By Karina Muñiz and Claudia Reyes

When Francisca Vasquez first walked into the San Francisco offices of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) in late 2013, she had on her signature blue fishermen's hat with white trim, and her metal-rimmed glasses. She kept her eyes low to the ground and her hands tucked into her jacket; she would offer a faint smile, sip her coffee, and listen to the topic of the day at MUA’s general meetings. But soon she started to share her story—one that shows the link between domestic work and human trafficking, a connection at once too common and too often overlooked.

For more than 20 years, Vasquez had lived in isolation with a San Francisco family who had originally promised her opportunities to learn to read and write, and to adjust her immigration status. When she moved into their home, she had recently arrived from El Salvador, seeking work to provide for herself, her two daughters and other family back home. With each passing year, her conditions worsened.

For a full two decades, Vasquez worked around the clock, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of several elders in the home for a total of $500 a month—far less than she would have earned if she were paid the minimum wage and overtime required by California law. Her employers controlled her time tightly, barely even letting her go to the store to buy food. She lived in fear and isolation, made worse by the fact that her employer was a religious leader within the Latina/o community who painted a far different picture of her life to the outside world.

Vasquez’s case was referred to MUA by an ally organization, Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach (APILO), which heads up a referral network for human trafficking survivors in the Bay Area. With the encouragement of a co-worker, she bravely sought protection and a way out; she received a T Visa as a trafficking survivor, based on her work conditions.

But she was still owed wages due to her over the many years of wage theft by her employers. With help from the Legal Aid Society’s Employment Law Center, Vasquez filed a claim with the California Division of Standards Enforcement (DLSE), which enforces the state’s wage and hour laws. After a long investigation and negotiation process, she won $138,386.85 in back pay and overtime in a judgement issued May 7, 2015.

“The statute of limitations kept Francisca from receiving all that was owed to her, but this judgment is still a huge victory for her and for the domestic workers movement,” said Claudia Reyes, MUA’s lead organizer for workers’ rights. California has more than 200,000 domestic workers who provide services such as elder care, childcare and cleaning. The US as a whole has an estimated two million people engaged in such work, but given the numbers of undocumented immigrants who are involved, the real number is certainly higher. [1]

Vasquez’s case shines light on the plight of all domestic workers, who too often live isolated inside private homes, their vulnerability heightened when they are survivors of trafficking.  

Most often associated with sex work, “trafficking” has a far broader meaning, according to the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000: “The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.”

Though national data is lacking, a number of smaller studies point to the prevalence of trafficking for domestic work, according to the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s January 2015 report, “Beyond Survival: Organizing to End Human Trafficking of Domestic Workers.” For example, more than one-fourth of the reports to the National Human Trafficking Resources Center hotline involved domestic work, making it the most-reported type of trafficking, as of August 2014.[2]

Trafficking amounts to modern-day slavery: Employers may deprive workers of wages, food and sleep, keep them locked in and cut off from communications with their families and the outside world, abuse them physically and sexually, and threaten them with deportation.

“When we think about trafficking, we need to understand not just the ways that traffickers snare people, but the broader situations that make workers vulnerable, and push them to migrate—domestic violence, poverty caused by global inequality, the violence of civil war and its aftermath,” Reyes said. “Our approach to solving the problem must involve basic workers’ rights, women’s rights, and immigrants’ rights, and solutions shaped by workers and trafficking survivors themselves.”

The International Labor Organization, a division of the United Nations, acknowledges the complexity of the situation facing the world’s 52 million domestic workers, most of them migrant women. The ILO’s Convention 189, “Decent Work for Domestic Workers,” calls for domestic workers to be recognized as equal to other workers, entitled to the same rights and respect. The Convention was adopted in 2011 after years of organizing by domestic workers around the world.

“Seeing this convention passed that recognizes our work, and leads to policy changes in countries that have ratified it, is tremendously encouraging for our work here,” said MUA Co-director Juana Flores, the US representative to the ILO, herself an immigrant domestic worker.

