Out of the Shadows
ON A BEAUTIFUL April day in 2002, a woman named Ai-jen Poo walked into the River Run Playground on New York’s Upper West Side, where a cluster of Caribbean women had gathered, tending to children who were not their own. Kids ran chattering up the play structures, following the trail of a concrete stream that runs the length of the playground. A woman named Allison Julien pulled her eyes off the little girl she was caring for and watched as Poo walked toward her, pulling fliers out of her bag as she approached. Poo was there, she explained, to talk to the women about their rights. Julien, an immigrant from Barbados and third-generation domestic worker, was ready to listen.
“Here was this Asian lady talking to a bunch of Caribbean folk about domestic-worker organizing?” Julien recalled. She stood at Poo’s shoulder and thought to herself: Who are you? A unicorn?
Poo is a lifelong activist with straight hair and a wide, calm face. She was in her late 20s when she first met Julien, already with a voice so steady it could talk down a thunderstorm. She spoke about the meetings her organization was holding. Julien was undocumented and afraid, but she knew she was interested — she had long been frustrated with the hours she worked, the lack of respect she felt and the stories of exploitation she heard from other nannies on the playground. Poo wrote down detailed directions on the back of a flier, in red ink, telling her which trains to take, where to walk and what door to use. Julien went home that night and started worrying about her outfit. “It was a meeting, and I didn’t know how dressed up to get,” she said. “Caribbean people, we love to get all dressy and fancy.”
The next week, when the meeting was scheduled, Julien resisted the impulse to overdress and showed up in sneakers. She opened the doors, walked into the meeting and thought: These women are just like me. Julien had spent years convinced that she should never refuse an employer’s request — that the insecurity of her job was a direct result of her personal situation. “As an immigrant, when you arrive, someone in your community introduces you to the work,” she explained. “They are the ones who tell you how much your wages should be; what hours you’re supposed to work; to never say no to an employer.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, that didn’t last long for me.”
What Julien had walked into was a citywide movement on the cusp of going national. Poo was then the head of New York’s Domestic Workers United; in a few years, she and Julien would both become founding members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a network of activist groups across the country. Formed in 2007, the N.D.W.A. has won state legislative victories, started membership services and created a political advocacy arm. Today it includes four local chapters and 63 affiliate organizations in 38 different cities and towns.
The women the N.D.W.A. represents are diverse and scattered. There are more than two million domestic workers in the United States, most women of color and immigrants. They are housecleaners, nannies and health aides working in private homes, a majority making less than $13 an hour. It’s a work force that is extremely heterogeneous, largely invisible and subject to abuses that range from wage theft to sexual assault and outright human trafficking. (Poo has organized more than a handful of midnight escapes.)
The diversity of backgrounds and needs among its members is something that the N.D.W.A. seeks to simultaneously honor and overcome. Poo, who has been the director of the N.D.W.A. since 2009, aims to create a community based on shared experiences that does not diminish the challenges that are specific to, say, an African-American worker in Atlanta or a recent immigrant in Seattle. Domestic workers have some of the hardest, least secure jobs in the nation, and Poo wants to make them good jobs — with living wages, benefits, days off and legal protections. A good job, she says, has a safety net. A good job does not end without warning or leave women rationing medication they can’t afford.
Poo is pursuing legislation that builds a floor of basic legal protections for domestic workers — a place from which workers and organizers can begin to advocate. The N.D.W.A. is trying to create a new kind of collective bargaining, one where domestic workers have standard contracts and a place to take their complaints. They have built a benefits platform tailored to workers who move from job to job and a political organization promoting candidates who support their causes. They are fighting for immigrants’ rights and women’s rights. “There isn’t a pre-existing model for organizing these workers — they are creating something new,” says Louis Hyman, a labor historian at Cornell University and author of the book “Temp,” who argues that existing labor and unionization laws have long been insufficient.
“We are bringing all the tools and all the creativity we have to do this work,” Poo says. “We are in a moment where we can either shape the future and be part of how this whole thing unfolds, or we can be victims of it, the way that we have been for generations.”
WHEN POO THINKS about what is happening to labor in the United States today, her closest comparison is the transformation that took place during the Industrial Revolution. In the agricultural economy, people largely worked for themselves, or in small groups. With the rise of factories, work was aggregated and made more efficient. In the upheaval that followed, laborers lost out, so they organized and went on strike. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was passed, but domestic workers and farmworkers, conspicuously, were left out.
