Part of the Family?. Sheila Bapat

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СКАЧАТЬ by 1945 the organization had fallen away.¹⁴ Nevertheless, many of the YWCA’s strategies and end goals are still relevant to today’s movement, including the pursuit of overtime, days of rest, paid time off, and limits on work hours.¹⁵

      The New Deal and the Exclusion of Domestic Workers

      The New Deal ushered in a progressive ethical and legal framework for the treatment of the American worker, along with a host of federal and state laws regulating minimum wage, overtime, hiring practices, child labor policies, and other working conditions. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932 and ending in the early 1970s, the New Deal era was an outlier from the laissez-faire economics of the 1920s and the neoliberalism and economic deregulation that would follow it beginning in the 1980s.¹⁶ William L. Niemi and David J. Plante of Western State College of Colorado argue:

       At its core, the New Deal regime aspired to a political economy with public (i.e., democratic) accountability in the financial system, in the corporate economy more generally, greater citizen equality with a real increase in life opportunities for the poor, women, and minorities (looking forward toward the politics of the 1960s), and hence, greater freedom as equal access to the political, economic, and cultural resources necessary to self-development.¹⁷

      Unfortunately, the “life opportunities” the New Deal offered resulted mainly in protections for white workers. Most of the regulations explicitly or implicitly excluded domestic as well as agricultural workers, many of whom were African American. John P. Davis, founder of the National Negro Congress, testified before Congress in 1935 that the decision to exclude particular employees from New Deal legislation would leave black Americans helpless in the face of employers’ abuses and discrimination:

       There is not a single thing [in the New Deal legislation] that will prevent the same type of ruthless exploitation of Negro workers. . . . [New Deal legislation] is supposed to be intended to help those workers whose lack of collective bargaining power renders them capable of exploitation by employers. As it stands, it does no such thing. . . . The economic crisis has not lifted for the Negro people. Because they are largely unskilled workers, reemployment for them has been slight. Negro domestic and agricultural laborers—representing the bulk of Negro labor—have had no benefits from the...protective legislation.¹⁸

      Domestic workers even made a direct plea to Eleanor Roosevelt, when “Fifteen Weary Housemaids” wrote to the first lady about the Fair Labor Standards Act: “We have read in history books and other books about slavery of long ago, but the way the housemaids must work now from morning till night is too much for any human being. I think we girls should get some consideration as every other labor class has, even though it is housework.”¹⁹

      Thus, the New Deal’s commitment to improving conditions for workers did not include all workers, but only a subset whose lives were deemed worthy of protection, regulation, and dignity. Examining two pillars of the New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, reveals how and why certain workers were excluded.

      The National Labor Relations Act

      In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which established the right of workers to organize, bargain collectively, and elect union representatives.²⁰ The law also established the National Labor Relations Board, a regulatory body that conducts elections for union representatives and investigates allegations of unfair labor practices.²¹ Though politics have chipped away at its power and scope over the years, the NLRA continues to play an important role in protecting workers’ ability to organize and collectively bargain.²² However, from the beginning, the NLRA has excluded domestic workers.²³

      President Roosevelt did not want the NLRA to exclude any workers.²⁴ The first draft of the act, as introduced by Senator Robert Wagner, defined “employee” as “any person employed by an employer under any contract of hire, oral or written, express or implied, including all contracts entered into by helpers and assistants of employees, whether paid by employer or employee, if employed with the knowledge, actual or constructive, of the employer.”²⁵ During hearings on the bill, Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts pointed out that the law would be challenging for farmers, as “it would permit an organization of employees who work on a farm, and would require the farmer to actually recognize their representatives, and deal with them in the matter of collective bargaining.”²⁶ Subsequent drafts of the bill excluded agricultural and domestic labor, amending the language to state that “the term ‘employee’ shall include any employee . . . but shall not include any individual employed as an agricultural laborer, or in the domestic service of any family or person at his home” (emphasis added).²⁷ When the NLRA ultimately passed the Senate by a vote of sixty-three to twelve, agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from its protections.

      This exclusion was the result of a deal struck between Roosevelt and legislators from the Southern states. Roosevelt knew that passage of the NLRA and other New Deal legislation required the support of Southern politicians, which was contingent on the ability of the region’s political economy to continue without limitation—in other words, on the continued supply of the cheap labor of black Americans. The compromise position between FDR and Southern politicians was, in the words of Juan F. Perea of the Loyola University of Chicago School of Law, “race-neutral language that both accommodated the southern desire to exclude blacks but did not alienate northern liberals nor blacks in the way that an explicit racial exclusion would.”²⁸ In the mid-1930s, most black workers in the South were engaged in either domestic work or farm labor. Excluding both types of work from the NLRA guaranteed that these workers could not form unions, reinforcing a racial regime of white domination, and a labor regime of extreme exploitation.

      The legislative history of the NLRA does not show overt evidence of racial prejudice. Rather, it reveals concern about the administrative difficulty of extending coverage to agricultural and domestic workers.²⁹ However, Perea argues that this history does in fact have clear racial overtones, and that this racial discrimination renders the NLRA unconstitutional. Evidence of the racial component, he says, is in the exclusion itself: the law could have exempted small businesses, including farms, but instead explicitly excluded specific classes of employees, a decision rooted in Southern legislators’ desire to maintain the economic way of life of the region, which depended on continued exploitation of the African American worker. Though slavery was unconstitutional after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the exploitation of black workers continued for decades in both domestic and agricultural labor, as it was considered essential to the Southern economy.

      According to Perea, the NLRA aimed to protect workers’ attempts to bargain collectively mainly for the purpose of avoiding strikes and their resulting costs to business. (The NLRA legislative history notes that over a two-year period, thirty-two million working days were lost to strikes.³⁰) Thus, the real objective of the NLRA was to equalize bargaining power between wage earners and large industrialists, in order to avoid strikes and the resulting disruption of the national economy. But the NLRA set an unfortunate precedent: the exclusion of domestic workers became consistent through all labor legislation of the New Deal era.

      Fair Labor Standards Act

      In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which required a minimum wage, maximum working hours, and overtime pay for workers. Although FLSA ended regional wage differences and began the process of standardizing the way most employees were treated under the law, it applied a narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause to exclude numerous employees either explicitly, like agricultural workers, or implicitly, like domestic workers.³¹ Since private enterprise was not seen as affecting interstate commerce, and domestic work was considered a purely private enterprise, Shah and Seville explain, “domestic work was seen as not affecting interstate commerce...and thus the work was originally considered as not part of FLSA’s СКАЧАТЬ