David Bacon
Honorata Nono, a Filipina immigrant and domestic worker and organizer, takes care of Michiko Uchida in Uchida’s San Francisco home.
As the age of the U.S. population continues to rise—and millions of people with disabilities, additional needs, and children need care—so too does the country’s insatiable demand for home health care and domestic workers. But years of underinvestment in the sector, and the chronic undervaluing of the important work carried out disproportionately by women of color (particularly those with an immigrant background) has left the sector in a perilous state.
Their plight has a deep and shameful history, rooted in the fact that enslaved African American women were forced to provide unpaid household care for white families during slavery. Following abolition, the low wages and poor conditions of domestic work were sustained by violently enforced, racist Jim Crow laws.
In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act recognized the collective-bargaining rights of private-sector workers and established a process to require employers to bargain with their unions. The law carried a political price, however. Dixiecrat senators and congressional representatives demanded exclusions as the price for their support. Domestic workers, who were still largely African American women, would not be covered. Neither would farmworkers, mostly Mexican and Filipino immigrants in that era.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed three years later, gave private-sector workers the right to overtime pay and minimum wages. Again, domestic workers and farmworkers were left out, at the insistence of Dixiecrats. It was no accident that the labor rights and wages of both groups were held far below those of other workers in the decades that followed.
Despite these exclusions, farmworkers continued to organize. And in the last few decades, domestic workers have sought to end their exclusion as well.
In California and other states, rising activism accompanied the increase of immigrant workers in the domestic worker labor force. According to historian Jennifer Guglielmo: “In the 1970s and 1980s, the domestic workforce began to change dramatically. African-American women moved out of domestic labor in large numbers and into clerical, sales, public sector, and professional jobs. Mexican-American women in the south-west also left domestic work for these jobs. This shift led employers to hire more immigrant women from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia in much larger numbers.” This wave of migration was in part the product of the displacement of families and communities in countries forced to adopt neoliberal structural adjustment policies and free-trade agreements.
In the 1990s, immigrant domestic workers in major cities began to organize community-based workers’ centers. San Francisco’s Mujeres Unidas y Activas started as a project of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, for example, while the Colectiva de Mujeres was originally a women’s center within the city-sponsored Day Labor Program. In the early 2000s, they joined, first with Bay Area organizations like Filipinos for Affirmative Action, and then with Southern California organizations like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles and the Filipino Workers Center, to form a statewide network.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the plight of care providers into sharp focus everywhere.
This process paralleled others in New York and other states. In 2007, five California organizations joined six from New York and one from Maryland to form the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which just a few years later played a key role in the adoption of a landmark international labor standard for domestic workers. In 2011, the International Labor Organization Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers recognized for the first time the right to minimum working standards for domestic workers.
Following a campaign by a coalition of trade unions and domestic worker organizations, C189 has since been ratified by 36 countries. The United States, however, isn’t among them.
When the California Domestic Workers Coalition put a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights on the state legislature’s agenda in 2012 (following a watershed Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passed in New York in 2010), then-AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recognized the historic justice of their demands. “It’s not right that domestic workers should be excluded from overtime pay laws,” he told a crowd in Sacramento. “It’s time for that to end. It’s not right that domestic workers are excluded from collective-bargaining laws. It’s time for that to end. Domestic workers’ rights are civil rights. Domestic workers’ rights are human rights.”
Trumka was responding to the stories he was hearing from workers who’d come to push for the bill’s promise of racial and labor equity. Teresita Gao-Ay, a domestic worker from San Diego, told him she’d been a caregiver since 1986, working from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. “I had to do everything from cooking, cleaning the whole house, laundry that had to be pressed and folded, including sheets, gardening, and caring for the dog. And I had to do this for the whole family, not just for the client I was taking care of. But how can you say no? I was living in their house. Plus, they said they’d call the police if I didn’t do as they asked. Then, when I was injured on the job, no one paid me for the days I had to take off to recover.”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the plight of care providers into sharp focus everywhere. In the U.S., where resources in the care sector were already stretched thin, the situation has worsened as thousands of experienced care workers either left the sector or lost their lives after contracting COVID. According to the AFL-CIO: “Care prices have also skyrocketed, straining working families and forcing them to spend a significant portion of their income on services.”
When President Joe Biden issued an executive order in April this year, seeking to use the administrative power of the federal government to raise domestic, home care, and child care worker wages and make the care they provide to working families more affordable, he implicitly recognized the historic injustice that had underpinned the workers’ plight. “Care workers deserve to make a decent living, and that’s a fight I’m willing to have,” he declared. He also noted the heavy financial burden that caring imposes on families. “No one should have to choose between caring for the parents who raised them, the children who depend on them, or the paycheck they rely on to take care of both,” he said.
Biden’s executive order contains a number of directives to different parts of the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, was told to consider actions to reduce or eliminate families’ co-payments for child care. Other agencies were directed to identify which of their grant programs can support child care and long-term care for individuals working on federal projects. The order also calls for increasing the pay of Head Start teachers and those child care providers whose work is funded with federal dollars.
The order also seeks to ensure there are enough home care workers to provide care to seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in Medicaid. It proposes to set minimum staffing standards for nursing homes, as well as conditioning a portion of Medicare payments on how well a nursing home retains workers. “This will be the first time that we’ll have a care standard,” says Mia Dell, deputy director for advocacy at the AFL-CIO.