“The first professional domestic workers in this country were enslaved black women,” Poo says. The nation’s labor laws were, from the outset, tied to Jim Crow. And with no minimum wage and no ability to bargain — really no legal protections at all — a work force that was at the time largely made up of African-American women was driven even further into the shadows. In Poo’s view, the problems that face domestic workers today are steeped in this history of exclusion, sexism and racism.
Poo was born in the United States to Taiwanese immigrant parents. She spent her life slipping in and out of new geographies and new contexts. Poo was raised, in part, by her grandmothers in Taiwan. She spent a year of her life there as a baby and then returned to the United States, first to Indiana, where her father was a student, and then to Irvine, Calif. After that, her family took her to New Haven, Conn., where a teacher criticized her “California surfer girl” attitude (“I can barely swim!” Poo told me). Through all of this, Poo was cared for by a community of immigrants and students, women she called “aunties,” who gave her mother the space to raise two children while getting a medical degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Before graduating from Columbia in 1996, Poo started volunteering with CAAAV, an organization serving the Asian community in New York. (The initials originally stood for Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, but now the group uses the acronym only.) It was there that she first started to understand the difficulties that domestic workers faced. CAAAV had begun an effort to reach immigrant women in all kinds of service industries — nail-salon workers, massage-parlor workers, restaurant workers and domestic workers. At the meetings they organized — the health fairs in particular — it was domestic workers who kept showing up. “As soon as you started interacting in the immigrant community, you started seeing domestic workers,” she said. “We were just starting to see the abuses facing domestic workers. And once you started to see it, you couldn’t not see it.”
Poo’s work changed accordingly. Soon she was meeting regularly with a group of Filipina domestic workers, many of whom who had come to the United States after laboring in Hong Kong. “One of the first questions the women started asking me was, ‘Why don’t we have a standard contract?’ ” Poo says. “They were asking: ‘What are the guidelines? What are the rules here?’ And then we would very quickly learn that there were very little protections in place.”
By the time Allison Julien joined the group, Poo had every playground in New York City mapped in her head. She had started this circuit in 1998 and spent hours walking the city every week. She visited playgrounds and commuter railway stops; she was kicked out of the kids’ sections at Barnes & Noble more times than she could count (“back when there were Barnes & Nobles,” Poo joked). She talked to care workers wherever she found them. She asked them about their lives and invited them to meetings. This is organizing, she told me — walking, calling, passing out fliers, holding meetings and building relationships upon relationships, creating a collective out of what she calls the “crazy, unruly raw ingredients of human beings.”
In 2003, Poo’s organization helped pass a citywide law that required nanny and babysitting agencies to inform workers of their rights. But it seemed like a symbolic victory at best. “Even winning that bill there was so little protection under the law, it didn’t really mean much — they didn’t have many rights to know about,” she says. So Poo set her sights on Albany and determined that introducing any new legislation would require input from her members. (“Being grounded in the specificity of what’s happening to people allows us to see the big picture,” she says.) That year, she organized a meeting of more than 200 domestic workers (with simultaneous translation) and asked them what protections they needed. Out of those meetings she developed what would eventually become the linchpin of the entire movement: the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. What they were asking for constituted a bare minimum of overtime pay, one day off a week, three paid vacation days a year and protection under New York’s Human Rights Law.
Still, it took domestic workers six years to get the legislation passed in 2010. Poo spent years organizing vans and buses from New York City, at least once a month when the Legislature was in session. She and her colleagues found that they had to constantly remind legislators what they were talking about — yanking domestic workers out of invisibility. “I ended up telling people: ‘Every time you say no, it’s just an invitation for me to come back,’ ” Julien told me about lobbying legislators. “So if they didn’t want to see me back there in their office, they better start saying yes!”
While Poo was organizing in New York City, other organizations across the nation were working with nannies and caregivers in their cities. (One group in Los Angeles was printing a cartoon called “Super Doméstica” and passing it out along bus lines.) Poo started reaching out to them to discuss the challenges she faced. “Organizing is really hard,” she said. “We were all struggling with these big questions that were really fundamental and thinking: There’s got to be somebody who knows the answer to these questions.” In 2007, a group of around 50 domestic workers and organizers from six different cities came together in Atlanta for the U.S. Social Forum, a gathering of social-justice activists. “We met together and decided right then and there, on our first date, to get married,” Poo said. They formed the N.D.W.A. in the hope they could work together, build capacity and concentrate power.
