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Rights, Respect, Recognition for Domestic Workers

Jocelyn Gill-Campbell's first job in her adopted land came with a rigid list of rules from the investment banker and full-time homemaker who employed her: Never be even a minute late for work. Enter through the back door, unless their child was in tow. Always be crisply uniformed in the compulsory white shoes and white dress. Jocelyn was expected to follow these rules to the letter, on top of feeding, clothing, bathing, coddling and consoling their child, for only $135.50 per week - with no sick leave, no overtime pay, and no vacation time.

"This was happening not in the '70s or '80s, but the late 90's. I suffered greatly there," says Gill-Campbell, 58, who arrived in the United States in 1996, entering the workforce as a babysitter and housekeeper. But, as a political researcher and activist back in her native Barbados, she was hardly the long suffering type. She quit that first job in the U.S. as soon as she could, and found one that paid fair wages by employers who respected her. She continued as a domestic worker for several years, always struck by how some well-paid employers were willing to skimp on the full-time care of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, Gill-Campbell also signed on as a volunteer with Domestic Workers United (DWU), an umbrella organization for several North Star-funded groups. DWU has been a national leader of organizing too-often underpaid nannies, eldercare workers and housekeepers. Today, Gill-Campbell, a scholarship recipient enrolled in Cornell University's labor relations program, is a paid organizer with DWU. The organization's supporters now include a growing group of those who employ domestic workers at a fair rate of pay and have joined them in the years-long fight for New York's domestic workers to win workplace protections. That solidarity helped invigorate Gill-Campbell. She and others who made repeated treks to talk to elected officials in Albany about the need for the nation's first ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The bill was finally signed into law on August 31, 2010, at a spot in Harlem named for the 19th century feminist and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

Why North Star Support

It's a big win, a landmark law that organizers elsewhere are now angling to replicate in their respective states, say advocates who helped draft the legislation, conducted meetings on the topic, and marched in the streets to ensure its passage.

"During the New Deal, as collective bargaining and other workplace regulations were being drafted, domestic workers and migrant workers were among the largest categories of workers not covered by those extremely important measures. Because North Star takes risks on issues and people who often are overlooked, we couldn't help but make the Domestic Workers Union one of our grantees. We saw that they had a deep vision, a strategy," says Hugh Hogan, North Star's executive director. "These women had a full analysis of the system they are working in, and of what was wrong. They did a tremendous job of organizing and bringing this issue to the forefront."

The new law, nonetheless, also is just a start. Organizers say that some items on their initial wish list of rights were omitted from the final bill. The law's provisions, nonetheless, include an 8-hour workday and 40-hour workweek; overtime equaling 1 ½ times the usual hourly pay; one day off per week; workers' compensation coverage; bans against sexual harassment at work; and bans against harassment or discrimination that is based on race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, marital status or a worker being a victim of domestic violence. Additionally, the law requires the New York State Department of Labor to decide whether domestic workers can feasibly gain collective bargaining rights.

Out of the Shadows

Those benefits aside, the law's broader, more ephemeral impact, observers say, rests in its capacity to push domestic workers out of the shadows, heightening their shared sense that they are not powerless and that they need not be isolated, silently capitulating to on-the-job abuses.

"Often people don't realize the extent of the exploitation that many of our women have suffered," says Luna Ranjit, 34, co-founder, 10 years ago, of Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice in Queens. A case in point, Ranjit adds, is the story of Shanti Gurung. Standing barely five feet tall and woefully underweight when she came to Adhikaar's attention, the now 21-year-old Gurung was trafficked here at age 17 from Nepal. She spent three years working for a well-to-do Indian-American couple that paid her once. A sum total of $120.

Workdays for Gurung lasted a minimum of 16 hours, as many as 7 days a week. She was malnourished, in part because the family's cupboards were mostly off limits to her. "We've filed a case in civil court for those unpaid wages. We're trying to get her into counseling and filing for her to get a proper immigration status," says Ranjit, whose organization serves various constituencies of poor, uneducated Nepali immigrants. Its 500 domestic workers of South Asian descent comprise Adhikaar's largest and, increasingly, its most vocal contingent.

"When people have a hard time merely surviving, it can be difficult to organize them. You have to eat, you have to be able to support your family and so forth. Only then can you begin to see yourself as part of this big movement," Ranjit says.

In metropolitan New York City alone, an estimated 200,000 people, mainly women, are employed as household help. (The nationwide estimate of domestic workers stands at 2.5 million.) They include the mother of Domestic Workers United executive director Priscilla Gonzalez, 32. Her mom, now in her late 60s, has been "a housekeeper and nanny and in this profession for 25 years. I came into this partly because I had no knowledge of what rights she could assert. My mother's options for retirement are pretty nil. This is such an invisible population that does not make enough to save for a rainy day. And because they usually are being paid off the books, they are not paying into the Social Security system. Many of them cannot afford to stop working. Ever."

But change is coming. Domestic workers have a platform to stand up for their rights. That is the point advocates and organizers are making as they ratchet up their game, getting the word out to domestic workers and employers about what the new law entails. They are conveying the specifics of that law to, say, the young woman who Domestic Workers United found crying uncontrollably at a commuter train station in suburban Great Neck a few days before Gov. David Patterson signed the Bill of Rights. "You see these cars driving up, picking up day laborers, and people negotiating pay for a day's work. Well, a lady had picked up this young woman for two days work, then dropped her off at the train station without any pay. She was afraid to go the police because she is [an undocumented immigrant]," organizer Gill-Campbell says.

Joining Together to Extend the Victory

Moving forward, enlightened and compassionate employers will be crucial to changes that do take place. Some headway already is being made in that arena. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, for example, supported the domestic workers law and has been scheduling gatherings in homes, synagogues and the like to enlist employers of domestic workers as partners in this endeavor.

"It's a consciousness-raising process all around," says Ai-Jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents 33 organizations in 17 cities. "The Bill of Rights is a symbol, a recognition of domestic work as a vital form of work that makes other work possible and very much deserves labor protections. It's a beginning but a huge step."

To further refine the law, the New York advocates now are gearing to address what the landmark law lacks. They will be urging the adoption of such additional benefits as reasonable advance notice of termination, severance pay, paid sick leave, holidays and health insurance. "You get sick because the children you care for get sick or because the elderly you care for get sick, or because you are separated from your own family and have so many stresses related to the work," says former domestic worker Linda Oalican, 58, co-founder of DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association, which is based in Manhattan but represents those from her native Philippines who reside throughout the tri-state region.

The New York activists also are conferring with like-minded domestic worker organizers elsewhere. "There are a lot of people who appreciate the work we are doing," DWU's Gill-Campbell says, after meeting with domestic worker advocates who'd traveled to Manhattan from Boston only days after Gov. David Patterson signed the legislation into law. "They want to see how we did it, and learn from our strategy, which was to involve the members, the workers, and uphold the vision of the workers. I've had the joy of watching members who used to say 'Oh, I can't do this,' come forward and speak up, without even being asked to do so. Without the workers wanting to be treated with the dignity that every worker wants, none of this would have been possible."

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Mike Arsham

Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP)