by Sarah Jaffe
One of the biggest struggles that such care workers face is that their interests are constantly pitted against those of their clients. The idea that the work is provided for love serves to paper over the fact that sometimes workers have needs that cannot or should not be subsumed by those of the people they serve. Personal attendants, after all, provide a kind of independence—by helping with or performing certain tasks for their clients, they allow the clients to remain in their homes, rather than to be institutionalized, and to have control over their lives. But for the clients to feel independent, care workers have to effectively make themselves invisible, so that clients can feel themselves to be the ultimate performers of their tasks.29
Paid attendants can be invisible in a way that family members or friends cannot be. In order to perform this labor that they are told is a labor of love to the best satisfaction of their clients, the attendants must accept, at some level, this invisibility. “I’m like an extension of his body,” one attendant told researcher Lynn May Rivas. Another, whose client referred to him as “just the caregiver,” told Rivas that such dismissal of his humanity hurt. The perceived low status of these workers helps to foster such invisibility: immigrant women, for example, are easily made invisible on the job because our society already considers them socially invisible, erasing their skills by claiming that what they do simply comes naturally. To Rivas, even when the worker allows such erasure out of genuine care, it is still harmful: “To be made invisible is the first step toward being considered nonhuman.”30
One of the ways home care workers have challenged such invisibility and attempted to improve their material conditions—real wages fell for home care workers between 1999 and 2007 even as demand for their services increased—has been by organizing into unions. The state’s involvement helped lay the groundwork for a different way to do that. By declaring the state the ultimate employer of the home care worker (since it pays for the work through Medicaid), rather than the recipient of services, the state allowed home care workers to become a collective workforce and bargain collectively. But getting the right to do this was a struggle; while some states agreed to the policy, others fought granting even this right to home care workers, and they remained outside of federal labor protections. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) challenged this on behalf of Evelyn Coke, a Jamaican immigrant woman who worked in home care on Long Island. The case reached the Supreme Court in 2007, but the Court’s disappointing decision focused on the costs to the state and to clients in upholding home care workers’ exclusion. Coke’s livelihood and that of other workers like her was dismissed. “I feel robbed,” Coke told reporters, though she was glad people were at least paying attention: “People are supposed to get paid when they work.”31
Publicly employed home care workers continued to organize in states where they had been granted the right. SEIU represented something like seven hundred thousand of them around the country in 2020—a scale that compares with the big industrial union drives of the 1900s. They are, in other words, a huge swath of the organized working class, even while their work continues to be misunderstood and devalued. The Supreme Court dealt them another blow in 2014 with the Harris v. Quinn decision, where Justice Samuel Alito created the special designation of “partial public employees” to yet again exclude these workers from labor protections. The lead plaintiff in that case, Pamela Harris, received Medicaid funds to care for her own severely disabled son, and argued that, in essence, she did not want the state or the union interfering with her family decisions—a version of the “part of the family” argument that erased the hundreds of thousands of home care workers who are not, in fact, part of the family.32
The rights of home care workers matter because, as Poo pointed out in her 2015 book The Age of Dignity, many Western countries are facing an “elder boom” on the heels of a decade of severe austerity. Several more decades of neoliberal restructuring have also hacked away at many of the institutions on which elders rely. In Germany and Japan, Poo noted, new universal programs have been implemented that provide for long-term care based on need rather than income or the availability of family members. In the United Kingdom, care workers face many of the same struggles as they do in the United States: their long hours and unpaid travel time leave them exhausted. In the iconic industrial city of Manchester, one writer described a working class that had turned from factory labor to care work; in fact, many of the carers are looking after the very men and women who worked in those factories, but for lower wages and fewer benefits than the factory workers once had.33
In late capitalism, as more and more people have had to take on paid work, more and more of the work previously done in the home has been commodified and is now done for a wage. And in an increasingly globalized world, much of this work is done—not just in the United States but in many other wealthy countries as well—by immigrants from the Global South. This has changed the power dynamics, particularly in the United States, where undocumented migration has only become more stigmatized and vulnerable even as we rely on it more. A period of decline in paid domestic work has been followed by a dramatic spike, and home care, in particular, is one of the fastest-growing and largest US occupations. “The terrain of political struggle for domestic workers has shifted dramatically,” Premilla Nadasen explained. In the 1970s, the movement fought for citizenship-based rights; in the 2010s, it has to struggle around the very issue of citizenship status.34
Immigrant women, who have few employment options outside of often under-the-table domestic work, wind up at the very bottom of the labor market: they are paid the least and expected to put up with the most. Their low wages have subsidized the middle-class family; their caring has made sure that middle-class families do not have to go without. For many employers, a worker like Adela Seally with a family nearby is less desirable than an immigrant worker in the United States who has left her family at home in her country of origin and can devote all her love to the client’s children. Those workers leave their own families in the care of others, in a form of “offshore reproduction.” And the remittances they send back home rival oil company revenues in terms of international flows of money.35