POO IS NOT the first woman to take the lead in organizing domestic workers in the United States. Chief among her predecessors is Dorothy Lee Bolden, an Atlanta domestic worker who helped nannies and maids win inclusion in minimum-wage and unemployment laws during the 1950s and ’60s. Despite the successes of Bolden’s movement, the working conditions for nannies and cleaners have continued largely unchanged across the nation. Today, however, Poo believes that the economic and demographic changes taking place in the United States will make domestic workers and their jobs increasingly important, and the problems they face more difficult to ignore. “Today, when I look around, the conditions that define domestic work — the unpredictability of hours, lack of job security, lack of access to benefits, and a safety net — this vulnerability has become defining of more and more of the American work force,” she says.
By 2030, Poo says, care workers — nannies and health aides together — will be the biggest work force in the U.S. Some scholars are predicting that, by then, the nation’s demand for domestic work will have grown so quickly that it will face a shortfall of nearly four million paid and unpaid caregivers. If we continue to neglect the women doing these jobs, Poo argues, we will struggle to find quality care for our aging parents and grandparents and our children.
At its inception, the N.D.W.A. was run entirely by volunteers, but by 2009 it had grown, and founders asked Poo to become the director of the organization. She approached her national role in much the same way she had organized in New York — working first to develop a full picture of the work force she was representing. In 2012, the N.D.W.A. commissioned a nationwide survey of domestic workers. “I think what snapped into awareness really quickly was that this work force, and these people that had been on the margins for so long, was suddenly on the forefront of so much change in our society and our economy,” Poo says.
Poo began paying close attention to the diversity of domestic laborers — their different experiences and demands. It was clear, she said, that her organization would have to be at once extremely specific and expansive. “It was really important to us to take on the issues that domestic workers care about,” said Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network and current strategy director at the N.D.W.A. “That includes things like criminal-justice reform. One in two black women have relatives who are incarcerated — not being able to make a fair wage may impact your ability to support a family member in jail. Having a family member in jail may impact your own ability to make ends meet.”
Early on in her work at the N.D.W.A., before the organization started growing at hyperspeed, Poo decided to think strategically about power. She identified five arenas she believed were integral to shaping her movement. There were the practical arenas: economic (building the economic power of their members and extending the way that the N.D.W.A. raised funds), political (legislation and voter outreach) and disruptive (protests). Then there were two categories that Poo feels are equally important but more esoteric: narrative (changing the way we think about and value domestic work) and modeling (creating state programs, technology platforms and collectives that work).
Many of the N.D.W.A.’s ventures fall into more than one of these categories, and Poo has been aided by a growing team of leaders. She brought on Garza to help expand their organizing, particularly in communities of black domestic workers in the South. She recruited a social innovation and technology expert named Palak Shah to create an innovation lab, who has facilitated partnerships with Silicon Valley and recently introduced a portable benefits platform called Alia, serving housecleaners. “We’re developing technology commercial markets have not yet solved for,” Shah told me.
In the meantime, seven other states have adopted domestic workers’ rights legislation, while a federal version is being prepared by Representative Pramila Jayapal and Senator Kamala Harris. The N.D.W.A. has launched an initiative focusing entirely on home health aides, as well as an immigrant rights organization called Families Belong Together. Mónica Ramírez heads its campaign to promote gender equality. And Poo is continuing to sponsor outreach that will help the N.D.W.A. better understand the domestic-work markets throughout the United States.
Last year, Care in Action, a group allied the N.D.W.A., began its first electoral organizing effort overseen by Jess Morales Rocketto, a 32-year-old alumna of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “We believe that low-wage women of color should be at the forefront of political leadership,” Morales Rocketto told me. “They should be the ones we listen to about strategy; they should be on TV; they should be the ones running for office.” Here is a constituency who reliably votes for the Democratic Party, Morales Rocketto explained, but their priorities are left off the agenda.