Today Francisca Vasquez wears a bright smile under her fisherman’s hat, and offers a warm embrace as she welcomes new members to Mujeres Unidas y Activas. She has spoken to an audience of hundreds about her case, and her story. She is an active leader that you can find at the front of May Day marches, actions against deportations, and is a strong voice in the fight for greater protections for domestic workers in California, and across the globe.

“I tell domestic workers they should demand their rights, and not stay in an abusive situation like I did,” Vasquez said. “They are not alone; other domestic workers and our organizations are there for support.”

Karina Muñiz is the political director for Mujeres Unidas y Activas; Claudia Reyes is MUA’s lead organizer for workers’ rights.

By Karina Muñiz and Claudia Reyes

Embargoed until June 16, 2015

Shifting Consciousness, Sharing Power, Shaping Policies
Photo Essay by Rucha Chitnis

You can view the version above in a pdf pop-up or view full html below.

Collective Leadership & Movement Building
“I am a home care worker, and I save lives. So why am I paid poverty wages?”  LaTanya Cline demanded of an ebullient crowd of domestic workers, unionists and their families at the Justice for Homecare Tribunal in Sacramento. In March 2015, more than 200 members of the California Domestic Workers Coalition traveled to the state capital to demand a living wage, overtime pay and dignity for homecare workers and workers who take care of seniors and people with disabilities.

The coalition’s contingent included several worker-organizers from Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), a powerful grassroots organization of Latina immigrant women in the Bay Area. MUA members are raising their voices and asserting their leadership to demand dignity, safety and recognition of the vital services they provide as housekeepers, nannies and caregivers.

Domestic Work is Invisible Work
“There is an entrenched devaluation of immigrant women workers. Domestic workers are breadwinners of their families throughout Latin America and Asia. In so many ways they are uplifting the economies of their countries through remittances,” said Katie Joaquin, campaign director of the California Domestic Workers Coalition. “We see this as an international struggle that is critical to the leadership of women,” she said.

There are nearly two million domestic workers in the United States, more than 90 percent of them women, mostly low-income immigrant women from diverse ethnicities.  Over the past 25 years, MUA has built a worker-center model of sharing power and harnessing workers’ collective bargaining rights.  MUA builds the personal and collective leadership, and power of immigrant Latina women, many undocumented, who are disproportionately affected by economic and political marginalization, racism and violence.  MUA also works to create safe pathways to citizenship, preventing deportation of immigrant women and their families.

“I learned that I have value.”

MUA is rooted in the belief that every woman who walks through its door is a leader.  The leadership program is designed to ensure the self-determination of women at home, and through policies which are being shaped by rigorous organizing by domestic workers from coast to coast in the United States.  “For the first time I learned that I have value,” said Lupe Zamuldio, an undocumented worker from Mexico who recently completed MUA's leadership training.  “All my life, I walked with my head down. I didn’t know about my rights as an immigrant worker. Today I walk tall and realize that I have value in the society as well.”

Claudia Reyes, MUA’s lead organizer for workers’ rights, explained that this program also offers a place for women to talk about the various traumas they have experienced and begin the process of healing in a safe space of sisterhood.  Issues of racism, patriarchy, legal and economic rights are also part of the leadership curriculum.  Many members have survived domestic violence, including MUA’s resilient co-director, Juana Flores, and receive counseling and advice from certified domestic violence advocates and sexual assault crisis counselors. 

Claudia’s mother, Maria Huerta Reyes, is an iconic elder in the space—a former domestic worker who joined MUA nearly 17 years ago, and became a powerful advocate for the rights of immigrant women.  Maria has recruited hundreds of women to join MUA, participated in hunger strikes for immigrant rights, traveled countless times to Sacramento to organize for the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights and served as president of MUA’s board of directors.  Maria’s leadership journey has inspired and energized other domestic workers, and this year she was honored with a special “movement leader” recognition at MUA’s 25^th Anniversary Celebrations in San Francisco.

