GRITtv was in Los Angeles this month, at the AFL-CIO Convention. This year’s meeting of the Nation’s largest labor federation was hailed as historic for a lot of reasons. There were more women and people of color there than ever before, lots of first-of-a-kind resolutions on things like incarceration and immigration, and lots of welcoming of non-union workers like domestic workers to the big old labor family.
Domestic workers were also at the heart of the big leap for labor rights which came immediately after the convention, when the Obama administration announced it will finally extend minimum wage and overtime protections to domestic workers, a change labor and community groups have pushed for.
Domestics have worked for poverty wages in miserable conditions in Americans’ homes, for ever. The Fair Labor Standards Act or FLSA, which big labor celebrates, excluded domestic workers, and retail and service workers, and farm laborers. They didn’t call it special rights for white men, but that’s what it amounted to. Even when FLSA was updated in the 70s, domestic workers were still excluded. They’re not workers, the lawmakers said, they’re “companions” — members of the family.
In LA, Lourdes Belagot Pablo, a 61 year old Filipina told GRITtv about what it’s like to “companion” sick elderly clients in their homes, round the clock, 24 hours a day in four-day shifts. If she gets two hours of un-interupted sleep the whole time, she’s lucky.
Pablo came here on a teaching visa –she taught math and physics at the university back home – but here she was forced to teach something different instead and when that didn’t work out, she found herself jobless, paperless and thousands of dollars in debt to the immigration sharks who had brought her.
Her real family, let’s be clear, is in the Philippines. In fact, after five years of no contact, she longs to see her 15 year old son on something closer than SKYPE. When they talked recently, he cried that he misses her.
The Obama administration’s new protections which will take effect only in January 2015are an achievement, but they won’t make everything right for women like Lourdes. That’s why the National Domestic Workers Alliance and others, are continuing to push for more protections through state legislation. (California looks as if it will become the third state to pass a statewide Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The state Senate approved the bill on September 11. )
The AFL supported the FLSA change. What next? Will real inclusion for excluded workers follow? How about muscle and money to invest in the organizing work those workers deem necessary? A warm welcome is very nice but Domestic workers are all too used to being called family. As South African domestic Myrlie Witbooi told the convention upon receipt of the George Meany/Lane Kirkland Award for Human Rights:
“I can assure you many of you sitting here are our employers. You have us at your homes, when you are here.”
“If I’m part of your family you need to let me sit at your table while you get up and you wash the dishes.“
Big Labor is welcoming domestic workers like family. But are they getting up and washing the dishes?
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy