The Nannies’ Norma Rae

[Omaha Steve]

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/the-nannies-norma-rae/

Culture | By BARBARA EHRENREICH | April 26, 2011, 9:00 am


Portrait by Max Vadukul. Fashion Editor: Ethel Park. Hair by Carmel Bianco at raybrownpro.com. Makeup by Shawnelle Prestidge for Tarte at raybrownpro.com.Ai-jen Poo in a Zero + Maria Cornejo dress. Go to barneys.com. Frank Gehry for Tiffany & Company earrings. Go to tiffany.com. Ippolita bangles. Go to ippolita.com. Paige Novick rings. Go to ikram.com.


It’s the most intimate class divide in human civilization, or at least in such relatively civilized places as Manhattan and Park Slope, Brooklyn. On the one side, there is the professional couple bringing in six figures a year; on the other, the nanny or maid without whom the couple wouldn’t be able to practice their professions. Conditions of employment are as variable as the individual employers are — from respectful and considerate all the way to criminally abusive. On average, a domestic worker is likely to get less than $15 an hour, no benefits and none of the credit or glory. To my knowledge anyway, there has never been a successful career woman — or man, for that matter — who’s responded to being praised for “doing it all” by saying, “Actually, Manuela (or Angelica or Harriet) does most of it.”

You don’t have to be down on your knees scraping congealed crème fraîche off marble tiles to see that there’s something not quite right about this picture. Ai-jen Poo was a recent Columbia University graduate in 1998 when she got incensed about the status of New York’s domestic workers and started organizing them into something resembling a union. It’s not that easy to organize domestic workers, even the ones who are fluent in English, because their workplaces are scattered among thousands of individual apartments and town houses and no one keeps a list of their names.


Domesticworkers.org TIGER ORGANIZER — Ai-jen Poo in her office at the National Domestic Workers Alliance,
top, and at a New York rally, above.


But word spread among networks of immigrant domestics, through churches and around the playgrounds frequented by nannies until, by 2010, the organization Poo helped put together, Domestic Workers United, was formidable enough to pressure the New York State legislature into passing the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, recognizing them as legitimate workers on a par with any other wage earners, and entitled to such amenities as overtime pay, a minimum of three paid days off a year and legal protection from harassment and discrimination: not everything they need, by a long shot, but a big step up from invisibility.

My image of a union organizer, based on extensive personal experience, is a big, loud guy with a bullhorn, not a slender, soft-spoken former women’s studies major whose reflexive response to a crowd is to melt into the sidelines. Nor does Ai-jen Poo look like a typical D.W.U. member, at least no more than than Jennifer Lopez looked like a housecleaner in “Maid in Manhattan,” and the incongruities only multiply as you get to know her. She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants, a neurobiologist and an oncologist, and her original career plan was to be not the scientist or lawyer you might expect from such a lineage but a potter.

Today Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an umbrella organization that includes 33 satellites like the D.W.U. from across the country. After college, she got a job with an Asian community organization in New York, where her job was to reach out to Asian workingwomen, including housekeepers from Hong Kong. It was a Jamaican woman, though — we’ll call her Alice — whose case compelled Poo to start focusing on nannies and maids, mostly immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. When Alice learned that Poo was interested in hearing from domestic workers, she came forward with her own story, which is, I regret to report, a not-all-that-unusual tale of slavery in the midst of urban affluence.

FULL story at link.

[niyad]

1. k and r