The Future of California’s Domestic Workers
In 2013, MUA members played a key role in winning the passage of the historic California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (AB 241), after an eight-year process of movement- and coalition-building.  This significant legislative victory extends overtime protections to women who care for and support hundreds of thousands of individuals and families in California.  MUA and its allies at the California Domestic Workers Coalition are now gearing up to introduce a 2016 bill to make these protections permanent; provisions of the bill passed in 2013 are due to expire in 2017. 

“There is tremendous strength to link with other organizations.  We knew that in order to win, we had to be grounded in the leadership of immigrant women and build the strength of coalitions.  A lot of worker organizations have worked hard to shift the visibility and consciousness of domestic work… and the Bill, and the organizing of immigrant women also helped to shift the consciousness of policymakers,” said Katie Joaquin.

Rucha Chitnis is a writer and photojournalist. You can follow her on Twitter @RuchaChitnis.

Lupe Zamuldio migrated to the United States from Mexico in 2001.  “The first job that I was offered was working as a full-time nanny, housekeeper and cook for a family for $100 a month,” Lupe says. “This seemed very unreasonable to me, and I refused the offer. I ended up working at a panaderia (a bakery) as a cook and cleaner for a starting hourly wage of $6 an hour.”

As an undocumented immigrant worker, Lupe says she was unaware of her economic and legal rights. After a family dispute arose, someone suggested she contact Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), and visit their offices in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. “At MUA, I received legal advice for my personal family matter, as well as legal counseling for my immigration status. I now have filed my papers, and I am on track to get legal status,” Lupe said. She ended up participating in MUA’s leadership program, where she learned about her labor and legal rights and recognized her personal leadership potential. 

“For the first time, I learned that I have value,” said Lupe.  “I walk with my head high.” She is now determined to refer other women to MUA, especially those who are battered from domestic violence.  Her employer at the panaderia ended up being sued for violating wage and hour laws, and after being underpaid for nearly 12 years, Lupe is now receiving a minimum wage of $12.50 an hour and lunch breaks.  “I want to keep learning and developing myself.  I am learning to trust myself, and I would love to study law or teach,” she says.

The MUA leadership program affirms the holistic self-determination of immigrant Latina domestic workers—at home, at work, and in state policies. 

MUA believes in the power of networks and alliances. In March 2015, MUA members headed to Sacramento to offer solidarity at the Justice for Homecare Tribunal, and advocate for labor rights, fair living wages and the right to overtime compensation.

“If you care about women’s rights, you should care about home care workers, the majority of whom are women,” said Ai-jen Poo at the tribunal. “My grandmother can age in dignity because of her caregiver,” said Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance.  

MUA and its allied labor unions believe that people with disabilities and elders benefit when the rights of homecare workers are protected. “In-Home Supportive Services allows so many families like mine to keep going even when the unexpected happens. Not only do our clients and loved ones get to stay at home, where studies show they are happier and healthier, but homecare also keeps them out of costly institutions and nursing homes—saving the government billions of dollars every year,” home care worker LaTanya Cline said in her testimony.

“My mother was a kitchen girl, my father was a garden boy, that’s why I am a unionist!” sang domestic worker organizers from South Africa, Jordan, Morocco and Hong Kong. “We see this as an international struggle that is critical for the leadership of women,” said Katie Joaquin, campaign director of the California Domestic Workers Coalition. 

“There is an entrenched devaluation of immigrant women workers. Economic justice is important to have freedom and dignity for women.  At the heart of the issues of domestic violence is the inability for women to leave a partnership that is abusive if there is no way to economically sustain themselves and their children,” said Joaquin.

Two generation of domestic worker organizers and leaders: Claudia Reyes (left) has followed in the footsteps of her courageous mother, Maria Reyes (right).  Claudia is the lead organizer for the workers’ rights program at MUA and played and important role in passing the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in California.

