Dolly Hernandez Medina wants lawmakers to remember one thing: That the mostly women who work in homes as housekeepers and health aides are human and deserve the same protections as any other worker in the United States.
Medina is a board member with CASA Freehold, a non-profit agency that works with undocumented and low-income workers in central New Jersey helping them become fully integrated into the community. CASA is one of dozens of organizations across New Jersey — and hundreds around the country — fighting for protections for domestic workers.
The fight includes national and state-level bills — dubbed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights — that would expand existing workplace protections to domestic workers, create added protections, and make sure the protections are enforceable.
Hernandez Medina understands the exploitative nature of domestic work, because her mother was a worker from Guatemala. “She worked as a nanny from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m. watching eight children in New York City,” she told me via email.
The situation was grueling, and she ultimate fled to New Jersey. However, her freedom came at a cost.
“When my mother left she lost her working papers, because they were kept hidden away from her” by her employer, Hernandez Medina said. This meant she could only work in the underground economy inhabited by many undocumented workers.
“She raised us cleaning houses,” she said. “Being humiliated sometimes. Working long hours. Not able to sit and eat lunch.”
Hernandez Medina hears similar stories all the time from workers like her mother, stories of exploitation, in which employers withhold pay and ignore the personal plights of their employees.
She provided the following from a worker, translating it from the Spanish for me. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous fearing reprisal, says she was mistreated by her employer, who forced her to “work when I was sick.”
“I told her I could not work, because I had COVID. She told me she did not care about COVID that I needed to get to work. My husband also had COVID and I had to quarantine and she told me again, ‘I do not care you need to come to work.’”
Then she broke her finger and her job came to an end.
“To this day, now a year later, she still has not contacted me to see how I am doing. I hired a lawyer to help me get my money that she owes me. I did ask her before to pay me and she said no.”
Stories like this are fairly common. The Economic Policy Institute estimates there are 2.2 million people in the United States working in private homes cleaning, providing child care, and working as health aides. According to EPI data, these workers are overwhelmingly women and people of color, with nearly a third being born outside the United States.
They are the most vulnerable and exploited, earning just 60 to 75 cents on the dollar when compared to other low-wage jobs. Because of this, according to EPI, “domestic workers are three times as likely to be living in poverty as other workers, and almost three times as likely to either be in poverty or be above the poverty line but still without sufficient income to make ends meet.”
This is where the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights comes in. As EPI points out, New Deal and later legislation purposely left domestic workers out of job protections, and programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security to win support from Southern lawmakers.
Specifically, domestic workers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935 to guarantee employees the right to form labor unions—or engage in other forms of collective action—to organize for better working conditions. And “live-in” workers are excluded from the overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act, enacted in 1938.
The proposed bill of rights is designed to address this. The national bill, which has been co-sponsored by Democrats Kristen Gillibrand and Ben Ray Luján in the Senate and Representative Pramila Jayapal in the House, covers what advocates say are “three major gaps” in the law, flaws that leave domestic workers vulnerable.
These include extending paid-overtime and paid-sick-day rules to domestic workers; requiring workplaces to follow safety and health rules that govern other workplaces; providing mandated meal and rest breaks; and covering them under sexual harassment laws.
In addition, the bill proposes “new protections to address the unique challenges of domestic work: written agreements, fair scheduling, a standards board and support for survivors of sexual harassment.”
These patches to current law may not seem huge, but they will go a long way to altering the power imbalance in domestic arrangements that allowed them to be abused.
“I would tell people to remind themselves that we are all human,” Hernandez Medina says. “We should all be treated the same.”
Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist, and journalist. He teaches at Rutgers University. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack: hankkalet.Substack.com
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022
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