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Street Roots • Jan. 1-7, 2016
Street Roots • Jan. 1-7, 2016
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Advocate and author Ai-Jen Poo says domestic workers are an integral yet overlooked facet o f the nation’s economy
BY AARON BURKHALTER
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R ITER
omestic workers make up a sort of
“shadow economy” in the United
States.
These people, who provide child care,
senior care, house cleaning and many other
services, often work in isolation and outside
the view of most workers.
Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National
Domestic Workers Alliance in New York,
has been organizing with domestic workers
to protect their employment rights and
secure better wages.
There are about 2.5 million nannies,
housekeepers and elder caregivers in the
United States, a group that Poo calls the
most visible and invisible workers, because
they are seen everywhere but often ignored.
She has been organizing with immigrant
women since 1996. She has also helped
establish bills of rights for domestic workers
in a few states.
Poo recently published “The Age of
Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a
Changing America,” a book looking at what
is known as “the age wave,” referring to the
growing population of seniors. By 2025, 20
percent of the U.S. population is projected
to be over the age of 65.
B
Aaron Burkhalter: Tell me how you first
began this work supporting domestic workers
and immigrants.
Ai-Jen Poo: I guess that you could say
that it started when I was a college student
in New York City, and I started volunteering
at a domestic violence shelter for Asian
immigrant women. And it was so clear to.
me that it was almost impossible for most of
those women to restart their lives and
break out of the violent relationships that
they were in. Mostly because they weren’t
able to gain access to living-wage jobs where
they could actually support themselves and
their children. And when I looked around at
the kinds of work that people were doing, it
was restaurant work, nail salon work,
domestic work: jobs that have been for too
long low-wage, poverty-wage jobs where
women are working incredibly hard but still
unable to make ends meet.
And so that’s when I started to get
interested in how do we make the jobs that
There’s no list, there’s no factory floor or
water cooler, so there is also a way the
workforce is incredibly spread out even as
they are everywhere.
women hold — especially women of color
and immigrant women — how do we make
those jobs good jobs where you can really
take pride in the work you do and support
your family? And so a group of volunteers at
another Asian organization that I was a part
of started a project to bring together
women working in low-wage service jobs.
A.B.: Are there common misconceptions
people have about domestic workers? What
kind of issues do you talk about to make
people more aware of the issue?
A.B.: What does it take to bring domestic
workers together, given that so many of them
work in isolation?
A.P.: Whether it’s unpaid family care or
professional care, it’s always been taken for
granted. It’s never really been recognized
for the true value it brings to society. So
oftentimes all you have to do is ask a room
full of people to share a story about
someone in your life who has cared for you,
and the value of that relationship in your
life, and everyone always has a story. Even if
you don’t have children, everyone has a
parent and someone who raised them. And
so care stories are everywhere, we all have
them, and it’s about tapping into that
experience that people have and to
understand that these relationships that we
take for granted are actually at the heart of
everything else working in our families and
our economy — and really talking about that.
A.P.: When we first started this work, it
was very slow and incremental because
there is a lot of fear. A lot of the women
who do this work are undocumented and
also working, barely making ends meet and
very fearful of losing their jobs. And so it
really took tapping into networks of
workers, it really took the worker-leaders
themselves really convincing their peers
that it was safe and that it was a good thing
to join. So you know it was very difficult to
get five or six women in a room together
initially, but once a handful of women who
did this work decided they wanted to be
leaders, they were able to organize their
peers.
A.B.: You’ve said domestic workers are the
most visible and invisible workforce. What do
you mean by that?
A.B.: Some states have a domestic-workers
bill of rights, such as New York and
California. (Oregon’s takes effect Friday, Jan.
1.) What has that done for workers?
A.P.: Pretty much in every city that you
could live in these days, you will see women
on the street pushing strollers with children
that are not their own; you will see
caregivers pushing elders in wheelchairs or
taking them to senior centers. This work is
everywhere. Everyone has loved ones (who)
need care, whether they’re children or
elderly, and each of us interacts with this
workforce in different ways all the time. But
because it’s so undervalued in society, we
don’t often think of it as real work, and we
don’t often account for the incredible
dedication of this workforce that makes
everything else possible. It’s both present
everywhere and also not very present at all
in our popular imagination.
And the other thing is, you could go into
any neighborhood and not know which
households were workplaces, which
apartments are workplaces because there is
no place that the workplace is registered.
