Sexual assault endured by domestic workers overlooked in national conversation
Women at the bottom of the labor market are least likely to see justice
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Janell Ross.
When June Barrett, a Jamaica-born immigrant, came to work for the nearly blind man as a live-in aide, she had already had a client who referred to her with a German or Yiddish term meaning “black servant” — or, by some translations, the n-word — and another white family that insisted she sleep on a couch, instead of an unoccupied extra bedroom. She’d worked for a black family that stopped paying after her first week. But the white and nearly blind Miami man had a habit of trying to put his hands between her legs, lick her neck or kiss her on the mouth. Her first night on the job she barricaded her bedroom door.
“It sounds completely crazy to me now,” said Barrett, who today works as a home health-care aide for a different family and an unpaid organizer with the Miami Worker’s Center. “But things go so bad for me at that job that I can distinctly remember thinking, if I am penetrated, I will leave straight away and go to the police. That was the line.”
Barrett was uninsured, paying for her asthma and diabetes medication out of pocket and could not miss a paycheck. Job agencies typically refuse to connect workers who complain or leave jobs quickly with more work. Searching independently can also be a problem. References and recommendations are everything.
“Women at or near the bottom, in terms of pay, in terms of standing are among those most frequently harassed,” said Mindy Bergman, a professor in the department of psychology and brain sciences at Texas A&M College Station who studies how work affects individuals.
Today black, Latina and Asian women comprise 40 percent or more of the nation’s nannies, maids and home health-care aides.
Gender lines
As the nation faces the frequency of sexual harassment and assault at work, both experts who study the problem and the agency that enforces laws against it say that it’s women at the bottom of the labor market who suffer sexual harassment most often and are least likely to see anything like justice.
Their experiences also suggest that the lines between predators and complicit cover artists don’t fall neatly along gender lines — often, the stories include women who overlooked sexual assaults or even facilitated harassment of female workers with less power to fight it.
That’s a pattern that makes pronouncements about the Harvey Weinstein effect — the idea American men have been shaken, even chastened and the workplace forever changed — seem optimistic, at best.
The problem
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC’s) authority to investigate, penalize or sue employers who sexually harass workers only applies to workplaces where there are 15 employees or more. Since most nannies, housekeepers and home health-care aides are the only employee in their workplace or one of just a few, they are often outside of the EEOC’s dominion.
In the 1930s, as Congress passed some of the nation’s core labor laws — including the 40 hour workweek and the minimum wage — lawmakers intentionally excluded occupations in which most of the nation’s black, Latino and Asian workers were employed such as domestic work and farm labor. Congress has adjusted these laws over the intervening decades. A Department of Labor regulation, known as the Home Care Rule, extended the minimum wage law and overtime guarantee for home care workers. It went into effect in 2015, but years of legal wrangling left the matter unsettled until 2016. Many farm laborers remain excluded.
Beginning in 2010, eight states — California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Nevada and Oregon — passed laws the alliance dubbed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. Some of these state laws mirror existing state anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws, giving domestic workers a process for filing sexual harassment and access to unemployment benefits. They guarantee a minimum wage and time off after a certain number of days worked. But in Nevada the harassment provisions apply to workplaces with 15 employees or more. In the remaining 42 states, some of these protections are absent for domestic workers.
“Domestic workers are almost expected to endure some degree of indignity as a term of their employment. That’s no accident,” said Allison Julien, a fellow with the National Domestic Worker Alliance’s We Dream in Black initiative, which advocates for black domestic workers.
