For eighteen years, Flor Montenegro cared for the children of well-off families in Fairfield County as a nanny.
“I have always worked blindly trusting [my] employers,” said Montenegro in Spanish.
Promised raises never arrived and for years, she was not reimbursed for expenses like food and the gas used to take the children under her supervision to their after-school activities.
“The initial verbal agreement was $12 an hour wage but it was closer to $10 dollars,” she said.
Montenegro is one of the more than 40,000 cleaners, nannies, and care workers in the state who are now supported by a law passed in 2021 that grants state funding to prevent violations of workers’ rights through education.
“I never saw it as exploitation,” said Montenegro. “It was not until a meeting I attended in 2019 that I realized I shared similar struggles with other women. Some that we kept to ourselves out of fear or out of shame or for fear of retaliation due to immigration statuses.”
Montenegro says if she would’ve known she had rights, she would’ve said something.
Instead, she quit.
“This is what we call a centuries-long struggle,” said James Bhandary Alexander, Legal Director of the Medical Legal Partnership at the Solomon Center for Health Law & Policy.
Bhandary-Alexander said domestic workers have always dovetailed with a struggle for the right to minimum wage, which was excluded from the 1938 Federal Labor Standards Act.
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