Migrant women, leading fighters for domestic workers’ rights in the US

Migrant women make up a growing proportion of home-based employees in the United States, including caregivers for children, the elderly and those with disabilities, housekeepers and nannies. Mobilization of this collective is, however, challenging. They are often worried about their precarious immigration status.

CASA de Maryland and Domestic Workers United (DWU), two leading migrants’ organizations in US, led a campaign aimed at reaching out migrant domestic workers — at public spaces such as parks and bus stops. As a result, they developed a strategy for improving domestic employees’ working conditions. The information gleaned through those contacts concluded that, for instance, in Maryland 60% of workers “were expected to be constantly on call to serve the needs of their employers’ families, regardless of the needs of their own families.” However, 80% were regularly deprived of overtime pay for those services.

DWU concluded that, in the state of New York “over a quarter made less than the minimum wage and lived below the poverty line, one-third had suffered either physical or verbal abuse and two-thirds did not regularly receive overtime pay.”

After years of campaign that included lobbying, demonstrations and strategic use of the Internet, New York has become the first U.S. state to legislate domestic workers’ rights — several local jurisdictions in addition to Montgomery County, Maryland, already had such laws for some time, including New York City (since 2003) and Nassau County, on Long Island (2006). Some of the achievement include the obligation for employers to give domestic employees “time off each week, pay for overtime and annual vacation days and give them two weeks’ notice or termination pay.”

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