“For too long we women have been silenced,” said Joycelyn Gill-Campbell, a Barbados-born nanny-turned-organizer for Domestic Workers United, one of the leading New York-based domestic rights groups, during a speech to her sister congressgoers. “But today we are in the forefront, we are moving forward… We are going to build an enormous movement!”
The time is certainly ripe for a movement of domestic workers. In the annals of contemporary American labor injustices, the ills suffered by domestic workers remain among the most stark and stomach-churning. Barred from even the minimum protections of basic labor laws like the National Labor Relations Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, domestic workers float in a kind of legal zero-gravity zone where they have no right to organize and no guarantees of paid sick days, paid vacation days, severance pay or advance notice of termination. Some forms of domestic work are also excluded from portions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (a fact that helps explain the wide pendulum-swing of wages that domestic workers earn, from as little as 50 cents an hour to, say, $10). As a result, all too many women who make their living in other people’s homes–cleaning their dishes, raising their kids and otherwise making their lives possible–find themselves enduring everything from humiliation to exploitation to worse.
“The lady said, ‘Scrub it, scrub it, scrub it!’” recalled Araceli Herrera, a 58-year-old housekeeper in San Antonio, replaying a former employer’s obsessive insistence that she clean, clean, clean even though Herrera was suffering from agonizingly painful gallstones. Later, when she tried to return to work after a monthlong recovery from gallbladder surgery, she found that the employer had hired somebody else.
Not that this was the first time she had been ill treated by an employer. An immigrant from Mexico City who arrived in the United States at the age of 40 after a harrowing weeklong trek across the border and through the desert, Herrera has experienced a post-immigration life that reads like a latter-day Steinbeck novel, from the forced separation from her then-16-year-old son–a memory that still makes her cry–to the story of her first employer, who paid her $45 a week, made her sleep on the kitchen floor, let her rest only a few hours a night and then fired her when a hip injury prevented her even from walking. Even some of her kindlier employers have often shown an all-too-callous thoughtlessness, taking vacations at whim while refusing to let her spend Christmas with her ailing mother–now deceased–in Mexico.
“They never think we are humans,” Herrera said, her genial voice turning suddenly raw. “I am a lady. I am a woman. I have dreams. I want to do something. No, they never [think] that. They maybe think we are machines.”
There is no good reason why domestic workers should not have basic labor rights, and why employers who mistreat employees shouldn’t face sanctions. Get more info from Domestic Workers United and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.
I’m not crazy about some of the subtly woman-shaming language in that Alternet article, like the sneer at “increasingly wealthy Americans who feel that time, work or money makes them no longer capable of cleaning their own toilets.” When teachers go on strike, do we make nasty comments about rich people who can’t be bothered homeschooling their kids?
Let’s look for clues to how to prevent such abuses:
An immigrant from Mexico City who arrived in the United States at the age of 40 after a harrowing weeklong trek across the border and through the desert
Now, if you think about this just as hard as you can, you might realize that a) she is/was not an “immigrant” but an illegal alien, and b) her status led to many or all of the alleged abuses.
Ergo (after thinking about this as hard as possible), we see that allowing illegal immigration leads to abuses, and those who allow that (such as by calling someone who came here illegally an “immigrant”) are part of the problem.
That is sooooo horrible. I haven’t known much about this issue before, but always figured domestic workers weren’t treated as well as they should be just based on my basic understanding of classism and racism, but daaaaaamn. What the hell is wrong with these people?? Making her sleep on a kitchen floor? Firing her because of an injury? Thank you for putting this up, and I’ll definitely look more into domestic workers’ issues.
Ah, yet another conservative who blames the illegal workers for coming here but absolves the illegal employers. Even the guys building the fence to keep illegal workers out were using illegal workers to build it.
As long as employers can get away with a slap on the wrist, they will continue to use illegal workers. After all, if your business model is so dependent on sub-minimum-wage labor that you have to use prison labor to stay afloat when your state cracks down on illegal workers, what’s your incentive to not use them?
First, Mnemosyne misrepresents my position on this matter.
Second, people like Mnemosyne are part of the problem and contribute to the situation that leads to abuses, alleged or real, such as described above.
The dodge used by Mnemosyne has been used by many others, and all with the same goal of preventing enforcement of our laws.
