The Nation: The New Domestic Order

The New Domestic Order
By Lizzy Ratner

September 9, 2009


Deloris Wright has been a nanny for twenty-one years. In the strange class warp of Manhattan's Upper East and West Sides, this places her squarely among the ranks of the invisible, a ministering ghost who is rarely seen and never heard. And yet, there she was on a startling spring Saturday, a 54-year-old Jamaican domestic worker standing at the edge of Central Park, demanding her rights.

"We take care of your children. We take them to school, to French classes, we clean your homes, do your laundry, and we care for your aging parents, right here in this neighborhood," she shouted into a microphone. "Now, with the economic crisis, we are thrown out into the street with no notice and no severance pay, no unemployment, no safety net, no nothing.... Some of our employers treat their pets with more humanity than they would treat us."

Before her, a crowd of several hundred supporters whooped and hollered. They were union leaders, young activists, sympathetic employers and, of course, domestic workers--women from a UN's worth of countries who understood Wright all too well. Patricia Francois, 50, a Trinidadian nanny, had recently been forced to leave her job after her male employer--a documentary filmmaker who lives opposite Carnegie Hall--allegedly punched, slapped and verbally abused her. Mona Lunot, a Filipina domestic worker, had spent her first nine months in the United States all but indentured to an employer who took her passport and denied her a single day off--a situation she endured until she finally escaped in the middle of the night.

Like many domestic workers, these women toiled in underpaid drudgery even during the best of times, members of a profession so devalued it is still excluded from many of the nation's labor laws. But as the economy collapsed, their lot grew even harder. So they headed to the Upper East Side--epicenter of the domestic trade, playground of Wall Street's bailout chiefs--to press their case for their own government rescue plan: the first ever Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/ratner