A greater investment in care would also ensure more equitable access to quality public care and health services. “The nursing homes with the worst history are those serving low-income communities of color,” Dell says. Better staffing standards and pay would also benefit the workers of color and women making up most of that workforce, another equity component of Biden’s order, she adds.
The president’s statement announcing the executive order highlighted his previous proposals intended to advance these goals. The American Rescue Plan of 2021, which provided funding to overcome the impact of the pandemic, contained over $60 billion for care issues. The administration statement credited that funding with saving the country’s system of private child care providers. Biden’s budget proposal this year included $150 billion over the next decade to expand Medicaid home services, and proposed $600 billion over ten years for expanded child care and preschool programs. But much more extensive proposals failed to pass Congress last year, when a handful of conservative Democrats sank Biden’s Build Back Better bill, and this year, with MAGA Republicans controlling the House, it never stood a chance.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE HISTORIC EXCLUSION of domestic workers run deep. In 2022, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report, the Domestic Workers Chartbook, that outlines the basic living and working conditions for the 2.2 million domestic workers in the United States. That number is expected to grow rapidly—more than three times as fast as employment in other occupations—because the aging of the population and workforce is expanding the number of people needing care.
Even today, the real size of the workforce is likely larger than the governmental statistics show, EPI says, because many domestic workers are paid informally, making them less likely to report employment and earnings. In addition, over a third of domestic workers are immigrants, many of whom lack legal immigration status, and many fear the consequences of contact with the authorities, including participation in national surveys.
Currently, a majority of domestic workers are Black, Hispanic, or Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Over 40 percent are older than 50. According to EPI, “The typical domestic worker is paid $13.79 per hour, including overtime, tips, and commissions—36.6 per cent less than the typical non-domestic worker, who is paid $21.76. The typical domestic worker’s annual earnings are just two-fifths of a typical worker in another occupation.”
Honor Nono, a Filipina domestic worker in San Francisco, has described the actual work conditions for which these workers are paid so little. “The work of a caregiver is no joke,” she told a 2016 rally supporting the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. “Clients vary; they may be kind or unkind, happy or grouchy, difficult or easy, even dangerous. You can break your back, your neck, arms, or shoulder assisting your clients, transferring them from bed to wheelchair or vice versa. That is why we say the caregiving job is 3D: difficult, dirty and dangerous. Some caregivers do not get the minimum wage, workers compensation or paid overtime.”
“We make all other work possible,” she told the rally, “and we work not only with our hands but with our hearts, because the people under our care also deserve love, respect and dignity. We are always in a battle, physically, and emotionally.”
The consequences of the historic exclusion of domestic workers run deep.
Passing a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in California was part of a national strategy, spearheaded by organizations including the National Domestic Workers Alliance and United Domestic Workers of America, to pass similar legislation in as many jurisdictions as possible. To date, ten states and three cities have adopted it in some form, and they often include guarantees of paid time off, overtime, a requirement for written agreements, and protection against discrimination.
In California, the first bills originally proposed guarantees of eight hours of sleep for live-in workers, the right to use kitchen facilities to cook their meals, sick pay and vacations, cost-of-living raises, and advance notice of terminations. The final Bill of Rights was more limited, but the original demands reflect a broad agenda of goals that domestic workers seek to win over time. In Seattle, a bill passed last year brings domestic workers under the state’s minimum-wage law and qualifies them for unemployment insurance. A municipal Domestic Workers Standards Board, with worker, employer, and community representatives, will make further recommendations for improving working conditions.
The Build Back Better bill included many elements of the various domestic worker Bill of Rights, as well as other elements that would have made it possible for undocumented immigrants, including thousands of domestic workers, to gain legal immigration status. After the bill failed to pass, says Dell, “the executive order made sense.”
Nevertheless, it is difficult to quantify the concrete impact of the executive order, in terms of the number of people it enables to access care and the changes in the economic situation of caregivers. “Basically, the administration was pulling every lever it could. In reality, there are only so many levers, so much they can do,” Dell says.
One major achievement of focusing on state legislation was the groundbreaking 2000 legislation in California that gave unions the right to bargain over wages paid to the roughly 500,000 home care workers who provide care to people receiving support from the state’s In-Home Supportive Services Program. Two unions—the United Domestic Workers, a local affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and Local 2015 of the Service Employees International Union—were then able to negotiate wages for workers on a county-by-county basis. That led to substantial raises, and a similar system was later achieved for child care workers. Today, UDW represents 98,000 workers, and Local 2015 represents about 450,000.
The effort continues to pass a national Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, although that path is effectively blocked without a change in the political balance of forces in the Congress and the continuation of a Democrat in the White House. Moreover, in 2014 the Supreme Court held that home care workers couldn’t be required to pay union dues, and weren’t actually workers at all, but “caregivers” who don’t come under labor law and can’t be considered state employees. In the meantime, state-by-state efforts are continuing to make progress in states where domestic workers and care recipients are well organized, and where progressive Democrats have legislative majorities and governors. “The state-based model has allowed us to organize at scale, but there are not enough states,” Dell says.
The elections of 2024 could change that calculation, but whatever happens, Dell says that unions will keep fighting for decent work for care workers: “The AFL-CIO wants to ensure that as we address the crisis of care in this country, we consider the needs of the workers who provide the care. At a time when we are considering making a historic investment in our care systems, we must make sure that workers are paid a living wage, with access to benefits, and the opportunity to join a union.”
This article is co-published with Equal Times, and was produced with support from the Ford Foundation and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