Really? You spoke only about these workers are responsible for their own mistreatment. Where was your call for companies that hire illegal workers to have their assets sold off and the companies dissolved?
I’m part of the problem because I want the companies that hire illegal workers to be punished to the same degree that the workers are instead of getting off with a misdemeanor slap on the wrist?
I would love for our laws against companies hiring illegal workers to be enforced, but somehow it never seems to happen, does it? Companies like Tyson get raided over and over and over again for hiring illegal workers and nothing happens to them.
Why are you so upset at the prospect of businesses paying the price for hiring illegal workers? If Tyson was dissolved and the assets sold off, I guarantee you that the market for illegal workers would dry up tomorrow. But somehow conservatives never seem to want to take the steps that would actually stop illegal workers from coming here and only want to punish the workers themselves while letting the companies off with a wink and a nod.
If a company gets caught three times with illegal workers on the payroll, the head of the company should get six months in jail, the company should be dissolved, and all of the company’s officers should be barred from getting a new business license for two years. End of story.
The time is certainly ripe for a movement of domestic workers. In the annals of contemporary American labor injustices, the ills suffered by domestic workers remain among the most stark and stomach-churning.
[...] Domestic Workers Unite [...]
i agree with both mnem and tlb as weird as that may seem. Enforce the laws we have for illegal immigration, on both the illegal immigrants and the companies that hire them. Doing so I think would shine a very bright light on how messed up our system is and perhaps at that point we can fix it (though I do not know what the fix would be). There are many ways to go about this but what do you say to someone when you ask them “well what about the companies?” and they respond, yes, enforce the rules 100% on them too? I say enforce all the laws, see what happens and at that point leave it up to the people, through referendum or legislation to decide what our immigration policy should be. There have been many eras in our history where we stopped immigration, for reasons good and bad, and many times where the doors were thrown open, I hope we can get to that part of the debate in the near future.
I do not in any way excuse what the employers in this situation did but I fail to see the relevance of “after a weeklong journey” and all that, so what? She weighed the pros and cons, the cons being very severe and in my mind unfair and made a “choice” to put herself in that situation. Its fucked up but at the same time, for caretakers, I wonder how exactly full benefits for them will be funded? An employee with full benefits is very expensive, wont giving them full benefits, paid for by the employer, drastically reduce the number of jobs in that particular sector? Are the American people ready for the greater economic costs of this? Applied to farm workers as well, I just dont know how it would all work (seriously dont know, asking).
[...] Domestic Workers Unite [...]
[...] Domestic Workers Unite [...]
Bad habit, this is, coming along late to the post and commenting, but seriously. Only one person objected to TLB’s comments? The workers are illegals and aliens so it don’t matter what may happen to ‘em.
I don’t know, but it’s starting to feel visceral to me, the reaction to those words. It is a slur. The word is a slur, the meaning of the word is a slur, the way it is used is a slur.
And I don’t know how any decent human being can hold a position of, “Sie did X thing wrong, so sie deserves no protections or basic human rights.” Not for immigrants, documented or un-, not for sex offenders, not for prostitutes, not for anyone.
This idea of citizenship as a litmus test for basic human rights is a cover, much like the states rights lie. It is a convenient cover that means we don’t have to give a shit what happens to “enemy combatants” or “illegal aliens” or any immigrants at all. We can enslave them, use them as garden tools and household appliances, scapegoat them and abuse them as vengeance for someone else’s crimes. We can do whatever the hell we want and no one can stop us, because hey, they aren’t citizens of the US so they don’t deserve any protections. It’s as arbitrary a boundary as any. And rightminded people should not let these remarks go unchallenged.
I’m also bad about commenting on old blog posts. So here I go!
The difference, as I see it, is that compulsory public education is (at least theoretically) about preventing the exploitation of vulnerable workers, not promoting it. I personally see nothing wrong with giving people a wake-up call that says, “If you think you are rich enough to hire someone to wipe your ass, then you are certainly rich enough to pay her a fair wage.” Education is a right; hiring someone to scrub the skid marks out of your underwear is a privilege. Which sort of leads me to this:
This is like saying, “I’m concerned – won’t emancipation create less opportunity for slaves to get good jobs as slaves? What will happen to the price of cotton, people?”