This story aired on the October 21, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
Domestic workers are people who work in private homes – like nannies, house cleaners, cooks and caregivers. In California, most are immigrants and women of color.
Not only is this work often undervalued, it’s out of the public eye. The state isn’t coming in to check that basic labor and safety laws are being met. So these kinds of workers are vulnerable to a wide range of abuses.
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On the job
It's Wednesday morning and Maria Elena Ceja is arriving to work in San Jose. For her, going to work means going to someone’s home.
Maria Elena is Gloria and Rogelio's caregiver. She's been working with them for a year. She begins each morning the same, gives them their medicine, a protein shake, and makes them coffee. Gloria sits in front of the TV while Rogelio retreats to his lawn chair in the front yard. Maria Elena heads to the kitchen table to pull out a well-worn notebook.
She jots down what time she came in, what she fed Gloria and Rogelia, and any other notes related to her caregiving.
“We have to document things like that at work,” Maria Elena says, “because it may be that people sometimes have dementia. So sometimes they don't remember what they ate and if they were fed”.
Maria Elena has been doing this work for 14 years, and has taken care of clients with various health needs like memory loss. The work is both strenuous and precarious. She tends to start working with people towards the end of their lives, which often means dealing with death, followed by unemployment. But for her last client, that ended differently.
Maria Elena was taking care of another elderly couple. The woman had Alzheimer’s and could be aggressive. The woman pulled on Maria Elena’s hair once in the shower and strained Maria Elena’s neck. At other times, the woman would start hitting her. This is common with people with dementia. If the patient lived in a skilled nursing facility, Maria Elena could call for back-up or talk to her boss, but in this case, there was no back-up and her boss was the couple’s children.
The harm reached a personal breaking point one day when Maria Elena ran into traffic to retrieve the elderly woman who had wandered out of the home. When Maria Elena suggested they hire a second caregiver to allow for breaks to heal from injuries, the couple’s daughter said no. The daughter said she could keep the job as is or leave. Maria Elena chose her safety and left.
“I preferred it this way,” she says.
“I need to take care of myself in order to take care of them," says Maria Elena.
Standing up for their rights
Maria Elena hasn’t always felt this comfortable standing up for her rights. When she first started as a caregiver, she was afraid to take breaks. She feared she'd be seen as lazy and get fired. She didn’t know then she was lawfully allowed to take rest breaks. So she’d work nonstop until she clocked out. A lot of domestic workers feel this way – it’s the nature of the job.
“It's a private relationship. It's in a private home. It's behind closed doors and because of that uniqueness, they are exposed to many abuses,” says Kimberly Alvarenga.
Kimberly is the Executive Director of the California Domestic Workers Coalition in San Francisco. It’s an umbrella organization for groups around the state that provides know-your-rights training and organizing opportunities for domestic workers.
Kimberly adds, “This is a workforce that is not all under one roof, that can't join a union because there aren't a number of workers under one roof that are going to be organized or can come together and have meetings”.
The workforce and a lack of labor protections
The workers are primarily women of color and immigrants, often afraid to call any attention to themselves due to fear of retaliation. In California, domestic workers are entitled to some labor laws related to pay: things like paid sick leave, overtime pay, minimum wage.
But domestic workers are excluded from labor laws protecting their health and safety at work, meaning that employers aren’t obligated to provide a safe workplace free of hazardous conditions. For someone like Maria Elena, hazardous working conditions can look like the dangers of lifting clients, which can be a heavy strain on caregivers’ backs. Without proper training or lifting equipment, caregivers face injury and ultimately loss of their source of income.
Domestic workers aren’t guaranteed these health and safety protections. No one is going into homes to make sure standards are being met. And even for the rights domestic workers are guaranteed, wage theft and exploitation are rampant. On top of that, enforcement and education is a huge issue.
“There's an unwillingness in our culture to recognize, domestic work is real work,” Kimberly says.
The California Domestic Workers Coalition has been campaigning for policy change over the last several years. In 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have given domestic workers those basic health and safety rights at work. The veto came out of concern for homeowners’ privacy. Inserting government enforcement in someone’s house doesn't bode well with some folks.
Kimberly says it was a huge blow to the coalition, because they see a veto like that continuing to devalue the essential work domestic workers perform. “Their work actually is the work that makes all other work possible.” She adds that without domestic workers, “so many people out there wouldn't be going anywhere to work without someone to care for the most valuable and precious things in our society, which is our homes, our elders, and our children.”
Back at Gloria and Rogelio's house, it’s time for Maria Elena's break. She knows it's her right to take one. Not only does Maria Elena know her rights, she now teaches other domestic workers about them. During the pandemic she became a member of the California Domestic Workers Coalition.
Maria Elena says, “It caught my attention because I always like to get involved, right? They were a great help for many people and for me too.”
Because Maria Elena knows her rights, her work experience has improved and until she’s fully guaranteed a safe workplace by law, she’s going to keep teaching others how to stay safe.