Transformative Labor Organizing in Precarious Times

The Domestic Work Sector: From Exclusion to Innovation to Power

We often talk about domestic work as the Wild West of employment, the sector where regulations and protections are fewest and farthest between. In the 1930s the US labor movement, after decades of struggle, won basic labor protections and the right to collective bargaining for most working people—but not for all.

At the time, the vast majority of domestic workers and farm workers were African-American. Among white people, there was pervasive fear of how a rising Black electorate and workforce could upset the social order. So, in 1938 when the Fair Labor Standards Act was debated in Congress, legislators and leaders of the labor movement agreed to explicitly exclude domestic workers and farm workers to push through the new legislation. At that moment when other workers were building their collective power and winning significant improvements—including the right to minimum wage, overtime pay, and collective bargaining—domestic workers were shut out.

The legacy of slavery in this sector is alive and well to this day. During the campaign to win one of our first state-level legislative campaigns to expand basic workplace rights for domestic workers, our members often repeated the slogan “we need to tell them that slavery is done.” While many domestic workers may find themselves in situations where their employers truly value and respect them, slavery by other names still exists in the sector. This is because of racism, because of the exploitation of poor people and people with vulnerable legal status, and because of the consistent and pervasive devaluation of women’s work—work that is done in private homes, behind closed doors, both paid and unpaid.

To right these historic wrongs, domestic workers have been organizing for recognition and dignity for generations. Progress has been incremental but steady. In the 1970s, Black domestic workers organized and won inclusion for most domestic workers—though not all—in federal minimum wage laws. Over the past 10 years, domestic workers have won Domestic Worker Bills of Rights in eight states, closing some of the gaps in protections and raising the visibility of the workforce. In 2015, after years of organizing for recognition, 1.8 million home care workers finally became eligible for federal minimum wage and overtime pay when the Department of Labor issued a rule change that ended a decades-old exemption.

Organizing for basic rights for domestic workers means we must stitch together a patchwork of rights and protections that vary from state to state. Many skeptics have said that this workforce is not organizable because domestic workers are so dispersed, work in a one-to-one relationship with their employers, and lack the legal framework that would allow them to build collective power. But our members disprove that argument. Being excluded for so long has forced domestic workers to develop innovative organizing models and creative strategies for raising standards in the sector. As more and more workers in the United States are robbed of the right to unionize, and as work overall becomes more precarious, the models that domestic workers have developed are increasingly relevant and essential for the labor movement as a whole.

Contours of the Domestic Workforce

The domestic workforce is largely made up of women of color and immigrants. An estimated 91% of home care workers are women, and 56% are people of color. ¹ As a result of the Wild West nature of domestic employment—and the intersections of racism, classism, xenophobia, and sexism—domestic workers are still among the lowest paid workforces in the United States.

In 2012, NDWA conducted the first national research project on the conditions of domestic workers around the country, training a core group of our members to survey and bring to light the experiences of thousands of their peers (Burnham and Theodore, 2012). Our research shows:

The reality is that many working people in the US do not have easy access to health insurance. When we combine the lack of health insurance with a lack of paid time off and add to that the hazards of work that involves heavy lifting and repetitive strain, it is easy to understand why domestic workers suffer from high rates of injury and illness.

There also is a lot of diversity within this workforce, including stratification related to immigration status, geography, and employment arrangements. Undocumented workers and live-in workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse. And workers in particular regions of the country experience higher rates of exploitation than others.

NDWA recently published a study of domestic workers at the Texas-Mexico border (Burnham et al., 2018). Texas has demonstrated hostility to marginalized workers across many sectors. It has the highest rates of wage theft in the country (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016; Hernandez, 2016). It also is a site of tremendous militarization, where undocumented workers are constrained not only by the international border itself but by numerous immigration checkpoints that limit their mobility north and south, as well as east and west. Pervasive anti-immigrant sentiment and state and federal anti-immigrant laws generate an enormous amount of fear and uncertainty among workers. That fear gives the employers of domestic workers an even higher upper-hand. In the context of the Texas-Mexico border, we found that:

Domestic work truly differs from the work done in most other sectors. Besides being deeply devalued, it also is uniquely intimate. The work can involve assisting clients with bathing and dressing, supporting them through their most vulnerable moments. It can involve soothing children through nightmares and providing moral guidance and instruction. Domestic workers enter into personal, private spaces, both figuratively and literally. They engage directly in complex interpersonal relationships, and the fact that they perform their work behind closed doors and with no Human Resources department in sight, means lines are so easily blurred.

