In spite of romanticised motherhood and a glut of pro-family rhetoric, neoliberal globalisation reduces the emotional, cultural and material resources necessary for the wellbeing of most women and families…. Women everywhere are increasing the time they spend on reproductive labour, in ensuring food availability and health maintenance for the family, in providing emotional support and taking responsibility for young, ill and elderly dependents. Mothers often curtail their own consumption and healthcare in favour of serving family needs, and daughters (more often than sons) forfeit educational opportunities when extra labour is needed at home.22
Peterson points out that this enhanced stress and pressure to serve the domestic sphere, and the lack of resources in support of that service, impacts whole families and communities:
The effects are not limited to women because the increased burdens they bear are inevitably translated into costs to their families, and hence to societies more generally.
Peterson also explains domestic work in the context of the “informal economy” and its impact on the “formal” or “productive” economy:
Domestic labor, or social reproduction, produces labor power (workers) upon which the formal economy depends. One important effect is that this “free” (unpaid) labor benefits employers, who do not have to pay the full costs of producing the labor force.
Feminist scholars have also pointed out the exclusion of domestic workers from New Deal–era labor rights legislation under the FLSA, the NLRA, the Social Security Act, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As Angela Harris has noted:
The creation of the idea of two spheres, private and public, is integral to a structural liberalism framework that continues to redistribute wealth and power upwards. The creation of a private sphere that should be free from government intervention is at the heart of the continued subjugation of domestic workers. It is a distinction invented by White supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and codified into law in key locations that facilitate the exploitation of Black and immigrant women.23
Labor patterns that emerged during the Industrial Revolution illustrate Peterson’s and Harris’s assertions. Attorney and scholar Terri Nilliasca also points out that
domestic work is women’s work. The Industrial Revolution led to a restructuring of the family that required a new, gendered division of work. Work dealing with the reproduction of labor such as child care, food preparation, household maintenance, and elder care was relegated to the “private” unpaid sphere…. The “cult of domesticity” arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, solidifying boundaries between the “public” and the “private” home sphere. The heterosexual family became sanctified as a respite from the competitive industrial world, and women became responsible for the creation of that sanctuary. The resulting regulatory and legal frameworks furthered this social construction, treating “housework as indistinguishable from other private family matters while treating paid labor as relevant to legal doctrine.”24
The consequence of this exclusion is that private-sphere laborers exist in an underworld unattached by the regulations, codes, and mores that govern public-sphere work. Legal scholar Janie A. Chuang wrote in a 2010 essay that “labeling housework as ‘care’ signals that work in the home is divorced from economic entitlements. Labor rights considered normal in the formal economy (e.g., minimum wage, days off, vacation, and fixed working hours) are not viewed as necessary or even appropriate in the context of work in a private household.”25
The Current Political Surge
With feminist theory serving as a philosophical foundation, the social movement for greater awareness about domestic workers’ rights is growing, building alliances with feminist and political leaders of a variety of stripes, and effectively utilizing social media. It is clear that setbacks—such as Governor Brown’s 2012 veto in California—do not deter the tenacious organizers at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Caring Across Generations, Jobs with Justice, and other groups that are mobilizing domestic workers around the country, advocating for state and federal policy changes, and raising awareness among employers and high-profile leaders within a wide range of movements.
This book will explore the roots of this rising movement, its strategies and successes, as well as why, after such a long history of exclusion, the conditions are ripe for expanded protections and standards for domestic workers. Against the backdrop of the current economy—rife with unemployment, part-time employment, and contract and freelance work, and with fewer and fewer opportunities for security or chances to climb out of poverty—many of the themes that these advocates are fighting for bleed into the experiences of American workers generally. Sick days, paid vacation, and paid family leave continue to be rarities for many workers. The domestic workers’ rights movement is helping to elevate American consciousness about how the individual worker ought to be treated—and how our policies can evolve to match this aspiration. The movement is multiethnic, reflective of not only the changing immigrant and racial demographics of America but specifically the impact of feminist ideology on women of color and how race, gender, and ideology are intersecting.
Why, after centuries of exclusion, is this surge of activism occurring at this point in time (rather than, for example, during the New Deal era, when workers in America were first claiming their rights)? Priscilla Gonzalez, who for ten years was the leader of Domestic Workers United, believes the reason is “intersectional feminist thought coupled with the increase of women of color and immigrant women in the US feminist community.”26 Intersectional feminist analysis has evolved in the United States to the point where feminist women of color, often the children of immigrants, are putting forward a vision for justice that is winning funding, political and cultural allies, and major legislative reforms that for the first time recognize and include domestic work. As this book will note, though domestic workers have organized before, the recent surge of sustained and successful activism is unprecedented. “This iteration of organizing domestic workers has been most sustained, and I feel like in general, a lot of organizing efforts were hard to sustain in prior time periods,” says Gonzalez, adding, “And this is in part because our vision is not limited to just wanting to win rights for domestic workers.” According to Gonzalez, movement leaders like Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, are third-wave feminists who understand intersectional analysis and how domestic workers are not just women, are not just workers, are not just immigrants, are not just women of color, but are all of these things. “Ai-jen and the other leaders of this movement understand that we needed to move on many different fronts: in the labor spaces, in the women’s rights spaces,” Gonzalez says. “We have never believed in silos. We have always made these natural bridges. We do not compartmentalize identities. There is a key shift among feminists of color in this country. That is one important piece that is generating the current domestic workers’ movement.”
Intersectional feminist thinking and practice is the most important influence in this movement for dignity and basic standards for workers who care for people young, ill, and old. In addition to grasping the importance of asserting their personal identities, domestic workers know the importance of love and compassion in their work—and they are now joining with their fellow domestic workers to harness this love and compassion to improve their lives.
1. Slavery and Domestic Work—Then and Now
“Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice.”—Harriet Jacobs, writer and house slave, Edenton, North Carolina (emphasis added)1
In 2013, writer-director Quentin Tarantino won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the