In 2017, my mother became unexplainably sick. Almost overnight, she began experiencing debilitating headaches, insomnia, constant vertigo, and joint pain throughout her entire body. Standing, and walking, especially, became unbearably painful for her; her feet simply would not comply. She had spent the previous 15 years of her life working as a housekeeper for several white, middle-class families. Within weeks of her sickness, she had quit all of her jobs.
Since my childhood, up until that point, my parents’ financial situation had improved substantially. Growing up, we had lived in one-bedroom apartments or with members of our extended family to afford rent. We recycled plastic and cans for income and paid the rent late most months. But by 2017, things had turned around. My father had gotten a much better job that offered health benefits for our family, and my mother had worked her way up to a full-time schedule. For the first time, life was comfortable. But that changed very quickly after my mother got sick.
Like the estimated 90% of domestic workers in this country, my mother was paid “under the table” by her employers, meaning her income wasn’t taxed, and she was ineligible for disability insurance. Because my father’s income wasn’t low enough, the family didn’t qualify for government aid. When I asked my mother if any of her previous employers, all of whom had called her family when she worked for them, attempted to help her financially, she said one “did text me and tell me she was going to help me with money. She said she was going to talk to the families I worked for to get some money together. But she never did. She never really text[ed] me after that. I felt so bad — but that’s why you should never expect anything from people.”
Ninety-five percent of domestic workers in this country are women, immigrants, or persons of color, most of whom have little bargaining power when it comes to fair working conditions. My mother didn’t work for a year and a half, a period that proved tremendously difficult for our family financially. But she was lucky because she had support: She had my father, my brother, and me to lean on. She also had access to quality health care and no young children to care for. That is not the reality for many domestic workers.
I often think about how different that year and a half would’ve been for any one of those women and how devastating it would’ve been for the children who depended on her. It’s heartbreaking to think about. No one who works full-time hours should have a financial situation that is hanging together by a thread or a work life defined by uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. But the precarious nature of domestic work and the fragility of domestic workers’ financial stability is evidence of the unfair way this country treats its most vulnerable people.
California is one of only eight states in the U.S. where domestic workers are protected by a bill of rights. The Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, originally signed by then-governor Jerry Brown in 2013 and updated in 2016, established labor standards that include overtime pay as well as “meal and rest breaks, clarity on what constitutes working time, sick time to care for families and themselves, and freedom from discrimination and sexual harassment” for certain domestic workers and personal attendants, as outlined by the National Domestic Workers Alliance. By some estimates, there are over 300,000 in this state. The enactment of such laws is beyond consequential in a country where domestic work has historically and systematically been excluded from protection under labor laws, both at the state and federal level. But so much of domestic work functions outside of the legal system, often leaving the financial situations of already vulnerable women entirely dependent on their employers’ ideas of fairness and capacities for kindness.
This often leads to explicitly exploitative work conditions in the form of below-minimum wages or physical or emotional violence. But even in situations when such treatment is absent, exploitation can be a defining feature of this particular employer-worker relationship.
My mother has always been paid above-minimum wages and has never been the target of threats or explicit violence by her employers. But she has gone without pay for weeks because her employers decided to take a last-minute vacation. I remember her having to postpone our family’s grocery shopping until the following week because her employer forgot to write her a check. And she’s been left with absolutely nothing to show for a decade and a half of work, loyalty, and dedication.
Even before my mother got sick, she tells me that the relationships she shared with her employers were marked by the constant granting and rescinding of the “family card.” Under the tree at Christmas, she was family. When visitors were over and she was introduced, she was family. Sometimes, my mother would come home with bags of used clothes and shoes that her employer had given her. But these types of embraces were often more of a burden than a blessing. They blurred the boundaries between the personal and the professional and made her feel a sense of loyalty to her employers that was, more often than not, not reciprocated. My mother says the fabricated sense of intimacy made asking for raises, demanding timely pay, and asserting boundaries feel nearly impossible for her.
In the 16 years that she’s worked for her main employer, she tells me that she’s never been paid for time off, not for vacation or sickness. She’s received two small raises. When I asked her why there have only been two, she says, “They’re not rich, and they give me two days of work a week. I’m scared that if I ask for more money, they’ll cut me back to one day a week.”
Domestic work is invisible, often lonely labor that has been largely kept inside the homes in which it takes place and out of public conversations. In the words of Alfonso Cuarón, during his acceptance speech for best director for Roma, a film about a domestic worker caring for a family in 1970s Mexico City, “Our job is to look where others don’t. [That] responsibility becomes much more important in times when we are being encouraged to look away.”
