“I know so many workers who are still working for $20 a day and getting taken advantage of.”

Life for Latina domestic workers in the Texas border region can be incredibly bleak. Many face severe economic hardships, often struggling to pay rent and cover basic needs, according to a new report released Tuesday—one of the first to provide a window into the lives of these women, many of whom face heightened instability under President Trump.

The report, published Tuesday by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, aims to “bring to life conditions of a sector that’s integral to the economy, but is overlooked and in the shadows,” says Linda Burnham, a senior advisor at the organization and one of the report authors. More than 200,000 domestic workers live in Texas, and it has roughly the third highest number of domestic workers in the country, after California and New York. The organization collaborated with three local groups focused on workers’ rights to survey 516 domestic workers along the Texas-Mexico border during the summer of 2016. Most of the surveyors were domestic workers themselves, who collected the data through interviews with house cleaners, nannies, elder care workers, and those who provide support for people with disabilities. The majority of the participants were women; 51 percent were undocumented or didn’t have work authorization.

One of the report’s biggest findings is that a significant portion of domestic workers in the region face economic uncertainty; more than 40 percent of them struggled to pay their rent at some point in the last year, while 37 percent reported going hungry—more than double the rate of food insecurity in Texas as a whole. More than half of the workers said they were unable to pay for medical care for someone in their household. Abuse was not infrequent: About 27 percent of the workers said they had been yelled at on the job, while 12 percent said they had been pushed or physically hurt by their employer. A small number said they had been touched in a sexualized way.

Making matters worse, workplace protections were few and far between. Only a third of domestic workers have written contracts, making them far more likely to suffer wage theft and abuse, or to be forced to work longer hours than scheduled, according to the report. For instance, an overwhelming 97 percent of house cleaners did not have a contract.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/new-report-reveals-just-how-difficult-life-can-be-for-texas-latina-domestic-workers/