As the age of the US population continues to rise – and millions of people with disabilities, additional needs and children need care – so too does the country’s insatiable demand for home healthcare and domestic workers. But years of underinvestment in the sector, and the chronic undervaluing of the important work carried out disproportionately by women of colour (particularly those with an immigrant background) has left the sector in a perilous state.
It is a situation that has a deep and shameful history, rooted in the fact that enslaved African-American women were forced to provide unpaid household care for white families during the period of human chattel slavery that operated in the United States from its founding in 1776 until 1865. Following the abolition of slavery, the low wages and poor conditions of domestic work was sustained by a series of violent, racist laws known as ‘Jim Crow’.
Against this backdrop, when it passed the US Congress in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act recognised the collective bargaining rights of US private sector workers and established a process to require employers to bargain with their unions. The law carried a political price, however. Racist senators and congressional representatives in the Democratic Party (known as Dixiecrats because they were all from the US South, or from ‘Dixie’) demanded exclusions. Domestic workers, who were still largely African-American women, would not be covered. Neither would farm workers, mostly Mexican and Filipino immigrants in that era.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed three years later, gave private sector workers the right to overtime pay and minimum wages. Again, domestic workers and farm workers were left out, at the insistence of Dixiecrats. It is no accident, therefore, that the labour rights and wages of both groups were held far below those of other workers in the decades that followed. Yet despite the exclusion, farm workers continued to organise. And in the…
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