Who Cares? Now, All of Us Must
Lauren A. Little/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images / ManorCare workers gathering as people parade past the retirement facility where they work to thank them, West Reading, Pennsylvania, May 5, 2020
I came to realize in a series of waves the enormous impact this pandemic would have on the domestic workforce. The first was quite early on, before the travel ban, school closures, and state shutdowns. One of my colleagues at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), of which I am the director, was in one of our regular meetings with house cleaners where we discuss organizational strategies and hear directly from our members. One by one, workers began describing clients’ cancelling jobs due to the coronavirus, leaving cleaners with no idea if, or when, those clients might resume their hiring. Shortly after, another colleague told me she’d heard similar reports in a meeting with domestic workers who find work in the gig economy. One worker held her phone up to her computer screen to show everyone on the Zoom call her bank balance: one cent.
As we listened to our members, our team quickly realized that the public health crisis had caused an unprecedented wave of job and income loss, with enormous implications for America’s workforce, especially its most precarious and vulnerable workers. For the 2.2 million domestic workers in the United States, work—by definition—takes place in someone else’s home. “Working from home” is not an option.
This labor force comprises over 90 percent women, and is disproportionately made up of women of color and immigrants. The wages for such work are poverty-level: 16.8 percent of domestic workers live below the federal poverty line—the threshold commonly used by researchers to measure what it takes a family to actually make ends meet—and 44.3 percent of domestic workers live below double the federal poverty line, compared with 16.9 percent of all other workers. Domestic workers already struggle to make a livable wage—most do not—and as the catastrophic losses for this insecure workforce rose, I began to feel the weight of the financial burden that NDWA’s members would only continue to shoulder. In response to the need, we launched the Coronavirus Care Fund, to provide $400 in emergency cash assistance to domestic workers affected by the pandemic.
The second wave of realization came two weeks after we launched our fund. Like so many millions of parents across the country, I was homeschooling a child—in our case, my step-daughter—and my husband and I were considering whether to bring his mother to live with us, to ensure her safety. We discussed the logistics involved with this change and how we might manage: my husband and I both work full-time, we were already homeschooling a third-grader, and his mother would make for a fourth family member, and third generation, in the home.
Read more
ΠΗΓΗ TIMESNEWS
