On the morning of Jan. 6, 1996, a powerful snowstorm hit New York City. Snow drifts were up to 8 feet high and city officials advised New Yorkers to stay home. Christine Lewis, then a 34-year-old Trinidadian immigrant and nanny, was taking shelter with her five-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment she shared with her sister and teenage nephew in the Bronx.
The phone rang and Lewis picked it up. It was her employer in Manhattan.
“Are you coming?” Lewis recalled her employer asking.
“In no way could I get to work,” Lewis said. The railway tracks in the Bronx were frozen over with ice.
She had worked for her employer for the past six years, sometimes working 12 to 14 hours a day. Her monthly salary was just $350, far below New York’s minimum wage in 1990 of $3.80 per hour. Had she been making that, Lewis’ bare minimum salary would have been around $912 to $1,064 a month.
“I was bringing all that I am to the workspace, but really underpaid,” she says. “The audacity of the woman to say to me ‘come here.’ ”
The same conversation happened on Labor Day, a national paid holiday, Lewis says.
In 2001, Lewis joined Domestic Workers United, an organization established in 2000 by Filipina and South Asian women advocating for domestic workers who were underpaid or abused by their employers.
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