Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

♪♪ ♪ Hello, I'm Cari Stein, sitting in for Bonnie Erbe.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, we have two women thought leaders addressing the issue of pay and working conditions for domestic workers.

They are, Sephanie Land, author of the memoir, Maid New York Times best seller and Netflix mini series.

And later, we'll hear from Jenn Stowe, President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Hi, Stephanie.

Thank you for joining us today.

Hi.

Thank you for having me.

The issue of domestic workers is a big one.

And I think that your your book and then the miniseries on Netflix that came out after that brings more attention to the issue.

Tell me a little bit about why you wrote the book and what you do hope to, you know, to see happen.

I'm not sure there's much more that could happen with it (Chuckle) at this point.

I mean, I, I think it's still.

Obviously, since I'm talking to you, it's still opening up a lot of opportunities for conversations to take place.

And and some focus to happen in domestic work.

And just the fact that it's it's not paid very well.

And not only that, but there's there's absolutely no benefits to speak of.

And there's often a feeling of desperation from the worker themselves of I have to get to work no matter what.

And and for me, on numerous occasions, that was dropping my kid off at daycare when they were sick.

And, you know, in in these times, I mean, that's a pretty dangerous thing to do sometimes.

And so I, I think that there's still a lot of work that can be done.

I do appreciate that it has started a conversation.

I didn't necessarily want to write about cleaning houses.

That was just an essay went viral.

And that's what they told me to write a book about.

The majority of domestic workers are immigrants or women of color You are neither of those.

Do you think that your experience was different because of that?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I I don't think I recognized that at the time.

I it was not only a very white area.

It was, you know, 2008, 2009.

There wasn't a lot of conversation happening about white privilege.

And and that, you know, as a white person, I experienced the world in a very different way.

I, I knew that it was a different experience because I constantly had to prove that I was actually poor.

And that struck me as an odd thing to have to continue telling people.

And, you know, I knew that I didn't fit some what I consider to be stereotypes at the time because I grew up in a middle class family.

I wasn't from, you know, my family was the first to kind of break out of the systemic poverty that my family was in.

And I think at the time, to me, it was it was a job, you know, and I so I more saw it and as that and not necessarily a job that it was odd for a white person to do.

And people don't think that you need much experience, though, to do cleaning.

That's sort of a stereotype.

It's coined as unskilled labor.

And I think, you know, because a lot of people, when they hire a house cleaner, it is the thought process is, well, I could do this myself, but I am just so busy that I can't.

And so hiring someone to do something that you think that you could do yourself kind of creates that like, well, this doesn't really require any skill.

There is a lot of skill.

I mean, and that is just with cleaning houses.

Like there's a whole other bunch of domestic work and care work that that I, I don't think many people could do, period.

You know, there's just there's so much to care work that is the basis of our economy.

And, you know, because we have assumed that it's unskilled labor, because a lot of nonwhite people do it and immigrants and black and brown women.

And that it is a job that is is very much taken advantage of.

The one thing that we do have in common is the fact that single mothers tend to live in poverty more than couples and couples with children.

Did you have any thoughts about that when you left?

When you left with your child to get away from your boyfriend?

No, I just needed to get out of a situation.

I no, I mean, at that point, I was so broken and depressed and I saw that it was affecting my my infant.

He did things that are really startled her at a very young age.

And I just knew I had to leave.

I hadn't really thought what the ramifications of that would be.

I just needed to get out.

You've gotten involved with the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

And tell me a little bit about the work that you doing for them.

I think right now I'm I am available for as much as I can be for any campaigns or events that they're doing or I got to go to D.C. and met them for a rally that they were holding for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

It's just supporting them in any way possible on social media, talking about them all the time and just paying attention to the work that they're doing so that I can talk about it when I'm doing interviews.

When you when you were out on your own and a single mother, were there were there programs in place to help you?

In what sense?

Like, help me at all ?

Help you at all, but help you get through the day, get through the week, the month, help you bring up a child.

There were programs through the health department.

Like there was a public health nurse that would do a weekly visit.

And she was usually knowledgeable about resources locally.

I think a lot of the help that I had was from people like that.

You know, the my biggest help, honestly, was you can pick up your phone and call 2-1-1 for help.

and that will direct you to someone in the community who knows who has gas vouchers that week.

And you could call them and get a gas voucher for ten bucks.

And that could mean that you could get to work the next day.

I can't think of anyone who helps in a really big way.

It was a lot on my part to constantly be looking for little tiny bits of help that added up to a lot, but it was a lot of work to find it.

Were you surprised about the attention and the interest that the book and the Net and the Netflix series garnered?