Maria Reyes is an iconic elder in the space—a former domestic worker who joined MUA nearly 17 years ago and became a powerful advocate for the rights of immigrant women.  Maria has recruited hundreds of women to join MUA, participated in hunger strikes for immigrant rights, traveled countless times to Sacramento to organize for the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights and served as President of MUA’s board of directors. 

Sisterhood and solidarity are important offerings for MUA’s members, many of whom have survived violence and racism, and experienced deep marginalization based on their identity as immigrant women.

The graduation ceremony of MUA’s leadership program is a space for domestic workers and their families to celebrate and honor every woman who has begun a new chapter in her personal transformation and leadership journey.  Here, Elena’s daughter runs to embrace her mother as she receives her certificate.

Armael Bulawin Malinis and Edgardo Pichay, male allies and community organizers at Migrante International, an advocacy group that defends the rights and welfare of overseas Filipino workers, raise their fists in solidarity with the rights of home care workers.

MUA offers wellness and self-care for its members. Here, members participate in a weekly yoga class offered by a volunteer at the group’s Fruitvale office.

Outreach, Educate, and Dance
By Dalia Rubiano Yedidia

 An estimated 250,000 domestic workers throughout California—mostly immigrant women of color who clean and care for homes and children—began receiving overtime pay when the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights took effect in 2014.

After two vetoes, dozens of mobilizations to Sacramento, and countless press conferences and legislative visits, the diverse coalition of workers, employers, and interfaith, labor and community groups—who had developed their leadership through a multiyear campaign—as well as the children and families of workers that had endured, strengthened, and grown tremendously through a seven-year struggle, could finally claim victory when Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill in September 2013. The win may be considered inevitable, given the growing visibility of the importance of domestic work nationally and the simple yet poignant truth that every single one of us has needed, currently needs, or will need care at some point in our lives. Nevertheless, the victory is historic as it is owed in large part to the domestic workers’ tremendous leadership, vision, and perseverance.

This end to an arduous seven-year fight to be granted basic labor protections, which included convincing elected officials, the labor movement, and even our own families just how precious and fundamental the work that makes all other work possible is, deserves to be celebrated. In fact, domestic workers and allies highlighted the importance of this victory by celebrating the one-year anniversary on September 26, 2014, proving they know how to party just as hard as they fight.

“It’s so beautiful to have such a party after fighting for so long, after so much struggle,” said Luz Sampedro, domestic worker leader and member of the California Domestic Workers Coalition. “To get to our first anniversary, to see our leaders and allies shine, to be able to hug each other and congratulate each other personally—it’s that human connection that makes us strong.”
Last year, the Coalition dedicated itself to building a base and deepening domestic worker leadership through organizing. This year, the Coalition’s steering committee made up of seven domestic worker member-based grassroots organizations—three from Los Angeles and four from the Bay Area and Sonoma—began planning the work of implementation and education.
As Claudia Reyes, lead organizer at Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), explained: “This law that we worked so hard to pass means nothing if we do not understand it. It is our responsibility to learn its ins-and-outs and educate ourselves and our community so that we can be sure our struggle and victory is truly realized.”
The Coalition developed “Know Your Rights” materials in partnership with the Women’s Employment Rights Clinic, finalized an outreach strategy for the year, including coordinated statewide efforts, and launched the Dignity in the Home campaign aimed at organizing 10 percent of the state’s domestic worker sector by 2017 when the law sunsets (expires). The Coalition currently has its eye on future campaigns to make overtime pay permanent and push for even stronger protections for California’s domestic workers. To this end, it conducted several trainings in both Los Angeles and San Francisco for domestic worker leaders to get educated on the complex and often (intentionally) confusing legal code which includes different wage and hour protections depending on the type of domestic work performed (caring for property, e.g. cleaning and gardening, vs. caring for humans as a personal attendant) and whether the worker is a live-in (residing with the employer) or a live-out.

