Along with agricultural workers, domestic workers were excluded from the labor protections of the 1930s. The right to unionize was never extended to domestic workers. They weren’t given social security benefits until 1950, and had to organize to even receive a minimum wage and overtime pay 1974. Even still, live-in workers were exempt from receiving overtime pay, and home health care aides weren’t afforded minimum wage rights until 2015.
To this day, domestic workers aren’t covered by OSHA or civil rights employment laws, which only extend to businesses with more than 15 employees. They’re also denied the right to collectively bargain. The report draws a connection between the lack of workplace connections and the intertwined histories of domestic work and slavery.
“Domestic service, in many ways, became emblematic of racial inequality,” historian Pramila Nadasen wrote in the report. “African American domestic workers continue to encounter inequality in the labor market and experience systematic underpayment and racial and gender harassment. Like earlier generations, they also organize and fight back, refusing to submit to any situation they deem unjust.”
Black women in the field elevate their industry, the report says, both by setting standards for care that go far beyond what they’re paid to provide and by organizing for better working conditions. Two-thirds of domestic workers surveyed in both Atlanta and Durham said they didn’t have any work contracts, and about a third of respondents in both cities said they were asked to do work outside the scope of their job. In the face of these informal working arrangements, the report documents the professionalism the caregivers demonstrate every day on the job.
“Sometimes you don’t get things done at home. Sometimes your bills don’t get paid because you had to work,” Joan Samuel Lewis, a certified nursing assistant, said. “You go in when it’s dark and you come out when it’s dark. That’s for years. There’s no holiday; there’s no Christmas. You have to give up all of who you are and your life to fit your clients’ needs.”
“I don’t think the public sees us as people. That is what I want to change. You have to be someone that cares in order to do that kind of work—because I don’t think people see it as even a worthy profession,“ Lewis says. “People’s perceptions make me feel bad enough for me to change it. That’s one of my goals: to change it.”