Many home care workers have physical, psychological, and emotional scars to show for their efforts. Yesterday, I met up with June, an elder care worker in Miami who is one of our alliance’s most engaged leaders. She showed me scars on her arms from when her client lashed out in rage and scratched her while calling her racial epithets and telling her that she is worthless. This is all while that same client relies on June for some of the most intimate personal care. June says that employers like hers are still living with a plantation mentality.

Workers like June provide care because care is needed and there is tremendous market demand for it. But there is more to domestic work than market dynamics. Right after explaining this horrific abuse, June told me how she considers care work to be an almost spiritual calling. While caring for others, June thinks about members of her own family who never got the care they needed. And she thinks about the care she herself will someday require.

June is not alone in feeling called to provide care. The intimacy of care work means that domestic workers connect with their employers’ humanity, even in degrading or abusive circumstances. Domestic workers’ ability to appreciate and connect with human dignity is a hallmark of their organizing. Domestic workers are often compelled to fight for their own wellbeing while also wanting the same for the families who employ them. Solutions that emerge from this approach can include wins that improve conditions for the workforce while also making care more affordable and available to those who need it. This kind of expansive vision of interconnection is something that we think domestic workers contribute to larger efforts for transformative change.

The Rise of Care

Care really is the issue that unites us all. Every single one of us will—at different points of our lives—be providers or recipients of care. Organizing the care workforce means understanding this complexity and recognizing the opportunities this complexity allows.

Home care is one of the fastest growing employment sectors in the country (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018). Childcare providers are also in high demand. The rise of the domestic workforce stems from fundamental demographic changes. Millennials are having children, yet the state and large employers fail to subsidize or provide adequate childcare. The baby boomers are aging and wanting to stay in their own homes. The sandwich generation—the people who juggle the work of caring for both their young children and their aging parents—are struggling. The ever-rising cost of living means that all adults in families must seek paid work outside of the home, making less available the free labor traditionally performed by women in their own homes. Domestic work is the work of the future; the need will continue to rise, and it will never be outsourced or become fully automated.

In addition to these demographic trends, other economic and social forces are shaping the domestic work sector. With the rise of the gig economy and of online platforms like Care.com, which serve as intermediaries between workers and employers, or Handy that dispatches housecleaners and other in-home workers to customers on demand, the traditional employment relationship is shifting. These for-profit companies are influencing who is considered an employee and who is not, who is worthy of basic labor rights and who isn’t. As these actors move into the realm of legislative advocacy, there’s a real struggle underway to shape the future not only of care work, but of work itself. For example, Handy recently moved legislation in a number of states to have anyone who acquires work through an online platform classified as independent contractors rather than employees, a move that impacts the rights of hundreds of thousands of workers. It is clear that if workers themselves are not organized to set industry standards, those standards will be set by others, and generally not with the workers’ interests in mind.

Raising Standards and Shaping the Future of Work

The National Domestic Workers Alliance has been organizing since 2007 to raise standards for the domestic workforce and to win a more just economy and democracy. We are an alliance of 60 affiliate organizations and three chapters, each with their own domestic worker base, as well as a growing network of domestic workers who directly enter into a relationship with NDWA.

We use two core strategies to raise standards for the domestic work sector. First, we work to establish a floor of basic protections, with legislative advocacy to win state- and municipal-level Domestic Worker Bills of Rights as our main mechanism to do so. ² Second, while we work to secure the floor of protections, we are also developing an aspirational vision of fair work that goes well beyond the limited protections afforded by law. In some ways, being excluded from inadequate labor protections frees domestic workers to vision creatively and expansively. While others may struggle to adapt to a future where work is made precarious, informal, and contingent, this is the reality that domestic workers have been operating in all along. The creativity of the domestic worker movement results in interventions like the recent ground-breaking municipal ordinance in Seattle that includes provisions for extending the right to minimum wage to domestic workers while also creating a Domestic Work Standards Board, a new model of a regulatory body that will allow domestic workers to have a voice in setting and enforcing more fair standards moving forward. This same spirit of creativity and innovation has allowed NDWA to establish worker-generated recommendations for the online economy, and to present them to the tech companies that are increasingly occupying space in the sector. And as more and more workers are denied benefits—either because of their work arrangements or their employers—we developed Alia, our new portable benefits platform that offers a real solution by allowing multiple employers to contribute to a shared benefits fund for an individual worker. We are constantly pushing the envelope around both the floor of protections and what it means to make all work fair work. These efforts will have implications for workers in many sectors, not just our own.