The workers are also vulnerable because of immigration policy. The current migration apparatus in the United States has its roots in the 1990s—it was put together alongside welfare reform, by the same bipartisan coalition. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 built on the foundation of the Reagan-era Immigration Reform and Control Act, which had allowed three million undocumented migrants to become “legal,” but also heightened enforcement. As the prison system expanded, migrants found themselves criminalized just for existing.36
It is the very gray area in which many undocumented workers operate that allows the worst employers to take advantage of them, as workers who attempt to escape an abusive boss can be vulnerable to deportation. Migrant workers who leave their own families behind are often more willing to live with their employers, making their jobs a 24/7 commitment. Domestic workers have reported physical and sexual violence, and even human trafficking. As historian Laura Briggs pointed out, it was important that the immigration crackdown made migrants more vulnerable but did not halt immigration entirely. The supply of exploitable labor was too important.37
The vulnerability created by various systems of legal and extralegal migration is not limited to the United States, either—in Europe, non–European Union migrants, from Asia and North Africa and even the former Communist bloc—do a significant portion of the domestic labor, and they, too, are vulnerable to immigration crackdowns in an increasingly hostile climate. What all these workers have in common is that, as researcher Carmen Teeple Hopkins wrote, “the precarious citizenship that these women experience often interlocks their place of employment with their place of home.”38
These workers are so often displaced from their homes, and yet they are expected to provide love where
they land, in what Arlie Russell Hochschild called “the global capitalist order of love.” And the fact that many of them do have genuine feelings for their clients, particularly when they care for children or elders, makes the work even harder. Eva Kittay, whose own daughter Sesha relied on the services of a longtime care worker, wrote poignantly of the challenges they all faced as Sesha and Peggy, her caregiver, grew older. How does one retire from such a longtime “relationship with no name”?39
For many of the women, in particular, who benefit from migrant women’s caring work, the entire situation is fraught. Feminists, as noted above, may have fought for domestic workers’ inclusion under labor laws, but many of their high-flying careers are subsidized by low-wage women in the home. This situation replicates an age-old power dynamic that has roots in systems of oppression those same women vehemently oppose. Yet there is no way to avoid the power differentials inherent in the employer-employee relationship. As author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, “To make a mess that another person will have to deal with—the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack—is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.” Researchers Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray pointed out that claims of friendship between boss and worker are just an “egalitarian” version of the “rhetoric of love.”40
These problems came into sharp focus when the coronavirus pandemic locked many of us in our homes to work and to be surrounded by housework. When the United Kingdom moved to lift restrictions on movement, some well-off feminists celebrated the ability to hire cleaners once again—even as the rules appeared to imply that it was acceptable to bring a new person into your house to clean it, but not for a visit. “Cleaning is work, and it’s work that I’d rather not do myself or negotiate with my household. I already have a job,” wrote Sarah Ditum in The Spectator. The Telegraph, meanwhile, said the quiet part out loud: “The argument appears to come down to which women you want to defend—those who hire cleaners, or the cleaners themselves.” Cleaning is indeed work, but the spat over hiring a cleaner reminded us that a woman’s solution to the problem that has no name still often relies on a less well-off woman picking up the slack. Some of those who defended their decision to hire help insisted, in their defense, that their cleaners loved their work.41
The bonds of love can be so easily weaponized against domestic workers. “You’re just like one of the family,” an employer told a worker named Elvira. When Elvira responded that she had her own family—and that family did not treat her badly—the employer snapped, “Remember, you’re just a maid.” Yet the family narrative has also become so routine for workers that they make a joke of its insincerity. Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong often wound up gripe sessions about overwork, curfews, and controlling employers by cracking, “So you’re a member of the family too, eh?”42
If one can buy love and family so easily, where does it end? In perhaps its zenith, Ishii Yuichi and his Japan-based company, Family Romance, provide actors, including Yuichi himself, to fill family roles for a wage. While often he is hired to be a stand-in boyfriend at social events, Yuichi began his company portraying a father for a friend of his who was a single mother; another client of his hired him to play the father for her daughter, who had never met her biological parent. “I am the only real father that she knows,” he explained. “If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, ‘Are you prepared to sustain this lie?’” Relationships like this one, Yuichi said, have made his “real” relationships feel like work. “I’m full of family,” he said.43