During the 2018 election, Care in Action mobilized in Georgia, supporting the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and a list of other candidates, all women of color. Care in Action had 578 paid canvassers, 1,400 volunteers and more than half a million conversations with voters. Its marquee candidate lost, but Morales Rocketto believes the election demonstrated what domestic workers could accomplish. “I think it was proof of concept,” she said. “We wanted to expand the electorate. We would talk to people who would say: ‘You can’t knock those doors. You can’t talk to these voters.’ And we had already done it.” One woman, she remembered, ran out of her house and told volunteers she had been waiting for someone to come.
When it came to changing the narrative about domestic work, Poo found that there was no more effective way to spread an alternate portrayal than Hollywood. It was the 2011 movie “The Help” that sparked the idea to partner with filmmakers and movie stars. “Our workers were waiting for the bus and seeing these huge billboards,” Poo said. Her team started handing out fliers at movie theaters that said, “Do you want to know about the real help?” Poo was a guest of Meryl Streep at the 2018 Golden Globes and of the director Alfonso Cuarón this January. During the Oscars this Sunday, stars like Laura Dern and Eva Longoria will help host a ceremony in Los Angeles honoring domestic workers, in conjunction with Cuarón’s film “Roma.” Poo calls this a “cultural moment” in which domestic workers are becoming increasingly visible.
POO’S OVERARCHING PLAN is expansive. People in the N.D.W.A. regularly use the word “experimentation” to describe what they are doing, and the breadth of their new ventures reflect the ambitions of its leader. What Poo is doing requires bringing all of her so-called vectors to bear — the economics, the politics and the protests. It also requires a shift in public consciousness that is close to seismic. Change the way we value the labor of domestic workers, she is telling us, and we can upend our current hierarchy of privilege and power, bringing our economy in line with our values as human beings. This vision is predicated on the idea that employers — most of them, at least — are her allies; that these are people who are simply unaware of the struggles facing the caretakers they hire, who are steeped in the idea that this is unskilled labor and are so overwhelmed by their own lives that they don’t stop to consider how long and unpredictable hours might keep their employees from their own children or partners or parents.
And yet even well-intentioned employers may be allies only to a point. The women and men who rely on caretakers to help them pursue their careers — jobs that themselves require eight hours or more a day in an office — might balk at paying overtime rates every day or cutting down on hours. Today, it is estimated that only around 5 percent of domestic workers in the United States are paid on the books. (Home health aides are a different story; most are supported by Medicaid payments, and there simply isn’t enough money in the public system to increase wages and provide the services needed.) Persuading the 95 percent of families who employ nannies to make the jump from under-the-table payments to an aboveboard living wage will require more than a simple narrative adjustment. A publicly funded system is also a difficult sell; in Maine last year, a ballot initiative to provide universal home care was defeated, largely because of a tax increase on those making over $128,000 a year intended to cover the program.
Poo admits that her project is ongoing and perhaps interminable. “Organizing and building power for this work force is a never-ending project,” she told me. Then she caught herself: “I mean, hopefully we will win and everything will be great. But this is an ongoing generational journey.”
The N.D.W.A. will soon be introducing a new Bill of Rights in California and other places, and the organization is considering trying to replicate a negotiating and enforcement body established last year in Seattle that represents both employers and workers. “It’s an experiment in creating a collective,” said Mariana Viturro, the N.D.W.A.’s deputy director. “We’re thinking: Is there a way for workers to set up standards without launching a whole other legislative campaign?”
In New York, Allison Julien is now working out of the N.D.W.A. offices full time. She spent more than 25 years as a nanny, and many as an organizer and she believes her work conditions improved after she started pushing back. “I started using my voice,” she said. “I believe my employers saw the value in my experience — they saw the lines of my professionalism.” Her dream is that domestic workers will be respected without having to ask for respect. But for now, she is still asking on their behalf.
Despite the lengthy struggle that the N.D.W.A. is facing, Poo’s ultimate vision would solve the problems of her workers and fill the needs of a changing society; in an idea she calls Universal Family Care, her moral narrative would fuse with her economic and political goals through the creation of a social insurance fund. Everyone in the U.S. would pay into the fund, which would cover care of all types — child care, elder care, paid family leave and services for people with disabilities. “It would finance our care infrastructure in a way that we could finally make these jobs living-wage jobs with benefits,” she says. “Doesn’t that sound great? It could totally happen!” And then Poo catches herself again. “I mean, it will happen. It’s just a matter of when.”
Source: nytimes.com
