by Sarah Jaffe
In recognizing these key facts, Poo said, the organization has recognized that its fight is about more than legal protections. It’s about “the values that will shape the economy of the future, what the social contract will look like and who it will include, and who it will uplift and what kind of opportunity it will create.”
ADELA SEALLY FOUND HER WAY TO NDWA IN 2014, WHEN SHE ATTENDED a National Nanny Training Day event. There, she met Allison Julien, who was at the event to speak about the New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. Julien invited the attendees to a monthly organizing meeting, and once Seally went, she was hooked.
The monthly meetings, she said, provided more than just a space in which to talk about grievances. There are more opportunities for training, and also writing workshops and arts and crafts projects. Through NDWA she has taken expanded training modules on nutrition and on effective communication with parent-employers. She has also become a peer leader—something like a shop steward in a more traditional union setup. She leads training sessions on her own and makes sure that other nannies and domestic workers know their rights under the law.
To Seally, giving up Saturdays for training sessions and being a peer leader is another way of giving back to her community—a community of workers who are often very isolated on the job. It has also given her a sense of the challenges that other domestic workers face. She and the other volunteers, she explained, spend time calling other workers to check in, find out how their work relationships are going, offer support, and invite them to workshops. The workshops range from “know your rights” training to resume-building or immigration law. Seally is also a part of a group within NDWA called We Dream in Black, a group of domestic workers who identify as Black. Within that group, they have a space to discuss the specific issues of racism that they face on the job. “Nannies in New York City, getting them to come together is really difficult,” she laughed. “We have so many different backgrounds. It is challenging. Sometimes we have meetings and then like five people show up. You always have doubts. ‘Are we getting across to them?’”
“We have been talking about the challenges of getting our nannies to organize,” she explained. “Being a domestic worker, most times there is just one of you in the house. If you do live up in the suburbs or somewhere, you hardly see another domestic worker or nanny. We try to get them to come at least once a month and we can talk about whatever is going on, how to organize, and how they can negotiate their contract for their working conditions.”
She has spoken with workers who have gone in and at the end of the day, had the employer simply say, “We don’t need you anymore.” Part-time nannies sometimes get a phone call saying, “We don’t need you today,” and don’t get paid. Parents will scream about minor things, she said, like the nanny giving the child the wrong snack. “Then, the mom goes off. That is not the reason why. Maybe she is feeling guilty [because the nanny is the one spending time with her children].” But, Seally noted, nannies have the same problem as the employer: they, too, must leave their families at home in order to go to work. “Whatever is going on in your personal life,” she said, “you have to leave it at the door when you get there and put on your brightest, happiest face for the baby and the employer. No matter how you are feeling, you have to suppress your emotions just to keep that job.”
Domestic workers sometimes find themselves caught between employers—one parent may come home, get angry, and fire the worker, and then the other parent tries to come in and smooth things over because they need the worker back. “Being a nanny is the only profession I would say where you have two employers to one worker,” Seally said. Then, if the nanny wants to move on, the parents mobilize their emotional bonds to try to keep her. “Why are you leaving the kids? The kids love you so much,” they’ll say. “Some nannies will give them a month’s notice and then, one or two weeks after, they get so mad because she is trying to move on, they fire her.” This leaves the nannies feeling betrayed.
One woman Seally spoke to while phone-banking for an NDWA event was a live-in worker who had been sexually harassed on the job. “She was telling me sometimes when she goes to bed, she will take her dresser and put it behind the door, and that is how she would feel safe because there was no lock on the door.” The room she slept in was the children’s playroom with a sofa bed, not a real bedroom. With Seally and NDWA’s support, the woman was able to find a better position.
Nannies find employers sneaking in extra duties. “They tell you light cleaning, but then it becomes heavy cleaning. You have to take care of the child, but then you have to do the family’s laundry, and all of these things take away from being able to provide optimal care for the child,” she continued. “I think because they are the employer, they feel that it is okay to disrespect and look down on you.”
Through NDWA, Seally learned about the early washerwomen’s strikes, and about Dorothy Bolden and the organizers of domestic workers’ unions in the 1960s and 1970s. Those stories inspire her to keep organizing. “With all of this technology and access,” she said, “we really have no excuse not to organize and be seen.”