It is a paradox of domestic labor that something that is so intimate, personal, and specific also relies so heavily on a few tropes. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that there are attempts, particularly as domestic workers assert their rights but also as the elder boom looms and low wages mean that few families can afford a stay-at-home parent, to try to find technological fixes. On the flip side of Yuichi’s love-for-hire model in Japan is the institution of interactive robots to do some of the caring labor. While it is possible to imagine robots being a desirable option for those who want to be independent, the idea of “companion robots” paying attention to lonely elders feels every bit as dystopian as a parent-for-hire, particularly if human companionship is only available to those who can pay.44
Even without robots, employers have sought to standardize domestic work in order to eliminate some of those pesky intimate tensions. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote of her time working as a housecleaner, “For better or worse, capitalist rationality is finally making some headway into this preindustrial backwater.” There is no pretense at family with Merry Maids; the employer pays the service, the service hires the maids and brags of their willingness to shine floors on their knees. Yet even these companies demand a certain performance of love. Author Miya Tokumitsu found “a maid-service company advertising on Craigslist… looking for ‘a passionate individual’ to clean houses.”45
And then there are the apps. TaskRabbit and its competitors allow people to hire a one-off assistant at the click of a button. Care.com will find you a babysitter or care attendant. According to one TaskRabbit executive, 60 percent of its users are women, many of them mothers searching for just a little help around the edges. In his sunny view, this piecework approach to hired domestic labor is making women’s lives easier. More cynically (and perhaps accurately, given that programming is still male dominated), one Harvard Business Review article called these apps the “Internet of ‘Stuff Your Mom Won’t Do for You Anymore.’”46
The labor exchanged via app is atomized, casual, precarious, and often personalized—just like paid domestic work has long been. It is less that these apps create a new form of unreliable, low-wage work, and more that new technology is facilitating a very old type of work arrangement. Yet domestic workers have also been some of the first to figure out how to collectively organize app-based work. In Denmark, the 3F union managed to win a collective bargaining agreement with a platform that provides cleaning workers to private homes. Workers will be considered employees of the platform—something that most of the bigger app-based services have fought strenuously against—and gain minimum-wage protections, job security, and unemployment benefits in case of illness, as well as something crucial for app-based workers, often called out at the touch of a button: 50 percent pay if the job is canceled less than thirty-six hours before it begins.47
Organizing has been difficult for domestic workers precisely because they have individual, one-on-one relationships with employers; the standardization of services like Merry Maids or the apps at least offers some hint of a way that the workers can come together to pressure the boss, something like the way home care workers have been able to bargain with governments at the state level. But for those who are still working in individual relationships, it has been necessary to rethink what organizing could look like.48
For workers who perform intimate labors, it may be necessary to create what historian Dorothy Sue Cobble called “more intimate unions,” unions that understand the worker in a holistic sense and focus not simply on wages and benefits but on a deeper understanding of the interpersonal relationships that structure the work relation. Such organizations would see it as their job to meet the workers’ needs on many levels—they would organize, for example, around immigration reform, fight deportations, and take their members’ daily experiences of racism and sexism on the job seriously. Legal assistance and training, too, would be an important part of these organizations. Personal service jobs are only growing more common, particularly in deindustrialized nations where less production is now done: they are harder to automate, so far, and the relationships that these workers build with their clients can be sources of power as well as abuse.49
In the United States in 2010, New York’s Domestic
Workers United and its outgrowth, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, won the country’s first Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. The bill put into law overtime and minimum-wage protections, a guaranteed day of rest, paid time off after three years, and protection against arbitrary employer deductions from wages. Subsequent state- and city-level bills in Massachusetts, Illinois, Seattle, and California have improved on the New York law, adding provisions for enforcement, notice of termination, and harassment protections. But one of the biggest challenges has remained: making sure domestic workers know their rights under the law, and feel empowered enough to demand that they are respected. Without a shop floor and a break room in which to post notifications of rights, workers, particularly when they are new immigrants, are often in the dark. Finding out about the law and making demands under it can be a daunting task.50
The National Domestic Workers Alliance stresses that the work its members do “is the work that makes all other work possible.” It is an argument for the importance of that work not just on a personal level but as a key part of the economy. The Alliance consists of sixty affiliate organizations in more than thirty cities that organize with nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers. The affiliates also lobby for legislation and provide training, legal support, and guidance, and even engage in direct action on behalf of abused workers. The Alliance also puts out original research relying on the testimony of domestic workers about their conditions and their needs. “Our journey,” said Ai-jen Poo, the founder and director of NDWA, “[took us] through realizing how much at the core of this was about a devaluing of the work that women have historically done to care for families across generations.… That was at the heart of it, in addition to the structural racism that has led to the exclusion of this workforce being written into the law and shaping our framework for how we value work in this country.”51