Though it is celebrated as a leading edge of the “new” workers movement, the current generation of the domestic workers’ movement in the United States has been organizing for more than fifteen years. The first domestic workers organizations of this era emerged in the 1990s. Many of these locally based organizations came into being as women's organizations within immigrant day laborer organizations, while some were founded specifically around the experiences of domestic workers. In 2007, a handful of local domestic workers organizations came together to found the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) in order to build national movement in their sector. Today, NDWA has forty-four affiliate organizations in twenty-six cities and eighteen states, and they have founded a local chapter in Atlanta. Most domestic worker organizing is still done at the local level by the affiliate organizations, but NDWA has also initiated a number of overarching initiatives to experiment with innovative approaches to organizing in order to forge new pathways for improving the lives of domestic workers.Footnote ¹

Most domestic worker organizing efforts in the United States have focused on ending the exclusion of domestic workers from employment protections that was institutionalized during the New Deal in the 1930s. While previous generations of domestic workers had overcome a number of these exclusions, several remained inscribed into law, including the exclusion of domestic workers from the right to unionize and collectively bargain and the exclusion of live-in workers from overtime protections.Footnote ² In addition to these formal exclusions, many of the protections that have been technically guaranteed to domestic workers are not meaningfully enforced, leaving many domestic workers working long hours without overtime pay and for wages below the national or state minimum. In the United States, there is the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, dating back to 1938, which establishes the national minimum wage, weekly standard hours, and overtime compensation requirements. States can also pass minimum wage standards that go above the national minimum. Most domestic worker organizing efforts have focused on legislative strategies that are framed as efforts to end the exclusions and establish equality for domestic workers. As it matured, the organizing has expanded to include pushing the boundaries of state-ensured minimum standards and to raise standards in the industry through directly intervening in the relationship between workers and employers. This piece will not capture all of the significant developments and exciting experiments that are currently taking place in domestic worker organizing around the United States. Instead it will attempt to capture the broad arc of the work, conveying this moment of transition from the legislative fight for equality to a multisited struggle to raise standards.

After six years of organizing, a coalition of domestic workers’ organizations led by Domestic Workers United, a multiethnic coalition of South Asian, Latina, Caribbean, and African groups, succeeded in convincing the New York State legislature to pass the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. When domestic workers first introduced the bill to the legislature, its provisions were expansive. Reflecting the hopes and needs that domestic workers had articulated during the city's first Domestic Workers convention in 2003, the original Bill of Rights originally included paid vacation, notice of termination and severance, a living wage and more, reflecting a radical expansion of the realm of protections normally guaranteed to workers through legislation. Over the course of the legislative process, legislators narrowed the Bill of Rights significantly, largely limiting it to ending the exclusion of domestic workers from the minimum standards normally guaranteed to other workers by the government: live-in workers were included in overtime protections, and all domestic workers were given a day of rest and included in the New York State Human Rights law, which is intended to protect them from racial and sexual harassment. New York's domestic workers also won one right that went beyond established minimum standards: the right to three paid days of rest per year, after they had worked for one year for the same employer. This process reflects a standing tension in the legislative efforts of domestic workers’ organizations: they set out to expand the realm of labor protections, but they are channeled into a struggle for equal inclusion. There is an increasing awareness of this challenge in the domestic workers rights movement, as organizations have begun to reflect on the patterns established by the spread of the legislative model.

The success of the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights inspired domestic workers in other states to run similar legislative campaigns, and it also inspired some sympathetic legislators to initiate their own Bills of Rights. The National Domestic Workers Alliance played a significant role in the campaign to end the exclusion of homecare workers from minimum wage and overtime protections in 2013. In 2013, a legislator in Hawaii initiated and passed a bill that included domestic workers in minimum wage, overtime, and antidiscrimination protections. In that same year, a state-wide alliance of domestic workers organizations in California successfully advocated for a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, which established the inclusion of personal care attendants in overtime protections. This campaign followed a similar trajectory to the New York bill: it began as a more expansive piece of legislation that would have provided meal and rest breaks for domestic workers, but it was narrowed down to a bill establishing equal inclusion in the minimum protections. This pattern broke in 2014 in Massachusetts, a state that had established the equal inclusion of domestic workers in minimum protections in the 1970s, when a coalition of domestic workers organizations, led by the Brazilian Immigrant Center, Matahari, succeeded in winning a more expansive Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. The Massachusetts bill requires employers to sign written contracts with the domestic workers in their employ, to give notice of termination and to provide for maternity leave. These provisions go above and beyond the standard realm of state protections, suggesting that more expansive legislative victories are possible in particular political contexts. State-by-state campaigns continued into 2015. As of this writing, domestic worker organizers in Connecticut, led by the Brazilian Immigrant Center, awaited the governor's expected acceptance of a bill passed in early June by the legislature that included some domestic workers in the state's antidiscrimination and antiharassment protections, while in Oregon a legislator-initiated, but more expansive, Bill of Rights similarly was about to come into law upon gubernatorial approval. Oregon's measure included paid vacation days, overtime, meal and rest breaks, and freedom from harassment. Organizers in Illinois also were seeking to end exclusions from basic protections.Footnote ³

