This report sheds light on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Spanish-speaking domestic workers. The pandemic has demonstrated how essential domestic workers are to our economy and society, yet they continue to be underrepresented in official economic data. This invisibility further marginalizes this essential workforce and reinforces their exclusion from relief.
This report sheds light on the precarious working conditions and obstacles that domestic workers in New Jersey face. The Center for Women and Work worked with a coalition of four NDWA affiliates to survey of more than 400 immigrant women who work as housecleaners, nannies, and home health aides in New Jersey revealing a pattern of exploitation, including employers committing wage theft, refusing to grant sick leave, and even denying lunch and rest breaks. Read the report to learn more about the key survey findings and policy recommendations.
The current public health and economic crises in America are racialized, gendered, classed, and citizenship statused. Black immigrant domestic workers are at the epicenter of three converging storms—the pandemic, the resulting economic depression, & structural racism. Intersectional identities such as Black, immigrant, woman, and low-wage worker make these essential workers some of the most invisible and vulnerable workers in our country.
This is a story about how NDWA took risks, experimented, and paved the way in partnering with the entertainment industry, developing their own internal capacity and expertise, and how this history provided the roots for trusting, authentic relationships to form around Roma.
April 24, 2020
Millions of nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers are losing their paychecks or even their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, exacerbating existing inequalities. Many domestic workers are the primary income earners for their families, and the majority of them are women of color and immigrants. Losing work, especially for a prolonged period of time, could mean putting their family’s safety and financial security in serious jeopardy. This new report includes survey data that further demonstrates the depth of the impact this crisis is having on domestic workers.
This report documents serious and widespread mistreatment of domestic workers – nannies, housecleaners, and caregivers – in the United States. They are underpaid, in many cases less than the minimum wage, and often at levels too low to adequately care for their own families. They are almost universally excluded from coverage by labor laws and usually work without a contract or any kind of agreement, written or oral, with their employers. They often perform work that is physically punishing, involving heavy lifting, long hours, and exposure to potentially harmful cleaning products.
Living in the Shadows: Latina Domestic Workers in the Texas-Mexico Border Region is the result of surveyors’ hard work knocking on doors, gaining trust and gathering data, and is the very first quantitative study of a sizable number of domestic workers in the Texas–Mexico border region. The data provides us with a fact-based portrait of the difficult conditions domestic workers in the region face. The report findings will be used to shape ongoing organizing and advocacy to improve conditions and end workplace abuse.
The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, clarified more than ever that the fight for women’s equality is inextricably linked to realizing the needs of immigrant women and women of color. While the executive orders, guidances, rhetoric and tweets of the first 100 days stirred hear and anxiety in communities around the country and the world, immigrant women and women of color continued to raise their voices by organizing, mobilizing, engaging members of Congress and local elected leaders in order to lead and defend our democracy.
With Millennials becoming parents and Baby Boomers getting older, the need for care across all generations of our families is growing. Many people can no longer rely on just family to provide the care they need. One of the most important steps we can take – and must take – in creating a family-centered caregiving system built for the 21st century is to address, head-on, the question of how we better provide long-term services and supports (LTSS) for our aging population and people with disabilities.