Improving conditions for domestic workers will not happen in a vacuum. We need to shape the broader political and economic context. This means positioning our organization at the forefront of a resistance movement that is powerful enough to defeat Trumpism—the endless array of attacks on labor, women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and on the very fabric of democracy. Finding common ground with diverse allies and working together to influence the environment of our organizing is nothing new for NDWA. But now, more than ever before, we’re called on to build a tent broad enough for everyone, showing that the issues that impact this workforce are everyone’s issues, and that domestic workers’ vision of a better economy and democracy is one that will improve life for us all.

Building a Broad Tent

Putting domestic workers—some of the people who are most marginalized in the United States’ political and economic systems—at the center of our organizing and our visioning allows us to ensure that our solutions leave no one behind. When we lead with issues of care, we can connect with virtually anyone. And domestic workers provide a unique moral authority for broader social justice movements when they speak about the need to ensure that our economy is based on values of interdependence.

I want to give two examples from just the past six months of how our movement stepped into moments of crisis and created a new moral imperative and a tent broad enough to engage millions. Since the Fall of 2017, unprecedented numbers of women have felt emboldened to speak out about sexual harassment under the banner of #MeToo. The domestic workforce endures high rates of sexual harassment, yet the sexual abuse of nannies, housecleaners, and home care workers is a hidden epidemic because it happens in private homes and to workers who are often unseen. Workers in other sectors, like farmworkers, also face secrecy around workplace sexual harassment without recourse. Finally, with #MeToo, a major issue that has plagued domestic workers for generations was on the table. Together with farmworker women, domestic workers seized this historic opening. Workers in two of the most invisible sectors built bridges with workers in the most visible, including Hollywood actors. Together, we articulated a shared demand that protections provided under Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act be extended to all workers, regardless of the number of employees in the workplace, and together we brought that demand to the desks of members of Congress. Domestic workers were able to harness the outrage of millions of women to put power behind solutions that will include the most vulnerable.

Similarly, domestic workers have been organizing for years to win more fair immigration policies. About two months ago, when reports broke that the Department of Health and Human Services had lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children, the #WhereAreTheChildren hashtag took off, gathering momentum practically overnight. This signaled unprecedented national interest in the wellbeing of migrant children, but this outrage was initially misguided. The reality is that most of the children referred to in those initial reports are minors who crossed the border alone and may now be in the care of family members with precarious immigration status, so calls to search for them could lead to devastating immigration enforcement efforts in their communities. At the same time, President Trump’s zero tolerance policy was actually creating a crisis: ripping thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border. This wasn’t the story that initially captured public attention, but it was the one that required immediate action. We worked with others to channel the energy behind #WhereAreTheChildren into #FamiliesBelongTogether, bringing along the millions of people who engaged on social media and the thousands of people who wanted to take action, articulating demands for an end to family separation and immigrant detention, drawing on the common ground that we share as parents and members of communities. In a short period of time, we helped organize over 1500 vigils and mobilizations in the month of June, including 700 actions on June 30th. This was the first time in our years of immigrant rights organizing that people in all 50 states coalesced on the same day around shared demands.

Our tent is big, and the key to winning real, lasting solutions in the United States will lie in our continued commitment to bringing in a wide array of voices while centering the very workers who have been most marginalized. Doing this requires finesse and agility around messaging and demands. It also requires a constant focus on organizing as an act of transformation.

I want to come back to June, the home care worker who I mentioned earlier. June says that becoming a part of the domestic worker movement saved her life. I asked her to explain to me what she meant by that, and she named four very clear reasons why our movement has been transformative for her, and why transformative organizing is the secret recipe for our success. For June and many others, transformative organizing includes unlocking the hold of trauma, building liberated organizations, organizing at the intersections, and claiming our place in the arc of history.

Unlocking the Hold of Trauma

The painful reality is that the workers who are leading some of the most powerful and innovative organizing to reshape our democracy and economy are the same ones who have been told for generations that they have no worth. That message is expressed in the policies that keep domestic workers and their communities living in conditions of poverty, discrimination, and violence. It comes in surround sound from many sources including institutions, employers, media, legislators, and even the labor and women’s movements themselves.

The actual living conditions of many domestic workers, combined with dominant narratives that devalue care work and the people who do it, cumulatively result in deep, intergenerational trauma. And trauma impacts the ways we are able to lead and relate to each other. NDWA has realized that if we are going to build power from the ground up—and if we are going to support the leadership of people who have been living in the crosshairs of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and classism—we need to unlock the hold of trauma.