Organizing from a Legacy of Racism and Slavery
Central to every training is an analysis that roots domestic workers within the legacy of racism and slavery in the United States, which continues to cast its shadow through the current devaluation and invisibility of this gendered, racialized, and often status-based workforce. Last spring, a strong team of 30 domestic worker leaders completed a “Know Your Rights Training-for-Trainers” where they learned the intricacies of the legal protections and gained a nuanced understanding of the historical and political underpinnings that keep domestic workers divided and unorganized, with minimal protections. This was followed by another training in early summer on how to conduct outreach. Then on International Domestic Worker Day (June 16, 2014) the Coalition launched its first three-week organizing blitz in the Bay Area.
Organizations, such as the Women’s Collective (San Francisco), Mujeres Unidas y Activas (San Francisco and Oakland), Filipino Advocates for Justice (Alameda County), and ALMAS-Graton Day Labor Center (Sonoma County), participated in intensive outreach to domestic workers on the job and at bus stops. The trained worker-leaders targeted childcare providers at playgrounds in the neighborhoods of their employers, educating them about the new law guaranteeing their right to overtime and spreading the word about organizing efforts to build a movement for Dignity in the Home.
“I was nervous at first,” said Martha Herrera, one of the worker-leaders, of her experience, “mainly worried that the women wouldn’t trust us enough to confide in us. But after getting out there and doing the outreach, it filled my heart and truly motivated me to see the looks on their faces after we let them know about the Bill and their rights!”
The pilot program helped Bay Area groups learn key lessons about planning and strategy, which informed their second statewide organizing drive launched on the first anniversary of the signing of the Bill.
In the planning process during the first half of the year leading up to the pilot, it became clear that not all of the Steering Committee groups had been doing systematic outreach and follow-up with domestic workers consistently while fighting for statewide legislation. During the campaign for the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, Steering Committee groups developed member leadership by training spokespeople to interview with the media and potential allies, draft and share strong testimonies at press conferences and in legislative visits, and build relationships with unions, community groups, and interfaith congregations. While those skills were invaluable and essential to the victory, they were different from the skills needed to expand the base and reach 10 percent of the workers. For collective bargaining, consistent outreach to domestic workers was necessary and had to be added to the organizational scope of work.
Within the specific challenge of building systematic outreach into the work plans and assessing the skills needed to both conduct the outreach and bring in new workers in a post-campaign time, a host of other unique challenges presented themselves. At the most basic level, the Coalition had to map out the areas where the workers were most likely to be in order to do outreach because there is no shop floor where all domestic workers gather daily. It got help from students at Stanford University who used GIS mapping systems and Census data to project likely hotspots—i.e. areas where high income households (marked red) overlapped with children under five years old (marked yellow). Within these hotspots (marked orange), the Coalition set out to identify the parks and libraries where the nannies and the children they cared for would gather.
Over the summer, Bay Area groups prioritized these hotspots for outreach with varying degrees of success. But even before the maps were created, a few specific playgrounds proved to be goldmines in terms of outreach because dozens of nannies who knew each other would meet there frequently. Ultimately, the Coalition realized that their members’ street knowledge and networking on the playgrounds was far more accurate and productive than the computer-generated maps. While seemingly minute, this was a key lesson for Steering Committee groups, which have limited resources and strive to invest the time of their domestic worker leaders, many of whom have tight schedules between work and families, wisely.
“One of the main challenges for me, doing the outreach, was just being able to make time for it,” admitted Emily, a domestic worker and Coalition member. “I loved being able to support other women by telling them about their rights, and hear them thank me from their hearts. But in order to do the outreach, I really had to plan my schedule, preparing meals in advance for my son and me, rescheduling my housecleaning gigs, and just managing my own schedule.”
Member leader and outreach coordinator Martha Herrera worked at her cleaning job from six to nine in the morning and came straight to the MUA office afterwards to meet other members and do outreach during the drive. “The truth is, I wasn’t tired when I got off work and came to MUA, even though I’d been up since 5am,” she admits. “I was actually excited when I would get off work a little early, to rush over and meet the others, so we could go out together and talk to workers.”
Another challenge the Coalition currently faces is how to engage new contacts during a time when there is no Bill of Rights or legislation to promote. While letting new contacts know about their new rights to overtime is an excellent start, the Coalition’s goal is to organize these contacts into the movement. Hooking in domestic workers hungry for change on the job was relatively straightforward when there was an active fight in which to plug new contacts. Now, without a mobilization to Sacramento to meet with legislators, or a march to draw attention to a needed legislation, the Coalition is assessing potential trainings and services it can offer to foster long-term engagement in the domestic worker movement.
Organizing 25,000 workers will be no small feat for the seven Steering Committee organizations, most of which are worker centers representing low-wage immigrant workers who typically cannot access formal labor unions. During this period of assessment and outreach, the Coalition is not only investing in organizing to scale in order to build real political power within a broad base for 2017, it is also considering the importance of developing and deepening worker leadership so that the work is sustainable. In addition, the Coalition sees a need to deepen existing member leadership to ensure long-term commitment and dedication to the movement. The goal is to develop domestic worker leadership that can expand the work as paid organizers with long term vision. Unimaginable in the past, it is now made more possible by the recent recognition of the importance of domestic worker organizing from the MacArthur Foundation.
With its ambitious goal of organizing 10 percent or 25,000 domestic workers across the state over the next couple of years, the California Domestic Workers Coalition has its work cut out for itself. Hard as that may be, this groundbreaking work will help to build power and position the domestic worker movement to launch another legislative campaign in 2016. The Coalition recognizes that the base-building work in California is just a part of a growing national strategy of organizing to scale and is anchored by the National Domestic Worker Alliance. As domestic workers continue outreaching, meeting, and connecting more workers and allies to this infectious, humanizing, and growing movement, they are truly transforming our relationships to one another and our political landscape.
“Fighting against the grain for the improbable can be so isolating,” mused Sampedro following the first year anniversary celebration. “But remembering that we are each the voice of countless invisible workers while hugging and congratulating each other on our collective anniversary—that is when you really get to see how the small work that each one of us does makes a huge change.”

