David Bacon
Honorata Nono, a Filipina immigrant and domestic worker and organizer, takes care of Michiko Uchida in Uchida’s San Francisco home.
As the age of the U.S. population continues to rise—and millions of people with disabilities, additional needs, and children need care—so too does the country’s insatiable demand for home health care and domestic workers. But years of underinvestment in the sector, and the chronic undervaluing of the important work carried out disproportionately by women of color (particularly those with an immigrant background) has left the sector in a perilous state.
Their plight has a deep and shameful history, rooted in the fact that enslaved African American women were forced to provide unpaid household care for white families during slavery. Following abolition, the low wages and poor conditions of domestic work were sustained by violently enforced, racist Jim Crow laws.
In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act recognized the collective-bargaining rights of private-sector workers and established a process to require employers to bargain with their unions. The law carried a political price, however. Dixiecrat senators and congressional representatives demanded exclusions as the price for their support. Domestic workers, who were still largely African American women, would not be covered. Neither would farmworkers, mostly Mexican and Filipino immigrants in that era.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed three years later,...
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