Swept Under the Rug: Domestic Workers’ Rights
I am a woman with a job that pays a reasonable salary, provides health insurance, gives paid leave, and contributes to a growing nest egg. It just doesn’t leave me with time to clean my house. Thankfully, there are people—most often women—who can be hired to help with that. However, for these individuals, housecleaning (or any other form of domestic work including raising children) routinely means low pay, long hours, and denial of health care. And in the worst cases, it can result in severe physical abuse. As one domestic worker described, “Amid the global recession . . . we perform the necessary labor to make other work possible for American businesses and professionals. We do the very basic and vital work for any economy — taking care of the next generation, the elderly, the homes, cooking food and doing the laundry. But even in New York, our labor remains unrecognized, unprotected, and devalued.” On August 31, New York signed the US’s first law protecting domestic workers’ rights. The bill guarantees overtime pay, a minimum of one day off every seven days, three days of paid leave per year, and protections against sexual harassment and racial discrimination for the estimated 200,000 domestic workers in NY (93 percent of whom are women, 95 percent are people of color, and 99 percent are immigrants). These are more rights than domestic workers anywhere in the US, or in most of the world, have. Let’s make sure other states and countries follow in New York’s footsteps.