Dalia Rubiano Yedidia organized with domestic workers at the Latino Union of Chicago, and worked on the campaigns to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York and California. She is currently the movement building manager for Forward Together in Oakland.

By Preeti Shekar

There are nearly two million domestic workers in the United States today. More than 60 percent of them are immigrant women of color. It’s no surprise, then, that the struggle for domestic workers’ rights is at the intersection of diverse social justice issues—immigration, migrant labor, and gendered division of labor—in a context of growing feminization of poverty and globalization.
 The domestic worker movement, which started as a small group of women organizing against unfair exploitation and pushing for some basic rights, has grown to be one of the most exciting labor movements, both in the United States and globally.
“The domestic workers’ movement today is over a decade old and is one of the most cutting-edge movements in the ability of its leadership to forge alliances and partnerships both globally and locally, with unlikely allies, including various labor unions,” notes Sheila Bapat, author of Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers’ Rights.
In her book, Bapat summarizes the short but delicious history of this movement in the U.S. with her skillful policy expertise, drawing on the many individual stories she researched for the book. “Every case study points to the one stark reality that ultimately, how domestic workers are treated depends largely on their employers,” she says. “Families that hire and fire these workers at will can range from being quite compassionate and just, to downright cruel and unbearably exploitative…  many [of them] immigrant or diplomat families.”

Diplomats and Domestic Workers: A Troubled History
“For every case of worker exploitation, abuse, and violation that makes headlines like this, there are thousands that go unreported,” notes Nahar Alam, a founder of Andolan, a collective in New York that has organized hundreds of immigrant South Asian women workers.
A leading figure in the domestic worker movement, Alam was talking about the infamous case of Devyani Khobragade, the Indian diplomat who was leveraging her diplomatic immunity to get away with exploiting her domestic help, Sangeeta Richard.
While this case held the headlines for a while, it is a sad reality that many more such heinous cases go unreported or under-reported, Alam emphasized. However, she went on to explain, the enormous publicity and media frenzy around such cases helps immensely to raise critical visibility and build solidarity on these issues that no one cares about when ordinary middle class families exploit or abuse workers.