Seally has also taken part in protests and political actions. She traveled to Washington, DC, to stand alongside women farmworkers who had been sexually harassed and assaulted, and to speak about domestic workers’ similar exclusion from legal protections against such violence. While she was there, she also made some lobbying visits to senators to ask them to support a federal Domestic Worker Bill of Rights that was introduced in Congress in the summer of 2019. “We are going to start working on getting all workers included in the law so they can work for a living wage,” she said. They talk about a “living wage,” not just “minimum wage,” these days, she said, because the goal is to make sure workers are not choosing between paying rent and paying the other bills.52
New York domestic workers, Seally said, are also working on expanding the Bill of Rights there to incorporate some of the protections won in other states. “The thing with having a Bill of Rights is that enforcing it can be really tricky and difficult,” she said. “Some individuals can negotiate a really good contract when they go in for an interview. Some are very laid back. For me, when I started, I had no idea about that. Sometimes, we sell ourselves short.” Because their work can be so unreliable, domestic workers often feel pressure to take whatever job is offered, even if they know the pay will not actually cover their bills. After a little while with NDWA, Seally was able to return to her employers and negotiate paid time off when they take vacations, and other improvements to her contract when she returned to full-time work.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, all of the issues around which the nannies were organizing became more urgent. Seally’s situation changed, but she was able to keep her job; other workers lost their jobs when the families they worked for decided to leave New York. As of this writing, many of them still didn’t know whether their employers would return. “Some of the nannies have been paid while all of this is happening. Some of them are getting full pay. Some of them are getting half pay. Some of them are getting no pay at all,” she said. “Some of them are actually doing a little bit of virtual nannying [over video chat],” engaging with the children so that parents can do something else. “This is new to everybody, so everybody is just trying to see how they can do something to ease all of the stress.”
Deciding to go back to work, for the nannies, is difficult. Employers have been making outsized demands in some cases, while often being unwilling to reciprocate or compromise. One of Seally’s colleagues was asked to come back to work, but to refrain from all other social contact, she said. Another nanny’s clients were in Florida for a while, and upon their return they asked her to provide proof that she’d been tested and was COVID-free. But when she asked the family for the same proof, they became angry. “I think she ended up leaving her job,” Seally said. “The sudden demands of nannies are unacceptable, I would say. Everybody wants to stay safe. Nobody wants to get sick. I know that
I may be taking precautions, but I don’t know what the other person is doing.”
It is not enough to rely on employers to do the right thing, Seally noted. “Paid sick leave and paid family leave are very important because everybody has their families to take care of, and bills are still expected to be paid. Domestic workers do deserve better health care, like any other sector of workers. We contribute to society just as any other profession. I think we should be paid and treated the same.”
Seally feels that her time organizing has helped her to grow as a person and to learn about her work, about the law, and about how to be an effective political actor. Organizing work, she said, is challenging, but fighting the stigma on domestic workers is worth it even if it adds up to just a drop at a time. “Society has seen nannies as being dumb, not informed, and that is so far from the truth,” she said. “A nanny is a nurse, she is the doctor, she is the mom, she is [the] therapist, she is the miracle worker. All of these things come into your responsibility.” The most important thing, to her, is to continue to make her work visible and respected. “I always tell my nannies, ‘You have to demand respect because nannying is a profession. You have to be proud to say that you are a domestic worker. You are the pillars of society. You hold up society.’”
CHAPTER 3
WE STRIKE BECAUSE WE CARE
Teaching
ROSA JIMENEZ’S SMILE LIGHTS UP HER WHOLE FACE. THE TWELVE-YEAR teacher can often seem pensive, but when something pleases her, the feeling is infectious. And when I met her, in January 2019, despite the miserable and very un-Los-Angeles-like rainstorm that had poured on the striking teachers’ picket lines for four days, she was still smiling, even bundled in a purple raincoat and rain boots, her glasses misty.
Teachers like Jimenez in the United States make something like 21 percent less than workers with similar education levels in other fields, and yet for all that they sacrifice—for all that they love their work—they are still often blamed when students fail to transcend the circumstances in which they live. Teachers tend to stick it out, staying on the job even as budget cuts mean class sizes grow and resources shrink—and even as they buy toilet paper and food for their students out of their own paychecks. When they dare to make demands for themselves—and especially when they strike, as Jimenez and her coworkers in the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) did that January—they are often told that they are greedy, that they are only in it for the money. Being on the picket lines in that driving rain, Jimenez said, was “really visceral” for her. It brought home to her how hard it was to make ends meet in a rapidly gentrifying city. It’s a struggle for her, and it’s an even bigger struggle for many of her students, who face homelessness, a hostile immigration system, and violent policing in their neighborhoods and in the schools. It sunk in, she said, that first day: “Wow, this is about fighting for ourselves and our families. And this is also for our students and our community. And this is much bigger than us, as well.”
Jimenez teaches history to the upper grades—high school juniors and seniors—at the University of California Los Angeles Community School, which is one of six schools that share the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools campus in LA’s Koreatown neighborhood. She became a teacher, she told me, because, “I realized I need to do something where I am serving the community, but I also have an opportunity to be an organizer. I don’t see any other places, other than teaching, to be able to do that, where you are in the middle of a community, you are able to grow those relationships with parents, with students, with other teachers, and really try to build something big and powerful.”