A.P.: Legislation is a tricky thing because
it’s definitely not an end in and of itself. But
for so long, this workforce has been
excluded from some of the most basic labor
protections. In the 1930s, when Congress
was debating the New Deal, Southern
members of Congress refused to support
the Fair Labor Standards Act and the
National Labor Relations Act — which are
kind of cornerstones of our labor laws in
this country — if farmworkers and domestic
workers were included. And, of course, at
the time they were black workers. And so in
a concession to those Southern members of
Congress, those two bills passed with the
exclusions in place. So for more than 70
years, domestic workers have been living
and working in the shadow of this racial
exclusion and (are) incredibly vulnerable to
abuse and exploitation as a result.
And so what we’ve done with these laws
in these states is really bring attention to
PH O TO C O U R TESY O F M S . F O U N D A T IO N
Ai-Jen Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Her recertt book, “The Age o f Dignity:
Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America, ” examines “the age wave, ” or the growing population
of seniors - many of whom will eventually need to be cared for.
this incredible injustice in our labor law and
really raise awareness about how many gaps
there are in our labor protections. And so
we’ve been able to establish basic minimum
standards in six states for domestic workers,
but it’s really not enough. It’s just the
beginning. So now in those states, workers
have a floor that they can build off of and
rights that they can assert on the job. But
really it doesn’t bring the living wages and
the benefits and the economic security that
they really need.
A.B.: What did you learn when you and
100 other women marched to Washington,
D.C., to see Pope Francis?
A.P.: You know, I really learned a lot. It
was a very transformative experience for
everyone involved. When we first decided to
do the pilgrimage, it was because for
months, all we were hearing about
immigrants in the news was what Donald
Trump was saying; this incredible anti-
immigrant hatred. Pope Francis is a leader
who carries a very different image about
migration and immigrants, and he was
calling upon leaders all over the world to
embrace migrants, to demonstrate
compassion and cooperation and really
uphold the human dignity of migrants. And
so we saw it as an opportunity to really lift
up the stories of immigrant women,
everything that they contribute to their
communities and our economy and their
stories of love, of faith, of suffering, to really
humanize the conversation and to take the
conversation in the media in a different
direction.
A.B.: I want to ask you about your book
“The Age of Dignity. ” What is the age wave,
and what will seniors need when it hits?
A.P.: Well, the age wave is already upon
us. The baby-boom generation began
turning 65 and reaching retirement age
three years ago at least, maybe even before.
Essentially, what is happening is a massive
demographic shift that not many people in
this country are talking about A lot of us
talk about the racial demographic shift and
how immigrant communities are growing,
and we are soon to become a so-called
majority-minority nation.
But there’s this other shift happening
parallel to that, where essentially people 85
and older are the fastest-growing
demographic in this country. Advances in
health care and technology have allowed
people to live longer than we have ever
imagined. And the baby-boom generation,
which is an incredibly large generation, is
now hitting retirement age. By the year
2050, 27 million Americans will need care
just to meet their basic daily needs, and we
are in no way prepared for the amount of
care and support that our elders will need in
this country.
So there are huge implications, and it’s
one of the*
reasons why
in-home care (is)
the fastest-
The Oregon Domestic Workers’ Bill ot
growing
Rights, which Gov, Kate Brown
occupation in our
economy today.
signed into law in the summer, takes
And it’s a very
e fe c t F riday Jan. f . The law
dangerous
establishes certain workplace rights
situation because
for domesticworkers, including
the average
overtime wages, rest periods, paid
annual median
income of home-
personal leave, and. p ro te c tio n s \
care workers is
against misconduct such as
$13,000 per year.
harassment. '
I don’t know what
the cost of living
OTHER STATES: Connecticut
is here in Seattle,
passed
labor protections for domestic
but I imagine that
workers in June. New York, California,
it would be pretty
hard to survive
Hawaii and Massachusetts also have
off of $13,000 per
domestic workers bills of rights.
year. And that’s
pretty much the
case in every
single city in this country.
So we’re talking about a workforce that’s
going to be more necessary than we ever
imagined, that is actually struggling,
working and still living in poverty. We kind
of need what I call a care revolution, where
we really think about every aspect of our
economy and our family structures in such a
way that enhances our ability to take care of
one another. And so a lot is going to have to
change. But I think it’s a huge opportunity
to make these jobs really good jobs that you
can support your family on and take pride
in. I mean these are the jobs of the future.
Oregon's m b f Rights
Reprinted from Real Change News in
Seattle.
‘We don't often account for the Incredible dedication of this workforce that makes everything else possible. It's both present everywhere and also not very present at all in onr popular imagination.
-Ai-Jen Poo