I was really surprised because my experience being a writer publicly and publishing things was freelancing and most of the time when I wrote about being a single mom on food stamps, especially if they showed a picture of me with tattoos or whatever, I received death threats and I had people threaten to call CPS saying, you know, I, I really feared for my safety and my especially my kid's safety.

Quite often I went out on book tour thinking that one of my trolls was going to be in the audience.

And so it wasn't it wasn't expected for people to be really happy about this book.

I think what the series did was brilliant.

I mean, throughout the years, I've heard like, boy, I've definitely thought about my housecleaner differently.

Or, you know, I learned their name or the thing that I really love is when people tell me that they tipped at hotel rooms because of some tweet that I did a long time ago, or just because of the show.

Or I get a lot of people saying that they that they either tip their house cleaners and they make a point to do that, make a point to treat them as a human being.

And I got a lot of people writing to me saying that they continued to pay their house cleaner through the pandemic when the when everything shut down.

And so those kinds of things are really encouraging.

And I really hope that that things like the Bill of Rights go through and that we start to see not only increased wages, but but benefits and safety precautions, and so that people who are entering these houses are not as vulnerable as they are.

Give me a sense of what it was like.

to not know day to day, you know, how you were going to get by, where you were, where some days you might have you would sleep.

I think that is a part that I'm still kind of working through in therapy, to be honest.

I mean, it's like I'm I'm learning that my experience with life has been one of, you know, I used to joke about it and say I was like mildly panicked all the time, but you couldn't tell talking to me.

But there's there's a certain type of, you know, post-traumatic stress that happens that where it's just repeated again and again and again.

And I still very much expect a very bad thing to happen at any moment just because when you lose something like I mean, food insecurity, like I was kind of fine with like I could I could be hungry and and still be okay.

Housing insecurity, especially when it came to not only losing the place where my child slept and affecting their sense of security, but also risking losing my child altogether.

And, you know, someone thinking that I'm a neglectful parent.

The Bill of Rights, that is going through Congress right now.

Would something like that have helped you?

Just knowing that my work was validated, that enough to have rights to my safety, my wages, like my ability to support my family and and really, I think taking the dignity out of the actual job itself and putting it back into the fact that a human being is doing it and that we all deserve the same rights.

But for some reason, because people are doing jobs that are cleaning up after other people, that suddenly they don't have the same rights that that other people do at their job.

You couldn't call in sick.

You couldn't actually even have a written agreement to ensure clarity of your roles and responsibilities to protect against losing pay due to last minute cancelations, not due to you, but due to the person you're working for.

The right for breaks, If you're working full time.

Extending civil rights protection, including workplace harassment to domestic workers.

If you're a low wage worker, I mean, most low wage workers don't have those rights.

And, you know, I throughout my twenties and thirties, into my thirties, every job that I had, I risked being fired.

If I called in sick too much or if I missed work, I mean, there was there was no way that that would be made up in any way, even if it wasn't my fault.

And a lot of times I wasn't even compensated for the money that I spent to travel to there to that place.

And there were there were a lot of times when I was working for the cleaning company that I would get to a house that took me an hour or so to get there.

And and the client wasn't there.

They forgot and and I was out the gas money and the time and, you know, the expected money that I needed in order to pay rent.

Well, thank you so much for giving us your time.

We know you're busy putting together the next book and we will look for that.

Thank you, thank you for having me .

Oh, it's our pleasure.

Now let's go to Jenn Stowe, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

- Hi, Jenn - Hi, Cari Thank you for having me.

So tell us, how does the National Domestic Workers Alliance help people like Stephanie?

So the National Domestic Workers Alliance is an organization of nannies, house cleaners and home care workers.

We fight for the rights, protection and dignity of domestic workers across the United States.

We have about 400,000 domestic workers in our network, in our movement, and we have 70 local affiliate organizations and chapters that really work for the respect of domestic workers, to ensure that domestic work jobs can be really good jobs with fair wages and protections.

You work on the the Bill of Rights.

What does it make sure that the domestic workers get and what is in It.

For in case their employers are not living up to those standards?

I'd be happy to talk about that, Cari.

So the domestic worker workforce is largely it really has a history of exclusion.

So in the 1930s when the New Deal was put together, it provided lots of labor protections and provisions for workers.

It was really unprecedented.

But domestic workers were left out of that provision.

So domestic workers, a lot of domestic workers, largely had been excluded from rights that other workers have, like Social Security, overtime protection, access to retirement, etc..

So that has really underscored how the workforce is treated today and through the Federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, we're looking to correct some of those wrongs and also really secure rights that are unique to the domestic worker workforce.

So we're looking for things like raising wages for domestic workers.

The average domestic worker makes a little under the median wage for a domestic worker is a little under $15,000 compared to the median wage of around just under $40,000 for a worker in the United States.

We also want to provide sick days.

