Ai-jen Poo

Hawaii is poised to become the second state, after New York, to grant basic employee rights to in-home domestic workers by ensuring they be eligible for minimum wage, maximum hours and other protections.

House and Senate conference committee members agreed to a bill Thursday that would add domestic workers — a predominantly female, immigrant workforce often putting in long hours for little pay — to the state definition of employment.

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Anna, a Filipino live-in nanny in Manhattan, begins her workday at 6 a.m. when the children wake up, and ends around 10 p.m. when she puts the children to bed and finishes cleaning the kitchen. Like many domestic workers, Anna's pay is low; she was promised $1,500 a month but receives only $620, meaning that -- on average -- she is paid just $1.27 per hour.

The past decade has seen a surge of organizing by domestic workers in the United States. These workers, who care for children, senior citizens and disabled people in their homes, are explicitly excluded from many of the basic protections of federal labor law, including union organizing rights. Their job is characterized by low wages, long hours and meager benefits, and it’s among the fastest-growing in the US economy. Last Friday, The Nation sat down with Ai-jen Poo, a founder of New York’s Domestic Workers United, who now directs the National Domestic Workers Alliance. We discussed some disappointments dealt by Democratic politicians, the challenges of sustaining non-union labor groups and how to confront the coming care crisis. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

The Nation: What’s happening to work in the United States? Does labor have the tools to grapple with it?

Real-life nannies have never had much in common with Fran Drescher’s “flashy girl from Flushing.” The domestic workforce is overwhelmingly composed of women of color, many of them immigrants. Care workers often labor for long hours under grueling conditions. In many states, they lack even basic workplace protections, a result of their exclusion from collective bargaining under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, is out to change much more than labor law. Poo grew up watching her Taiwanese immigrant parents struggle to balance work and family, and she believes that good jobs for domestic workers would also help solve what she calls the nation’s “care crisis.”

Testimony presented by NDWA Director Ai-jen Poo at “How Comprehensive Immigration Reform Should Address the Needs of Women and Families”

Domestic care workers are aspiring Americans who work hard every day so America’s families and economy can work too. Many of you listening to my testimony today benefit from the work of domestic workers. In our modern, demanding economy, domestic workers do the work that makes all other work possible. It’s time we make our immigration policy work for domestic workers.

For years, immigration policy has focused almost exclusively on enforcement and deportations. Now there’s hope of a new, inclusive road to citizenship. The reforms being debated in Washington are particularly critical for the care workers who look after our children, parents, and grandparents. By 2020, one in six Americans will be over the age of 65, and America is at least one million workers short of filling the need for home-based elder care. Caretakers for the elderly, as well as nannies and housekeepers, are vital to our lives and our economy and must be prioritized in the process for citizenship.

Direct care workers are already relegated to the unseen corners of our law and economy, but never more so for those who are undocumented immigrants. According to a new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Caring Across Generations campaign, while the care industry as a whole is plagued by substandard wages and lack of labor law protections, care workers without legal status are even more likely to receive extremely low pay and suffer exploitation, harassment and abuse at work.

We applaud the President for his commitment to creating a clear and accessible roadmap to citizenship for the millions of aspiring Americans currently living and working in this country. But this road needs to be open to all who dream of a better life in the United States—not just those with advanced degrees. And we need the President’s continued leadership to make the dream a reality.

Millions of new American immigrants work in this country every single day, caring for our children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. It is imperative that the domestic workforce be given the chance to step out of the shadows and continue the work they do every day to make all work in this nation possible. The demand for these workers is growing and they represent an amazing opportunity to strengthen our economy and transform the way we care for ourselves and each other. Any comprehensive, successful immigration policy needs to expand opportunity for all rather than selectively applying our nation’s values.