Empowering Domestic Workers Through Law and Organizing Initiatives

• Publication year: 2010
• Citation: Vol. 9 No. 1

§ Fall/ Winter 2010-#16. Empowering Domestic Workers Through Law and Organizing Initiatives

Washington Seattle Journal For Social Justice
Volume 9, No. 1
Fall/ Winter 2010

Empowering Domestic Workers Through Law and Organizing Initiatives

Reyna Ramolete Hayashi(fn1)

I. Introduction

We are subjected to emotional and physical exploitation from which we cannot easily free ourselves because of the need to work and support our families in our home countries. For some of us, being immigrants-this makes our situation worse, because the employers take advantage of this situation, increasing our work hours, many times reaching 24 hours. We are verbally assaulted, and we have to stay quiet. Often we end up leaving these jobs when we can't take it anymore. What is sad and difficult is that sometimes we are not paid a single penny for the work we've done. In my case, I have had good, considerate employers, but in these years, I have also experienced difficulties which I never thought I would have to endure-discrimination because of the color of my skin and for being an immigrant.

Housecleaner from the Dominican Republic(fn2)

Domestic workers in the United States are predominantly poor immigrant women of color,(fn3) subject to multiple forms of oppression based on class, nationality, gender, and race. Current U.S. immigration and labor law does little for domestic workers to guarantee basic workers' rights or provide protection from, or remedies for, employer abuse. While legal reform in U.S. immigration and labor law is necessary to codify rights and remedies for domestic workers, it is not sufficient.(fn4) A community-based, organizing-centered approach to progressive lawyering that privileges the goals of social movements over law reform efforts will empower communities to more holistically address the conditions of power and privilege that cause domestic worker abuse and oppression. This law and organizing model will require facilitating creative initiatives with domestic workers to produce

social change alongside legal reform efforts, which include unionization, worker centers, and worker cooperatives.

This note seeks to critically examine the domestic work industry in the United States, critique the immigration and labor protections available for domestic workers, and propose alternative law and organizing initiatives to empower domestic workers to generate meaningful social change. To begin, section two will illustrate the domestic worker experience by examining the history of domestic servitude in the United States, the domestic workforce today, domestic workers as a unique workforce prone to abuse, and the exploitation of domestic workers by focusing on intersections between gender, race, immigration, and poverty. Section three will provide an inventory and critique of the current state of labor and immigration laws and remedies for domestic workers. Section four will argue that law is an imperfect and problematic apparatus for social change by employing critical legal theory to critique the law, litigation, and lawyers. Section four will ultimately conclude that the best way to address the intersections and conditions that cause domestic servitude is to de-center the role of law and lawyers and adopt a "law and organizing approach" to social change work. Section five will argue that adopting a law and organizing methodology will require facilitating creative, community-based, and organizing-centered initiatives. These include unionization, worker centers, and worker cooperatives-all of which empower domestic workers to generate tangible, bottom-up social change. Section five will then present case studies of three innovative law and organizing models: the unionization of a particular sector of the domestic service workforce, a worker center, and a worker-owned cooperative.

II. The Domestic Worker Experience

A. The History of Domestic Servitude

I am a negro woman, and I was born and reared in the South. . . . For more than thirty years . . . I have been a servant in one capacity or another in white families. . . . I frequently work from fourteen to sixteen hours a day. I am compelled by my contract, which is oral only, to sleep in the house. I am allowed to go home to my own children . . . only once in two weeks. . . . I don't know what it is to go to church; I don't know what it is to go to a lecture or entertainment. . . . I live a treadmill life. . . . You might as well say that I'm on duty all the time-from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week. I am the slave, body and soul, of this family.

African American domestic worker, 1912(fn5)

Today's domestic work industry depends upon the exploitation of the household labor of women of color. The industry today both inherits and reproduces the systemic, institutionalized relationships of power and privilege rooted in our history of slavery-where the growth and power of the U.S. economy depended upon the appropriation of the land and labor of people of color. As the colonial plantation economy grew and white settlers accumulated wealth, they hired maids, used indentured servants, or bought slaves to perform household work.(fn6) While white men could labor in the market economy, women's only option was household work.(fn7) Meanwhile, African American women did the same work as slaves-laboring both in the fields, growing and harvesting cotton, as well as in the home, spinning thread, weaving fabric, cooking, cleaning, washing, and raising their white master's children-all of which sustained the life of the plantation economy.(fn8)

After the abolition of slavery, African American women continued to perform household work as paid domestic workers.(fn9) As white women, both American-born and foreign-born, moved from the private sphere of the home to industrial, retail, and service sector jobs, they sought to distance themselves from what was increasingly thought of as "black women's work."(fn10) White women experienced sexism as a paternalistic denial of their right to work outside the sanctity of the home-a denial which sought to preserve the feminine ideal of women's roles as mothers and wives.(fn11) Thus, the core demand of the white feminist movement was the right to do paid work outside of the home.(fn12) Consequently, white feminism's vision of access to work outside their homes universalized white women's experiences, discounting the very distinct ways in which women of color experienced both sexism and racism. Because the labor of women of color has always been exploited, women of color feminists questioned demands for access to paid work outside of the home. For women of color who had always been working, who had never had a day off, who had never been paid for what their labor was worth, and who had always been relegated to taking care of white women's children, their experience of the labor market was one of oppression, exploitation, and trauma. Women of color wanted the right to take care of their own children, not just white women's children.(fn13)

Thus, as white women gained entry into the male-dominated public sphere of work, they shifted their child-rearing and domestic responsibilities to African American women, instead of demanding a fundamental change in the gendered division of labor.(fn14) Because of white women's exodus into other sectors of the workforce, and the fact that African American women were denied work in other occupations, African American women occupied the majority of the domestic work industry by the 1940s.(fn15) Eventually, African American domestic workers moved to institute day-work as the prevailing form of domestic labor, replacing the historical arrangement of live-in domestic work. Day-work gave domestic workers more autonomy over their conditions of employment by shortening work days, making it easier to leave an abusive employer, and allowing workers more time to take care of their own families and children.(fn16) As the civil rights movement made jobs available to African Americans, their presence in domestic work declined.(fn17)

B. The Domestic Workforce Today

We have been forced here because U.S. foreign policy has created poverty in our home countries. Once we are here in the U.S., searching for a way to survive, we are pushed into exploited jobs where our work is not recognized, respected or protected.

Joycelyn Campbell, nanny from Barbados.(fn18)

From the 1970s until today, immigrant women of color have dominated the domestic work industry.(fn19) These domestic workers are either immigrants, undocumented migrants, trafficked workers, or those working under special work visas. The push-and-pull factors that cause forced migration to the United States are a direct result of U.S. neoliberal foreign policies.(fn20) The United States and other developed countries instituted policies to encourage globalization and free trade, which created poverty and displacement in developing countries, resulting in unemployed or underemployed economic migrants coming to the United States in search of work and higher wages.(fn21) Treaties like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement, in addition to the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, all jointly reduced tariffs, opened markets, and distributed loans in developing countries.(fn22) These policies collectively shifted jobs to low-wage countries, encouraged lower wages and living standards, weakened workers' rights...