These victories have been significant at both the level of policy and the level of culture. They have brought public attention to the shrouded world of domestic work, and state recognition has validated this often-degraded occupation as “real work.” Sylvia, a Mexicana nanny who is a leader of Domestic Workers United, captured the political and cultural significance of these legislative victories during the second Domestic Workers Convention in New York City, saying, “Before the Bill of Rights, the law didn't recognize us. We had to work behind closed doors, and we were all invisible. Now we have a bill, and we are not invisible anymore.”Footnote ⁴

While Domestic Workers Bills of Rights had significant cultural and political impacts, they have been limited in their ability to impact the material conditions of workers’ lives. Enforcement has been a major challenge in every state in which Bills of Rights have been passed, with widespread reports of ongoing wage and overtime violations flowing into domestic workers organizations. Even states that have sympathetic Departments of Labor do not have the practical capacity to enforce these newly-won rights in the hundreds of thousands of private homes in which domestic workers labor. In response to the absence of effective state enforcement, domestic workers’ organizations have experimented with a range of worker-led enforcement projects. Domestic Workers United (DWU) in New York City developed a program modeled after union shop stewards, in which domestic workers volunteered to make sure that the workers in the neighborhoods where they worked knew about their new rights and had access to legal services when they were violated. Domestic workers organizations in California ran a “Know Your Rights” organizing blitz in the months following the adoption of the Bill of Rights, setting out to establish direct contact with ten percent of the workforce in the state. As a result, dozens of domestic worker leaders spent hours pounding the pavement to educate their peers about the Bill's provisions. The national domestic workers’ movement has recognized enforcement as a systemic challenge in the industry. In response, the National Domestic Workers Alliance is currently working to develop a “next generation” version of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that contains provisions for strengthening state-led enforcement and resourcing grassroots worker-led enforcement in order to strengthen the material impact of domestic workers’ legislative campaigns. These next generation bills will also aim both to expand rights above the previously established minimum and facilitate the process of building workers’ and employers’ organizations. One mechanism that is being considered is to mandate that domestic employers register with the government, which would provide domestic worker organizations with a list of employers to utilize for education, enforcement, and worker outreach.Footnote ⁵

This drive toward worker-led enforcement has motivated a number of domestic workers organizations around the country to experiment with more systematic base-building efforts. The predominant model within domestic worker organizing has been for organizations to be primarily composed of a tight core of highly engaged domestic worker leaders who carry out the majority of the work of the organization. These organizations have historically prioritized the leadership development of their core members over broader outreach and base-building in the industry. This has resulted in the emergence of dozens of powerful and articulate domestic worker advocates, a model that has been effective for winning Bill of Rights legislative campaigns. But it has not had the same level of success when it comes to the question of grassroots enforcement, which requires a much broader reach into the industry as a whole. DWU's Ambassadors Program was one program that was designed to increase the organization's base-building capacity by training worker-leaders as peer educators and geographically deploying them to conduct outreach. The Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles engaged in a particularly innovative approach to base-building, which developed a “snowflake” structure that enabled its leaders to build through workers’ existent social networks. Workers would meet regularly in small groups, sometimes in person and sometimes virtually. They quickly formed dozens of small groups, significantly expanding their membership in a short period of time.Footnote ⁶ The National Domestic Workers Alliance worked to build on these experiments, developing a national base-building training program for about a dozen of its affiliate organizations, called “Get BIG!” (Base-building Innovation Group). These organizations have had varied levels of struggle and success with their base-building efforts, reflected the challenges of transitioning to a new organizational model and the long-standing difficulties facing organizers working in such a radically decentralized industry. Matahari in Boston, Fe y Justicia in Houston, the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance chapter in Atlanta, and Mujeres Unidas y Activas all built on the small group model to allow them to reach a broader cross-section of workers in their cities. For example, Mujeres Unidas y Activas is using the small group model to expand from their traditional bases in Oakland and San Francisco to San Jose while Fe y Justicia built domestic worker committees in different electoral districts throughout Houston.

The domestic workers’ movement has also been trying to develop new nonlegislative strategies for improving standards in the industry, particularly standards that would go beyond the standard floor of state-mandated minimum standards. Domestic workers have long seen the hiring process as a site to impact the relationship between workers and employers: training workers in negotiation skills and resume development, providing professionalized skills trainings that can improve workers hands in the negotiation, distributing sample contracts to encourage workers to uphold a higher standard and to promote the tool of written contract, and setting agreed-upon minimum wages through social networks that workers are expected to uphold in their individual employment relationships. Taking these sorts of strategies to a new level, the National Domestic Workers Alliance recently opened a “fair care” employment agency in New York City called CareTango. This agency is designed to serve as an intermediary that connects skilled workers with high-income employers and using the networks it builds to shape the market and systematically raise standards in the industry. At the same time, the National Domestic Workers Alliance is in discussions with Care.com, the largest domestic work referral website in the country, which has direct access to millions of workers, in order to raise the standards that they promote on their site. Additionally, the national alliance is investigating the possibility of providing much-needed services and benefits to domestic workers—like health and liability insurance—that would enable them to both materially improve workers lives and develop a broader reach into the industry in order to build a larger membership. Finally, they are experimenting with training and workforce development strategies to fill gaps around professionalization and standards in the industry.Footnote ⁷ Though nascent, these programs are significant in that they reflect a different strategic approach than the now-established model of domestic worker advocacy and organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can grow to scale, have enforceable impact or translate into mechanisms for building collective worker power.