NDWA integrates spaces for individual and collective healing into our organizing model, allowing domestic workers to cultivate the resilience that is essential to lead. An example is what happened just before NDWA members lobbied in Washington, DC for improved protections against sexual harassment. In a hotel on the edge of Capitol Hill, we held a two-day training on trauma and resilience. We built a shared understanding of what trauma is and how it manifests. We explored the very intelligent strategies that many of us have developed to survive, but that may have become habitual reactions that prevent us from accessing the range of strategies we need to use now. We talked about how, for instance, becoming isolated and withdrawn can help someone feel safe after experiencing trauma, but how isolation prevents us from doing the work of relationship-building that is so critical for organizing. At that training, we spent time identifying both individual sources of resilience and collective practices for our organizations. Healing from trauma and building resilience are key ways to move past survival mode and into power.

Stepping out of that hotel and into the public eye, our members were on fire. As they walked up to the US Capitol to share their personal stories with their representatives in Congress, they were dignified and grounded. I struggle to find words adequate to describe what it was like to watch June in her full power, speaking about workplace sexual assault to legislators and the press from a place of deep resilience. I truly believe that there was a shift in energy on Capitol Hill that day, and that no one who encountered our delegation has been the same since. Having confronted trauma head-on and grounded in their resilience, domestic workers were an unstoppable force of moral authority, and irresistible in their demands.

This is how we organize; at the heart of all of our leadership development work is a commitment to addressing trauma and turning it into power, both individually and collectively. Doing the work of healing from trauma is an investment of time and energy and resources, but the impacts are palpable. It unlocks the true power of our base to lead. It expands our sense of possibility, resulting in a clearer vision of the kind of economy and democracy we’re fighting for: one that cares for all people.

Building Liberated Organizations

This transformative work is not only happening at the personal level, but at the organizational level as well, since trauma does not just impact individual leaders’ concepts of their own potential, but it also impacts the ways that we organize together.

Systems of oppression pit us against each other, and trauma breaks our sense of safety and dignity. In small membership-based organizations like the ones that make up our alliance, the outcomes often play out in interpersonal interactions. There can be competition between leaders, an undermining of women of color leadership, burnout, and inability to build trust. Often, the intensity of conflict can be traced back to trauma, since it’s harder to work through political or strategic differences when you don’t feel dignity for yourself or others.

The domestic worker movement is working to build strong organizations using traditional organizational development tools like developing strong membership structures, setting up systems for effective outreach, achieving financial sustainability, and enacting systems for transparent and democratic decision-making. In addition, we’re also building liberated organizations by providing leaders with tools to courageously disrupt the impacts of trauma together. This means engaging in a reflexive process and asking each other: What damaging power dynamics are being reinforced in our organizing? How are our organizations actually microcosms of the dominant systems we are trying to dismantle? And how can we ensure that they instead become microcosms of the kind of world we want to live in?

Organizing at the Intersections

June says that the organizations that make up our movement have never asked her to leave a part of herself behind, and that has allowed her to step into leadership. As a queer, Black, immigrant home care worker, she has space to address multiple facets of oppression and to lead with her full self. She does this in an organization rooted in fighting anti-Black racism and grounded in an institutional commitment to intersectional organizing. NDWA is clear that it doesn’t make sense to exclusively focus on raising wages for domestic workers while Black families are facing incarceration and murder at the hands of law enforcement. It doesn’t make sense to only focus on improving workplace conditions while immigrant families are live in fear of deportation and family separation. NDWA takes on multiple issues and embodies intersectionality because domestic workers, like all people, lead intersectional lives.

Holding anti-racism and intersectionality as our organization’s bottom-line gives space for all workers to shine. NDWA initiated We Dream in Black, an organizing program explicitly built to honor and elevate the leadership of Black domestic workers. In addition, as our alliance grows and expands from our traditional women of color core to include more white workers, NDWA is developing a political education program to help this diversifying base understand why and how we put anti-racism—and specifically efforts to combat anti-Black racism—at the center of our work. We hope that this institutional commitment to anti-racist political education will lighten the burden for women of color to confront racism within their own organizations, allowing them to instead focus on leading our movement and advancing toward collective freedom.

Claiming Our Place in the Arc of History

For far too long, the dominant narrative of American history obscured the history of domestic work and domestic workers. Even historians who study labor, women, and social movements have too often erased domestic workers’ struggles and leadership. But situating ourselves in the arc of history can both reinforce our dignity and sharpen our sense of strategy.

So domestic workers are retelling their own story and claiming their place in history. We are working with activist-scholars at Smith College who have dug deep into women’s history archives to illuminate the history of domestic work and domestic worker organizing. Together, we are building an interactive digital timeline of domestic worker history that will be the cornerstone of NDWA’s core political education curriculum to be used across our alliance.

