be fair to those who care
A friend emailed me this article from the NY Times today (read it quick before it goes behind the TimesSelect wall). I was very interested to read about the efforts of domestic workers in New York to make themselves eligible for the minimum wage, partly because I’ve been doing some research on this issue for work, and have been struck by just how unfair the national exemptions are on this issue. When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (the law that created the right to join a union) in 1935, they made two major groups of blue-collar workers exempt from the bill–farmworkers and domestic workers.
Since that time, there have been some interesting campaigns to rectify that situation, notably the UFW’s grape boycott and march from Delano to Sacramento in 1966, which led ultimately to the passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act. The CLRA gave farmworkers in California the right to join a union, and since then a few other states have legislated similar rights for farmworkers, but I don’t think there is any state where domestic workers–other than home health caregivers–have the right to join a union or collectively bargain.
On a related note, today’s Health Care Blog is written by Mary Kay Henry from the Service Employees’ International Union, talking about her union’s efforts to help solve the nation’s care crisis by improving the situations of home care workers. It seems unconscionable to me that we could be in a place, still, as a nation where caregivers are seen as second-class citizens, who don’t deserve the same legal protections as other workers do.
Edited to include: Blog for Domestic Workers’ Rights on June 5th, which I saved to del.icio.us and then forgot about. Drat! Thanks, saltyfemme.
