Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940

Epilogue: The Walls of Jericho

174 Epilogue The Walls of Jericho On a balmy August day in 2004, a group of immigrant women workers, mostly Latina and Polish, stood on a street corner in Williamsburg, a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Like the African American domestics who had occupied Bronx sidewalks during the Depression, these workers waited for day work cleaning the houses of middle-­ class women who lived nearby. As the morning progressed, employers approached the group on foot or drove up to the curb and, after carefully considering their options, chose a worker to take home with them for the day. Although there was no formal organization among the workers, they pressured one another to uphold a basic wage, a strategy that did not always work. A consistent source of conflict were the workers, most of them poor, some undocumented, and many with families to support in their home countries, who sometimes broke ranks. A fifty-­ three-­ year-­ old Polish widow told a reporter, “We never talk to the Latinas—​ sometimes they agree to work for less.”1 Even when they upheld a wage standard, however, some of the women waiting in Wil- epilogue • 175 liamsburg worked for less than New York State’s minimum wage. Although unreported and untaxed labor for less than minimum wage is illegal under New York state and federal law, neither the workers nor their employers seemed particularly worried about being caught or punished. Williamsburg ’s street-­ corner market for domestic workers, as a New York Times reporter put it, was a rare, publicly visible indicator of the “vast underground economy of domestic service.”2 It is hard to know the precise number of immigrant women working as domestics in New York today. The only thing that is certain is that Williamsburg ’s domestic workers are not the only women who are paid under the table for housework in middle-­class homes. These workers operate without the legal protections, including minimum wage and mandatory overtime pay, that domestic workers won under an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1974. Domestic Workers United, a New York domestic workers’ union, estimates that there are anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 household workers working in New York City today.3 Scholars and research organizations agree that domestic work is on the rise, reporting that there was a 53 percent increase in hiring between 1995 and 1999. In 1999, 30 percent of employers who hired domestic workers did so for the first time.4 According to a survey of 547 domestic workers that the organization conducted between 2003 and 2004, the work in today’s middle-­ class homes is hard and the pay is low—​26 percent of the workers surveyed earned wages that put them below the poverty line. A few earned less than minimum wage; 37 percent said they could not afford to pay rent or take out a mortgage; 40 percent said they could not afford a phone. The economic downturn in 2008 only made things worse. Domestic help was often the first expense that middle-­ class and wealthy families cut as they reassessed their finances. As Ai-­jen Poo of Domestic Workers United pointed out, “Unlike other sectors getting hit, domestic workers have no safety net. . . . It’s the invisible, untold story of this crisis.”5 Despite these poor wages, domestics worked hard. Half of the workers worked overtime, sometimes more than sixty hours a week, even though 67 percent said they did not receive overtime pay. Working conditions were also frequently unpleasant. A third of the workers surveyed said that their employers had at one time or another made them feel uncomfortable or had subjected them to verbal or physical abuse. Marilyn Marshall, a Brooklyn nanny, explained, “Because you work in a private house, almost anything goes. . . . They don’t think of what you do as real work or of you as a real worker.”6 176 • epilogue How did we get here? There has been quite a bit of legislation and debate over domestic service in the seventy-­odd years since African American workers waited in Depression-­ era street-­ corner markets. Most notably, in 1974 the federal government passed legislation guaranteeing live-­ out domestic workers a minimum wage and overtime pay. Many middle-­class and elite women also think differently about domestic service than organized women’s groups did in the 1930s. With the dawning of the women’s movement , feminists...