Grounding our political education curriculum on an exploration of domestic worker history helps us understand how the sector has evolved the way it has. It is no accident that June’s employer lives with a plantation mentality because it was literally on plantations that some of the dynamics that have characterized the employer-domestic worker relationship were forged. For our members, it can be deeply inspiring to learn about how enslaved domestic workers engaged in everyday acts of resistance to achieve some modicum of dignity. Similarly, learning about how domestic workers were among the main engineers of the Montgomery bus boycott and how their networks were the building blocks of that historic action can be very informative as we develop our own strategies today. There is so much to learn when we are able to connect with and listen to our movement ancestors.

Talking about domestic worker history allows our members to see themselves in a new light, as powerful political actors. The courage of our movement ancestors is a mirror for our own. We’re able to reflect Wow, if she could organize a boycott, build a mass-based organization, fuel a movement—without the Internet!—then we can too. If she could take tremendous risks like the ones she did, then so can I. Her courage brought us to where we are now. What story will my own courage tell?

Thinking about the past through this lens helps us understand our own importance in the arc of history. We are able to ask ourselves: what do we want our movement legacy to be? Movement legacy is a really powerful concept. When we examine it, we see leadership in the current moment as not only a responsibility to ourselves and our sisters, but also to generations to come. When we think of ourselves as future ancestors, we strive to lead in ways that will inspire others down the road. Our members often say “we’re making history!” and they’re right in terms of the legislative advances we have won. But they mean that also in a broader sense. Maria, a housecleaner in San Francisco, captured this beautifully, when she said, “I won’t have much money to leave to my children when I die, but this movement will be my legacy to them.”

Becoming Irresistible

Several years ago, our board of directors—led by domestic worker leaders—determined that in order to build the political, economic, narrative and disruptive power that we need to advance on our two core strategic priorities of raising standards for domestic workers and building a more just economy and democracy, we need to grow our membership base to an entirely new scale. I am deeply grateful to them for that foresight. Since then, our country has come under the grip of Trumpism, and we have been thrust into a new level of urgency to fight back and win. I was asked to speak on the topic of “transformative organizing in precarious times,” but “precarious” doesn’t go far enough in describing the threats that we are up against. We are in a moment of crisis, globally, nationally, and locally. Everyday it seems that things get worse in ways that we really could never have imagined. If there was ever a time to develop innovative models of organizing and transformation, that time is now.

To meet the challenges of the moment, we’ve set out on an ambitious path of growth, to expand our membership base from the approximately 15,000 domestic workers we represented a few years ago a total of 250,000—an estimated 10% of the domestic workforce—by the year 2020. Our challenge—and our commitment—will be to grow without abandoning the transformative elements of our movement that have been a key to our success so far. In other words, we plan to grow without sacrificing the depth and quality of our relationships with each other. This is especially important for a workforce so characterized by isolation. We are figuring out ways for workers who we may find online and who may never meet in person to feel powerful together and bound to each other by a common vision.

Since most domestic workers do not have the right to collective bargaining, we need to build a mass organization that individual workers will voluntarily join. An organizer I really admire recently shared with me a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery that gets at the heart of our project: “If you want to build a ship, do not drum up people to collect wood and do not assign them tasks and work. Rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Our task is to identify the collective experience of longing powerful enough to draw in millions. The experience of participating in our movements and our campaigns will need to satisfy that longing and be irresistible to the vast numbers of people we need to engage in order to win. Just as domestic work is the future of work, this is the future of organizing. Domestic workers are charting a path forward for everyone who wants to win a better reality than our current one.

Every day I am reminded that this is the moment we have been building towards. As old structures crumble around us, we have new opportunities to ask ourselves: Who has been organizing in the ruins all along, and how can we make way for them to lead? What power would we unleash if we truly allowed ourselves to heal from the trauma wrought by systems of oppression? How can this moment of despair allow us to build organizations that are irresistible to the very people we need in them? What would our movements look like if we all recognized the pivotal nature of this moment in history and acted in ways that will inspire our movements’ next generations? There is no doubt that the time is now, if only we have our eyes open wide enough to see the opportunities and if only we’re bold enough to step into them.

I want to end with an excerpt from a prayer offered up by Valarie Kaur, an organizer and faith leader in the US. She shared these words two days after the 2016 election in reference to the realities of a Trump presidency, but they ring as true anywhere where attacks are being waged on democracy and the dignity of working people.

What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?

What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?

What if all the mothers who came before us, who survived genocide and occupation, slavery and Jim Crow, racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia, political oppression and sexual assault, are standing behind us now, whispering in our ear: You are brave? What if this is our Great Contraction before we birth a new future?

Remember the wisdom of the midwife: “Breathe,” she says. Then: Push.