Decompiling Oppression #67
Sam McVeety
On July 7, 2022, Seattle's Office of Labor Standards (OLS) announced the first employer/employee settlement under the city's Domestic Workers Ordinance, awarding over $71,000 to a domestic worker as a remedy for multiple violations of labor standards under the ordinance. In keeping with my intention to center sustainability and contrast challenges with progress, I wanted to highlight this first-of-its-kind settlement as an example of how movement building and local change can have real effects.
Some context: the last time we looked at this topic, we focused on the history of exclusion and lack of legal protections that characterize domestic work. Let's catch up on what's happening, specifically in Seattle. Through extensive advocacy work and organizing, the City Council passed a domestic workers bill of rights, which established a variety of protections, and also created a body (the Domestic Workers Standards Board, or DWSB).
The Council charged the DWSB with making further policy recommendations, providing official city resources for the ongoing work of improving labor standards for domestic work. (Disclosure: my husband sits on this board.) Importantly, almost all of the seats are reserved for people who are close to the work, both workers and employers. By centering this kind of representation, the DWSB is set up to include those people who are most affected by its policy recommendations ("nothing about us without us"), rather than operating in a vacuum that is dominated by abstractions and theory.
The makeup of the board is a good step towards inclusion, and it's also an important example of where an equity lens is important. Remember that domestic work can be characterized by economic insecurity, unpredictable hours, multiple employers, and a number of other factors that might make it difficult for an employee to commit to attending a board meeting for something like the DWSB. In order to make meetings more accessible, the board has worked to make stipends available to participants, aligning with a growing trend of compensating people for their time and the expertise of their lived experience, rather than relying on unpaid volunteering (which creates accessibility barriers, as volunteer time is an economic privilege). Meetings are also held with simultaneous language interpretation (another area where having the City's resources is helpful!).
The area of domestic work provides a number of examples of why this kind of representative group is important, because the space is nuanced in ways that refract and change across different identities. Providing programs like vacation and sick leave to domestic workers isn't amenable to the same kind of approach as a single-employer 9-5 job, because there are multiple employers and work expectations at play. Accordingly, the DWSB, working with community partners, has been refining implementation options for "portable benefits" that are available across employers. Notably, even within this conversation, there is nuance across identities, where the kind of registration system that might facilitate such benefits needs to ensure protections for other vulnerabilities, like being undocumented.
Building on that theme of access varying across identity, this is also a case where the legal ecosystem matters. Keeping ICE out of courts is important here, because a large number of domestic workers are undocumented. If the threat of deportation prevents people from accessing the court system, then it's amplifying the vulnerability they already experience in their profession -- think about the potential violence that people are subjected to in the context of domestic work (environmental, interpersonal, economic, ...), and how in many other work contexts, we would expect the legal system to provide a remedy. Conversely, if that remedy isn't available (and especially if an abusive employer is depending on that), it can create a very dangerous situation. Given these and other challenges with traditional legal remedies, it's all the more important that jurisdictions introduce administrative remedies for things like labor violations (as in the case of the Domestic Worker Ordinance), which can bring agency resources to advocate for individual and group cases.
Ultimately, improving standards for domestic work is a place where local government can matter, and make a difference. I realize that it's all too easy to look at the deadlock (and losses) at the federal level and feel hopeless, but I think it's crucial to remember that this only represents one of several layers of government, and there are opportunities to improve labor protections for gig workers, provide social housing, and many more concrete policies that affect people's daily lives. It's both/and -- by building strong movements and power at local levels, we build more will and power to bring about wider change.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What labor protections do you benefit from, and how long have they existed? How were they won and established?
Communal: If you are an employer of a domestic worker, be intentional about breaking the silence around having the privilege to pay for help. Talking more about paid domestic work also amplifies the important truth that all domestic work (paid and unpaid) is real work.
Solidarity: Support Casa Latina (workers) and Hand in Hand (employers) and their organizing efforts around domestic workers.
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