Building that power is important because of whom she serves. Her school alone has over eight hundred students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. It is located in one of the most densely populated areas in a mostly spread-out city (the district spans some 960 square miles, from mountains to valleys to waterfront). Many of her students are recently arrived immigrants from Central America, Mexico, and Southeast Asia, and her school is bilingual—she teaches in English and Spanish.
“We consider ourselves a social justice school,” she explained, and when I asked what that meant, she laughed, her face lighting up again. “We have had lots of internal debates about that, but the idea was both that the teachers and the way that we teach are reflective of the needs of our students and that we are building an environment and building spaces for learning that support students to become agents of change.”
That means, for instance, that the school is taught in multiple languages because teachers and the community believe it is valuable and just that students learn in the language in which they are most familiar. It means a commitment to antiracism and to teaching the students curricula that are relevant to their lives.
The school is also, as the name implies, a “community school,” a model that teacher activists like Jimenez have committed to as an alternative to the wave of privatization that has swept through urban school districts in the past few decades. Teachers are involved in making school decisions democratically, parents are invited to feel comfortable inside the school building and to be part of those decisions, and students’ thoughts on how the school should be run are valued.
The social justice dimension of Jimenez’s work hits close to home. Her parents were immigrants from Mexico who both worked in factories; her father, a shop steward in his union, she said, “always talked about the importance of standing up for your rights as a worker.” Her activism meshed with her teaching from her first days in the classroom. She was part of a wave of new teachers who were laid off in the days of budget cuts driven by the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and the fight to save funds for the schools was the first glimmer of the movement that would find her on that soggy picket line twelve years later. She was part of a big civil disobedience action against budget cuts, but it was unsuccessful, and she realized, “We have a long way to go if we want to really shift and challenge the situation—otherwise, it is not going to change.”
The schools were crumbling and overcrowded, she said, when she was brought back into the classroom. When she got the opportunity to move to the new RFK campus to help build the community school, it was a chance for her to put some of her ideas into practice in the classroom as well as outside of it, to create a space that could be a model for the rest of the district.
At her school, she has a number of responsibilities on top of teaching. She has regular meetings with students and parents, of course. She is on committees to help with professional development. And she makes time for organizing meetings each week—bringing together teachers who want to support students’ organizing, or meeting with community groups that work alongside the union. All of this is on top of being a single mother, so her eleven-year-old daughter’s commitments—to softball, playing guitar, or other activities—also take up a lot of her time.
Things had only become more challenging with the coming of the Trump administration and its crackdown on immigrants. “Every week, we see new students and we recognize that those students have experienced a lot of trauma,” she said. “We have kids who are coming from detention centers, and we do not have the capacity to support them and their social-emotional needs.” Part of the challenge, she said, is trying to do more with what they have—resources she is grateful for at her school, but that she recognizes are still insufficient.
“We really need more therapists, more psychiatric social workers,” she told me. “We need people who can support that aspect that we just don’t have the capacity for. Teachers are doing it every day and our counselors are doing the best they can, but…” she trailed off.
The challenge of being an authority figure, a counselor, an adviser, and a friend to her students is a big one, and it is complicated further by punitive school disciplinary practices. When students face random searches in school, she pointed out, it’s not by school police (of which there are plenty—Los Angeles has a dedicated school police force), but administrators and counselors. “The very same peopl
e that you are supposed to trust and you are supposed to feel safe with are the ones that are making kids feel unsafe.” For teachers to really build trust, she noted, they have to change this disciplinary framework. “What are alternatives to traditional school discipline that pushes kids of color out of the schools?” she asked.
It is a daily challenge to make the school feel like a place of safety. Migrant students and other students of color have justified fears of state authorities, and fears of the school shootings so prevalent across the United States today. But Jimenez believes that all the threads of her work come together, that none of them work without the other parts. The students have to feel comfortable, safe, and valued in the school; parents have to be a part of that space; and teachers have to have the support they need to make sure all of this happens.
To that end, it’s the idea of sanctuary that she returns to. “What would it mean to be a sanctuary school?” she asked. “It would be a community school with all the things that a community school has and it would be free of ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and it would be free of police and it would have all the things that students need to feel safe. It would be a place that could be a center of organizing for the community. So if the community is experiencing issues around police, around housing, whatever the case may be, that these schools are not just here to protect, but we are also able to go out and support whatever organizing is happening in the community.”
“I don’t think such a place exists yet,” she said dreamily. “But that is the vision.”
TEACHERS LIKE ROSA JIMENEZ HAVE LONG BEEN EXPECTED TO TREAT their job as more than just a job. From the beginning of publicly funded schooling in the United States (and Europe), teachers have been pressed to treat their work as a calling, to dedicate long hours outside of the classroom to it, and to do this out of care for their students. Yet such expectations have existed in tension with the idea that teachers’ skills are little more than a “natural” inclination to care for children, rooted in a love that is simultaneously too big and too unimportant to be fairly remunerated. Like the work done in the home—paid or unpaid—teachers’ work is considered both necessary and not really work at all.