Feminist Sheroes
Even as the domestic workers’ movement has been gaining momentum steadily through high-visibility cases, the stellar feminist leadership of young women has also helped pave the way for rapid mobilization and some concrete policy gains.
Ai-Jen Poo, a long-time labor activist and campaigner, is widely seen today as the face of the domestic workers’ movement and rightly so for her role in making it the highly visible, highly intersectional movement it is today. Under her astute leadership, the movement has forged strong partnerships with immigrant rights groups, labor movements, and even environmental movements focusing on the disproportionate impacts of climate change. This last was evident at the People’s Climate March in New York City ahead of the UN Climate Change Summit, where a domestic workers’ group showed up in full force to join the hundreds of thousands of grassroots environmental activists and their allies.
Last August, Ai-Jen Poo won the prestigious MacArthur Genius award for her work. While this is cause for celebration for both the domestic workers’ movement and young feminist leadership, we also need to reflect on who gets to lead the movement and be its face. Alam urges social justice activists to be truly mindful of a reality that often leaves workers unable to lead their own struggles because of their vulnerabilities. We need to examine how the nonprofit industrial complex has created “career-activists” who are professionally trained to be dynamic leaders and act as external catalysts of change, as opposed to leaders grown from within a movement. In this regard, the domestic workers’ movement is not dissimilar to others, such as the restaurant workers organizing.

From Slavery to Surefire Liberation: The Long Slow Arc of Justice
Slavery, author Sheila Bapat reminds us in her book, is deeply imbricated with the evolution of domestic labor in 20th century America. “The roots of domestic work are deeply connected to the history of slavery in the U.S. It’s no accident that a vast majority of domestic workers were African American women to begin with, and increasingly now, immigrant women of color.”
With a deep and long history of exploitation rooted in slavery, making domestic work visible as critical labor has been a decade-long struggle. But thanks to strong feminist analysis undergirding the movement, it has grown to be quite a formidable one. A shining example is Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), an organization that both empowers domestic workers and enables them to find well-paid work in the Bay Area, where they are based.
According to Bapat, the domestic worker movement has organically drawn from the “best feminist theories out there—from intersectionlity to inclusiveness. But for all its theoretical underpinnings of feminism, labor economics, and human rights, its demands are quite basic: rudimentary overtime, breaks in the work day, and a decent wage rate. And as a labor movement, it’s unlike any other—women-led (with women caring for each other’s children at meetings)—and inclusive of the most silenced voices.”
“Groups like MUA and others have come up across the country—in the midwest and East Coast—to serve domestic workers,” she adds, having spent a considerable amount of time with various leaders in the movement. And in the last decade or so they have grown to be powerhouses of organizing, representing a new and radical model, unlike any union.

A Tale of Two Labors—One Not Valued
For all its successes and promise of changes down the road, the domestic workers’ movement raises stark questions about the larger issues of labor and how our economies are structured to value certain forms of it and not others, which are subject to exploitation.
It is hard to not get outraged or upset as you read and learn about the history of how domestic labor— that crucial work, which ensures that our children are taken care of, allows our elderly and disabled to live with care and dignity, and sends out the workforce everyday, clothed and fed and taken care of—is rendered invisible and valueless. The very struggle to have domestic work recognized as valuable labor mirrors the women’s movement’s struggle to make women’s voices heard. So it’s no coincidence that over the years, as the feminist movement has gotten more inclusive of women of color and is no longer dominated by white women, it has taken on complex issues involving labor rights, economic justice, and environmental justice.

