“Tell Dem Slavery Done”: Domestic Workers United and Transnational Feminism

Domestic work is a devalued and degraded occupation, in part because of its racialized and gendered character. For most of U.S. history, immigrant women and women of color—especially African American women—formed the bulk of the paid domestic labor force.¹ In addition, the association of the occupation with women’s unpaid labor in the home and the location of that work in an ostensibly private space, have sometimes made it difficult for others to see household labor as “real work.” It is, in the words of Judith Rollins, “invisible” work.² If the work is not recognized neither are the workers. A domestic worker is treated simultaneously as invisible and as the personal property of her employer. In the minds of some employers, the intimate nature of the work and the racial makeup of the workforce—which encourages employers to construct their employees as racially different—justify low wages and poor working conditions. For many employers, hiring a domestic worker is not limited to hiring their services or their time—it is conflated with the purchasing of their very bodies.

The racial politics of domestic work profoundly influenced its treatment in labor legislation in the first half of the twentieth century.³ When the New Deal was enacted in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression, Southern Congressmen, concerned about maintaining control over the African American labor force, insisted on the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from minimum wage and collective bargaining laws. Consequently, domestic workers were denied the basic labor protections and avenues for protest guaranteed to nearly all others in the American workforce. Domestic workers, in fact, were not given Social Security until 1950. They only earned the right to minimum wages and overtime pay in 1974, in response to a national organizing effort by African American domestic workers. But, even with the passage of this law, babysitters and companions for the elderly are still excluded from minimum wage provisions, and live-in workers are not granted overtime pay. In addition, even today, domestic workers do not have the right to organize or bargain collectively. Moreover, domestic workers are excluded from the Occupational Health and Safety Act and civil-rights employment laws, which apply only to businesses with fifteen or more employees.

These legal limitations have resulted in a particularly vulnerable workforce that is left at the mercy of employers. Employers may be kind, generous, and understanding, but they can also be cruel and abusive. Indeed, it is the imbalance of power that makes this occupation so unpredictable and susceptible to abuse. This susceptibility is heightened by the fact that many domestic workers are undocumented, often don’t speak English, and have minimal knowledge of the workings of the American political and legal system. The isolated nature of the work makes oversight and enforcement of existing laws difficult. Often shrouded behind a mask of middle-class respectability is the exploitation that takes place behind closed doors. One case in 2008 involved Varsha Sabhnani, an independent businesswoman in Muttontown, Long Island, who was convicted of torturing and imprisoning two Indonesian women and sentenced to eleven years in prison, fined $25,000, and forced to give up her $2 million home. The middle-aged Indonesian domestic workers testified that they worked 17 hours a day; were rarely given enough food to eat; had their passports confiscated; were forced to take ice cold showers and eat hot chilies as punishment; were cut with a knife; and were burned with boiling water. Their pay: $100 a month. Dozens of such cases come to light every year. But even when torture is not the norm, domestic workers are often treated unfairly. Equally important are the daily patterns of disrespect that characterize the occupation. DWU’s citywide survey of domestic service found, for example, that 33 percent of workers surveyed had experienced verbal or physical abuse or had been made to feel uncomfortable by their employers; 26 percent earn below the poverty line; 90 percent do not have health insurance from their employers; and 67 percent only sometimes or never get overtime pay.

Today the ranks of domestic service in the United States are filled primarily by poor women from around the globe.⁴ Jamaican, Indonesian, Salvadoran, Mexican, Filipina, and Trinidadian women are scrubbing the floors, dusting the bookcases, and burping the babies of New York City’s middle and upper classes. The labor of these transnational migrants has resulted in new forms of racialization based on class, gender, nationality, and occupation—what sociologist Rhacel Parreñas calls the international division of reproductive labor—where poor women of color are doing the child and elder care for wealthy, mostly white, families in industrialized countries.⁵ These changes in domestic work as an occupation have created a vibrant site of resistance, where women of color have been able to come together to challenge the basic contours of the occupation. Yet, the historical legacy of domestic service is still very much present. DWU’s slogan, “Tell Dem Slavery Done,” is a powerful reference to the occupation’s roots in slavery and also describes the current conditions under which many domestic workers find themselves.

1. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration (New York: Kodansha America, 1996); Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Garland, 1993). [↩]
2. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). [↩]
3. Peggie Smith, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Private Paid Household Workers and Approaches to Employee Representation, ” North Carolina Law Review 79 (2000): 45-110; Phyllis Palmer, “Outside the Law: Agricultural and Domestic Workers Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 416-40. [↩]
4. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, eds. Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): Chapter 6; Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics (Urbana, IL: South End Press, 2000); Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Influence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). [↩]
5. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). [↩]