Domestic Workers Gain Visibility, Legitimacy

Rachel Sherman is a sociologist at the New School. Her specific field of study is social class and service work.

Last week, the legislation known as the “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” took effect in New York State, having been signed on August 31 by Governor David Paterson. The existence and passage of this bill is due primarily to several years of organizing by Domestic Workers United (DWU), an organization of nannies and housecleaners in New York City.

DWU offers computer literacy and child care training to its members, helps protect workers against abusive employers, and has produced a report on domestic employment, “Home is Where the Work Is,” based on original research. Their main policy effort, however, has been campaigning for the passage of this bill, which will affect over 200,000 workers in the state.

The law includes the following provisions: The right to overtime pay (at time-and-a-half) after 40 hours of work in a week, or 44 hours for workers who live in their employer’s home; a day of rest (24 hours) every seven days, or overtime pay if the worker agrees to work on that day; three paid days of rest each year after one year of work for the same employer; protection under New York State Human Rights Law, and the creation of a special cause of action for domestic workers who suffer sexual or racial harassment.

Although these demands are not especially radical (more controversial provisions, such as paid holidays and two weeks notice prior to termination, were removed from the final version), this law will materially influence the lives of many workers. Perhaps equally important, the law is symbolically significant, for a number of reasons. First, domestic workers have traditionally been excluded from labor legislation, beginning with the New Deal laws covering collective bargaining and minimum wage and hour regulations.

Although over the years some laws (such as those covering the minimum wage) have been extended to apply to domestic workers, their work remains largely unregulated. Thus the bill, which also mandated investigation into the feasibility of granting collective bargaining rights to these workers, is a step toward establishing nannies and housecleaners as “real” workers who deserve recognition and protection from the state.

Second, but related, domestic employees differ from other workers in multiple ways: they work in private homes rather than in public workplaces, they usually work alone, and they are employed directly by their own clients. Furthermore, they are almost always women of color, often undocumented immigrants. For these reasons they are especially vulnerable to mistreatment by their employers. Typically the conditions of employment are determined informally between worker and employer, and clear communication is often lacking. The mere existence of the law encourages the formalization of these implicit agreements and takes a step toward recognizing that the “private” sphere is also a paid workplace for many women.

Beyond making paid domestic labor more visible, this legislation also brings to light the continuing dilemma over housework and child care that many families face.  This dilemma has several causes, including: the continuing refusal of men to share the “second shift,” especially when it comes to housecleaning, which leads their wives to pay other women to do it; the extremely long hours worked by professionals in the corporate world; and the absence of state supports, such as day care centers, for working families.

In the absence of cultural and policy shifts that would create more support for the professionals who employ these workers, domestic workers pick up the slack. As DWU often points out, the labor of these workers frees their employers to work in law firms, finance, academia, and elsewhere, and as such is critical to local and even global economies.

Finally, domestic work is a function of high income-inequality in the U.S., which has been shown to be correlated to increasing employment of household workers, and of continued economic pressures in other countries, which lead women to leave behind their own families to immigrate to the U.S. and take care of ours.

Thus domestic labor is tied into social issues such as immigration, work hours, differential remuneration of men and women, and state labor regulation, as well as the intimate (but no less political) question of the gender division of labor in the home. This law, I hope, will contribute to more open public conversation about both.

Fact sheets on the law and the report on collective bargaining