Mapping the Local and the Global, the Personal and the Political
“At the end of the day, our movement needs to be not just local or regional—it has to be globally connected,” Alam notes. Her analysis stems from the reality that a lot of global economic shifts—brought on by neoliberal economic policies—have enabled this growing network of global migrant labor. Massive socio-economic changes have entirely transformed the physical landscape and triggered the global migration of labor, creating a new underclass of cheap, dispensable (and therefore exploitable) workers who are unprotected by the state because many toil in foreign countries with vulnerable temporary or even undocumented immigration status and long path or no path to citizenship.
Several countries in the global south have also made a deliberate shift to neoliberal models of globalization. While these models have benefited a few in the middle and upper-middle class strata, the vast majority have been left to fend for themselves in the informal economies of wage labor which sometimes come dangerously close to slavery. At the same time, countries like the U.S. have witnessed a steady decline in social services, health care, and other vital public spending which enabled the middle and lower middle class to have a decent quality of life on limited incomes.
Domestic workers organizing globally have drawn from U.S. domestic worker organizing and in turn, lent it enormous solidarity and strength. It’s a two-way street, remarks author Bapat. The International Domestic Workers Network based in Hong Kong has been pivotal in raising the visibility of basic domestic worker rights with the International Labor Organization, and also in tracking the successes of domestic workers’ groups in different countries—from India and Singapore to the United States. Minor though these gains may be, they are a tremendous boost overall to the movement that works for the rights of millions of domestic workers around the world.

Putting the Power into Empowerment!
As bleak as things seem in the U.S., “We need to remind ourselves that there is still tremendous hope, as you can see from the growth of the movement and its leadership and the gains made by legislation in the few states,” notes Bapat. In several Arab countries, where workers’ rights are non-existent, we cannot even begin to imagine what fighting for the basic rights of domestic workers would look like because there are no provisions in the law and the media is silenced. In that sense, it’s critical for international organizations like the ILO to be involved, in order to ultimately democratize these human rights that currently only exist in certain countries, such as the United States.
This is definitely an exciting time for the movement, both globally and domestically, where a handful of states have already signed a domestic workers’ rights bill. But that law needs to be implemented or actively enforced to make it a reality.
“We need political power, not just paper power,” Alam reiterated at a recent meeting in the Bay Area. “There have been hundreds of stories of immigrant women who toil away and put up with abuse not knowing their rights. We still need to fill that information and advocacy gap, lacking which, thousands of immigrant women remain trapped in their isolation and fear. Only the time-tested ways of old-school organizing and consciousness-raising can enable that. Not all your state-of-the-art technologies and social media campaigns can transform that ground reality.”

Preeti Shekar is a freelance writer and a contributing editor at RP&E.

Claiming Our Voice Panel Discussion with Gulnahar Alam (lead organizer and founder of Andolan: Organizing South Asian Workers), Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel (filmmaker & director of Claiming our Voice), YaliniDream (performance artist featured in the film) and Sheila Bapat (author of Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Struggle for Domestic Workers' Rights) offer remarks on domestic workers' rights. Learn about the challenges and successes of South Asian worker organizing efforts in the United States. This discussion is moderated by Preeti Mangala Shekar. This event was co-sponsored by Reimagine Race, Poverty and the Environment and ASATA (Alliance of South Asians Taking Action) and held at Oakstop Coworking in the heart of downtown Oakland.

Claiming Our Voice is a film about South Asian domestic worker organizing. 

There are more than 1.8 million domestic workers in the United States, many of whom toil in often unregulated and exploitative work conditions hidden from view in the homes of employers. Immigrant women of color constitute a disproportionate number of these domestic workers.

Claiming Our Voice interviews the women of Andolan, an organization founded and led by South Asian immigrant low-wage workers in New York City who organize collectively against exploitative work conditions. The film joins the women as they prepare to share their stories in a multi-lingual theater performance directed by YaliniDream.

By Preeti Shekar

Sheila Bapat, author of Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers’ Rights offers remarks on domestic workers' rights. Learn about the challenges and successes of South Asian worker organizing efforts in the United States.