine hours a day or forty-five hours a week.

  As it had the year before, the bill cleared both houses of the state legislature. Once again, it was sent to the governor for his support or veto. Now, nearly seven years after the first domestic worker bill had been put forward in California, the coalition had forced the political winds to shift. Opposition had fallen away and the public now largely favored improved conditions for domestic workers. The governor signed the bill into law.

  There was only one hitch to their legislative victory. The bill would expire after three years unless the coalition brought another bill to make it permanent. An emboldened and wiser group of domestic-worker advocates began the political work almost immediately. In 2016, before the law would have sunset, the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights was made permanent with wide-ranging support from politicians and the public.

  The successes of the legislative efforts in New York and California—as hard-won as they were—have prompted others. Domestic workers in Illinois are among the most recent caregivers to secure additional labor rights. In 2016, they won the passage of a bill that gives them paid time off and minimum wage. It also tackled sexual harassment directly by r
evising the Illinois Human Rights Act so that it expressly includes domestic workers, who had previously been singled out for exclusion.

  And in 2017, Nevada legislators passed two bills supported by the SEIU, which provide a number of new benefits to domestic workers. Caregivers there now receive overtime pay, and there are caps on meal and lodging deductions. Employers are also required to give workers at least one full day off per week.

  Systematically and purposely ignored by federal labor laws, domestic workers have had to fight for their rights one city, one county, and one state at a time. But momentum has built on momentum. “The domestic workers bill of rights campaigns has provided a way for us to fight for immigrant and non-immigrant workers—and to win,” says Mercado, who is now the executive director of New Florida Majority, which seeks to build the political power of marginalized groups such as minorities, immigrants, and youth. “At the end of the day, this is not just about changing the law. We needed to make domestic work visible and respected.”

  Myrla Baldonado left domestic work and the city of Chicago before she could have benefited from the passage of the Illinois Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, though in many ways, her work and activism helped pave the way for its passage.

  Petite and pixielike, Baldonado emigrated from the Philippines in 2007 when she was in her fifties. She was a human rights activist in her home country, and she took on full-time domestic work in the United States after a friend in the Philippines died and left four children in need of financial support. After nearly a decade, she still sends them the bulk of her paycheck.

  When she started working as a caregiver, Baldonado had no experience or context for the job. She joined the industry later in life and had a hard time accepting the indignities that were imposed on her. She was particularly troubled by the sexual harassment she encountered on the job, a workplace hazard she had not anticipated.