82% of domestic workers do not have one sick day.

And we realize and recognize that with the pandemic, that's just untenable.

It's unacceptable.

We also want to provide protections from harassment and discrimination.

It seems to me, though, that it would be a hard thing to regulate and to enforce because they're in these workers are in people's homes and, you know, a sexual sort of harassment violation would be a difficult thing for a nanny or a a housecleaner to come out and try, try, and prove it, try and even address it.

We're celebrating our 15th anniversary as an organization this year, and we have always thought about enforcement along with securing the rights, because we know that without a really strong vision for enforcement, you know, we won't really ensure that the rights that we're fighting for can be upheld.

And so we have a variety of enforcement models that we've been testing and working on locally as we have secured Domestic Workers Bill of Rights In other states and cities.

I think when you hear the term domestic workers, people think low wage workers, yet this is a little different than just low wage workers.

You can have low wage workers, but they're not working people's homes.

So you're talking about working in people's homes?

That's right.

We're talking about when we say domestic workers and when we talk about the 2.5 million domestic workers who are 90% women, mostly women of color, largely immigrant, we are talking about people who work in private homes.

We know that if you work in a private home, you're more like your work is more likely to be exploited.

You're less likely to have protections.

So we see that work as being truly valuable.

The people who take care of our homes, who take care of our family, our children.

So that is really what our workforce is defined by really working in private homes.

I see here that you have protect against losing pay due to last minute cancelations and obviously established written agreements to ensure clarity on roles and responsibilities as far as pay goes to expect I know dental hygienists who if a patient cancels, they don't get paid for that that time either.

Where would the money come from?

You mean when a domestic worker is to get like paid leave?

Like, who is responsible for paying that out?

In our vision, I think it could be.

There are multiple avenues of enforcement, as I said.

And I think that There are ways to build in to build in paid leave, in the salary and pay that domestic workers receive.

And we're also exploring the ways in which to solve that issue with technology through the thought of portable benefits and ensuring domestic workers can carry their paid leave with them something that makes the domestic workforce very unique is that oftentimes you'll have a domestic worker with multiple private employers, so you'll have a house cleaner, and she will have about seven clients in the week.

Who would have to have like seven, 1099s to.....

Right.

Right.

So we've been exploring how do we ensure or what would it look like for domestic workers to carry their leave with them so that it could they could have it with them across clients still ensure that they can take care of their loved ones, take care of themselves when they're sick.

Ultimately, we want to ensure that domestic workers can take care of take care of us in our homes and do the work that they do and at the same time take care of their loved ones and their families, too.

It seems to me also that one of the challenges in doing this is that domestic workers are some of the underground economy.

They're paid cash, and they might be told, I can give you X amount if I pay you in cash or I can, you know, give you less because I'm going to be paying certain taxes.

Yeah.

Like I said, our workforce is 90% women, largely women of color.

There are a lot of immigrants who make up our workforce.

And I think that there are undocumented workers and informal workers for which that is their preference, because being undocumented to undocumented in this country is something that is very scary, right.

You just have you have ways of being that you have to consider that you don't if your documented to this country.

So we do do a lot of immigrant rights work and work in the immigrants rights movement.

And ultimately, we know that care workers and domestic workers in this country really deserve a pathway to legalization and citizenship.

One of the positions that the National Domestic Workers Alliance has come out with is a criticism of Hollywood and of the portrayal of domestic workers.

Do you think that Maid did anything to correct that?

I think they did.

I think Maid was an incredible, incredibly rich story.

It really humanized a domestic worker.

We saw the highs and the lows.

We saw the full breadth of a domestic workers life, which you don't often see.

And we saw a domestic worker as a protagonist in her own story, which is ultimately like what we want if we are looking to really fight for the respect of the workforce and the domestic worker industry.

We know that the workers have to be respected too and there has to be a recognition that their work is skilled and their work is valuable.

The Bill of Rights, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

Do you think that it will pass in 2023?

I don't know, Cari, but I'll tell you what.

We'll fight.

We'll fight like heck to ensure that we can keep our issue at the center and keep care at the center.

I think that the pandemic, just unearthed a lot for all of us.

But one thing that was very clear is that domestic workers are essential workers and that the economy really can't hold itself up without care and care workers.

And so we want to really make sure that we keep care in the air per se and that we keep that spirit so that we can keep the drumbeat going on our issue.

because domestic work, that domestic workforce is one of the largest and fastest growing workforces in the country.

Thank you so much for your time, Jenn.

I really appreciate it.

This is an important issue to our audience.

- So thank you.

- Thank you, Cari.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

That's it for this edition.

Please follow me on Twitter and visit our website, pbs.org.

slash To the contrary.

And whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next week.

Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

The Park Foundation .

and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.