Part of the Family?. Sheila Bapat

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СКАЧАТЬ saying that HHS had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution by contracting with an entity that imposed its religious beliefs on trafficked people.⁴⁹ However, the First Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the ruling, holding that the federal government could still choose to contract with entities that refuse to offer reproductive health care to immigrant women who are victims of trafficking or who are detained by Homeland Security or are otherwise under government control. In her appellate brief to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri argued, “HHS has not come close to showing that it is absolutely clear that the circumstances giving rise to this case will not recur…. Furthermore, in addition to the TVPA contract, HHS has a long—and ongoing—history of contracting with [the Catholic Bishops] and accepting precisely the same abortion and contraception restrictions that are at the heart of this case.’”⁵⁰ When the contract between HHS and NCCB lapsed in 2011, the Obama administration did not renew it and instead went with a different intermediary, stating in its request for proposals that it would “have a strong preference” for groups that offered comprehensive health care.

      “There Is Not as Much Help as There Is Need”

      While many employers of domestic workers still view them as undeserving of equal employment rights, the current movement is working to change this viewpoint. The surge in activism over the past decade has raised consciousness among domestic workers and the general public. A former community organizer, Rocio Avila credits these activists with being a force for change in how domestic workers are able to access the resources they need to turn around their lives. This advocacy has engaged many diverse actors, from community organizers who live and work alongside domestic workers, to the highest leadership in the federal government, all of whom are “in motion around a shared vision,” as National Domestic Workers Alliance director Ai-jen Poo has said.

      There are numerous examples of government officials who are also allies of the movement; former labor secretary Hilda Solis, for example, who resigned her post in early 2013, pushed for minimum wage and overtime pay for domestic workers. Ultimately, though, it is today’s advocates for domestic workers’ rights who are helping to secure victories for domestic workers. Avila is a perfect example of this. Since graduating from law school in 2006, she has been representing domestic workers in Northern California in civil suits against abusive employers. Her clients have typically been denied the wages promised them, or even the legally mandated minimum wage. In the more egregious cases, her clients are human trafficking victims who have been physically or emotionally abused. All the work that she and her fellow activists have been doing on behalf of domestic workers and trafficking victims is still not enough, however; according to Avila, “There is not as much help as there is need.”

2. “No Deal” for Domestic Workers: Activism Before, During, and After the New Deal

       “A code for maids! I hope it fails. . . . I work far harder now than my maid does, and longer hours. Besides, no home that is a home, with children and frequent guests, can run strictly by the clock.”—Mid-twentieth-century employer of domestic workers¹

      “We mean business this week or no washing.” This was the no-nonsense message from laundry workers to their employers in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881. The women had just formed the Atlanta Washing Society and announced that their members would strike unless given a raise to one dollar per dozen pounds of laundry.² Though the workers washed clothes inside of homes—sometimes inside their own homes—in isolation from other workers, the members of the Atlanta Washing Society evangelized their cause in churches, seeking solidarity among other washerwomen. (The group would grow to as many as three thousand members.)³ Within three weeks of its formation, its demands unmet, the Atlanta Washing Society began a strike.

      The city of Atlanta responded to the strike and the group’s recruitment of new members by arresting and fining Washing Society members for disorderly conduct, taxing the group’s membership, and encouraging local businesses to stop hiring women who belonged to the society.⁴ Despite this pressure, the society pushed on, telling the city:

       We are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so we can control the washing for the city. We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.⁵

      Eventually, the Atlanta city council rejected the idea of imposing fees on the society. Ultimately, as historian Tera W. Hunter of Princeton University has written, the strike resulted in “a greater appreciation for the fact that these women should not be taken for granted because of the role they played in the city’s economy.”⁶

      In the decades that followed, domestic workers organized unions and associations to improve their working conditions and to generate solidarity. From 1870 to 1940, there were twenty domestic workers’ unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, in various parts of the country.⁷ Domestic workers also joined the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of the most successful efforts to unionize domestic workers during this time was led by Jane Street and the Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union, IWW Local No. 113, founded in 1916 in Denver, Colorado. Street’s vision for the union was larger than the traditional demands for better wages and shorter hours; she saw the union as a vehicle to “rebalance the power dynamic between mistress and servant.” With its innovative strategies, including the creation of an alternative placement agency, the IWW Local made real gains in increasing wages and improving working conditions.⁸ Similarly, in Harlem, New York, Dora Lee Jones created the Domestic Workers’ Union, organizing seventy-five thousand African American domestic workers in the area.⁹ The group secured a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per week and a maximum workday of ten hours. Jones’s organizing inspired the formation of similar groups in New Jersey and Washington, DC.

      One of the more well-known efforts of this period was that of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). At the time, the notion that one couldn’t find “good help” was becoming widespread. In response, the YWCA—comprised primarily of white, middle-class women who wanted to professionalize the industry rather than necessarily be worker advocates—sought, according to Hina Shah and Marci Seville of the Golden Gate University School of Law, to “re-conceptualize the mistress/maid relationship from a feudal one to a modern business contractual relationship, hoping to make the job more desirable for white working women.”¹⁰ The YWCA convened a national conference in 1928, which resulted in the formation of the National Council on Household Employment (NCHE), the goal of which was to “coordinate educational and research activities in the hopes of educating employers and workers, and to gradually work out standards for household employment.”¹¹ The “code for maids” that the NCHE developed—which included overtime, paid time off, and limits on work hours—spread across the country during the 1930s and 1940s. The YWCA also attempted to bring domestic workers’ issues to the attention of the Roosevelt administration, writing proposals to support New Deal protections for domestic workers. The National Recovery Administration, a preeminent New Deal agency, declined, stating that “the homes of individual citizens cannot be made the subject of regulations or restrictions and even if this were feasible, the question of enforcement would be virtually impossible.”¹²

      A major flaw in the YWCA’s overall strategy was that its membership and leadership was not comprised of domestic workers. Instead, it was spearheaded by social workers and social scientists. In addition, the NCHE did not garner enough support among employers of domestic workers.¹³ Though, according to Shah and Seville, the organization did begin to “[lay] the groundwork for justifying labor protection in the home as it changed the public’s perception СКАЧАТЬ