Decompiling Oppression #42
Sam McVeety
With the introduction of a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in the House (preceded by the passage of local legislation in Seattle, California, and other jurisdictions), I wanted to take the opportunity to look more closely at the history of protections (or lack thereof) for domestic workers (e.g. care assistants, nannies, house cleaners, au pairs, ...). In many ways, the New Deal was a negative milestone for treatment of domestic workers. At a time when labor protections were increasing rapidly, domestic workers and farm workers were largely left out, to avoid resistance from Southern Democrats who were interested in maintaining the racial status quo in their home states through economic domination. Throughout this period, farm workers and domestic workers were left out often in tandem, though we'll focus on domestic workers today. Our key text for today will be Juan Parea's The Echoes of Slavery, which explores the topic in much more detail.
While many of the New Deal regulations initially (and appropriately) covered all workers, their final versions created exceptions for domestic workers and farm workers. Many of these exceptions were the result of explicitly racist debate, while others appeared to take their cue from the prevailing political climate that wouldn't allow any bill with such protections to be passed. Remember, this is a time when President Roosevelt was unwilling to pass an anti-lynching statute, for fear of alienating the Southern supporters whom he viewed as crucial to passing his economic agenda:
If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk.
For example, with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a proposal to explicitly allow differential wages based on race (facially justified by racist "intelligence testing" that indicated that Black workers were inherently less skilled than whites) did not make it to the final bill. However, exclusions for domestic and farm workers did. That the final NIRA bill would have a similarly discriminatory outcome through racially "neutral" language was enough for it to retain Southern support, while avoiding the appearance of overt racism that might alienate other allies of the legislation. These consequences didn't go unremarked at the time, though these complaints were ultimately ignored. On behalf of the NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston (Dean of Howard Law) testified that:
If we follow the history of the workmen's compensation acts, we know that two great classes of workers who will be excluded from the benefit of unemployment insurance; they are agricultural workers and domestic workers. Again, 3 out of every 5 [Black] workers drop through the holes of the sieve.
Whether or not there was explicit racial animus in the discussion of a given bill, the effects were largely the same -- labor protections designed to help "everyone" left out 60% of Black Americans. This is a case study in how laws with race- (and gender-) neutral language can still have severely harmful effects. Modern apologists for the act may point to bureaucratic reasons for excluding classes of workers, such as the difficulty of tax collection from domestic workers. To argue this ignores the racialized and gendered contours of power. Yes, there are many practical challenges in any piece of legislation. That the New Deal Congresses failed to summon the political will and creativity to craft legislation that didn't exclude vast swaths of Black Americans speaks volumes about their underlying interests and the amount of weight and regard they are given.
This episode also illustrates the ways that anti-Black racism doesn't just harm Black people, particularly when it intersects with class. When occupations or sectors are characterized as Black (even if there are a sizable number of non-Black, particularly white people, in the group), racialized arguments prevent protections for that occupation (for example, at the time of the New Deal, the majority of domestic and farm workers were, in fact, white). In the modern day, racialized debates over the Affordable Care Act have played out similarly, despite beneficiaries from all groups.
While the New Deal policies largely revolved around race, no discussion of domestic work is complete without an additional look at gender. In contrast to farm work, domestic work has faced the additional headwinds of being discounted as running parallel to "women's work" in the home, whose economic value has reliably been erased and ignored in the modern era. Assigning value and protection to work that is otherwise minimized has created additional barriers to political recognition.
In subsequent years, some of the exclusions for domestic workers have been repealed, but many remain. Further, intersections with class, immigration status, and other marginalized identities render many domestic workers particularly vulnerable. With the introduction of new protections, we have a chance to address this history and provide redress for the ongoing harm that is happening in our midst.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Do you employ a domestic worker? As an employer, learn about what protections may or may not exist for the people you employ, and where you can provide support.
Communal: In your community, what domestic roles and tasks are done through paid vs. unpaid labor? Does this change how you see the value of this work?
Solidarity: Support the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Hand in Hand and their work to provide equitable, safe working conditions for domestic workers.
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