How Ai-jen Poo Helped Pass America’s First Domestic Workers Bill of Rights By Listening to Mothers: ‘I Became Obsessed’
“We have to be talking about money.”
So says SheMoney founder Jacki Zehner in an excerpt from We Do Declare, an oral history project of the virtual Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and focusing on the meaning of independence in women’s lives since the 1970s.
Inevitably, these stories are deeply tied to the importance of financial power, and the women interviewed are those who have played critical roles in advancing women’s financial independence over the last 50 years.
“I was in my 20s, and you couldn’t get credit. There was so much that was just unavailable to women as a matter of course, and there wasn’t much of a language to object to it,” recalled American labor leader and founding director of Working America Karen Nussbaum in another excerpt.
But there has been monumental change.
“In my case, and probably my contemporaries’, we were making our own mental notes about what wasn’t right. But we were in no position to try to fix it,” said former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Barbara Hackman Franklin. “That came a little later.”
For Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance an executive director of Caring Across Generations, “fixing it” came out of some facts that “plagued” her many years ago, when she was a volunteer at the New York Asian Women’s Shelter and at the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. That’s when she worked a hotline that would take middle-of-the-night calls from Asian immigrant women who were leaving abusive relationships and needed support, she explained.
“And so much of their calls were economic concerns,” said Poo in her oral history excerpt.
“They were about where they could find an affordable apartment and where are the jobs that pay enough to be able to take care of your children on one income. And that question was a question that really plagued me,” because of how few employment options there were for these women.
“People were either working in garment factories, working in restaurants, working in nail salons, or working as caregivers or domestic workers. And none of those jobs earned a living wage. None of them have job security. None of them have access to healthcare or benefits,” she said. “And so you have a situation where these women are literally working so hard, doing everything right, and still not able to pay the bills or take care of the people they love. How could that be?”
Poo became “obsessed” with how to solve the problem. She and a group of others started the Women Workers Project, to support women working in low-wage jobs, and did outreach to nail salons, restaurants, and domestic workers. Many of the domestic workers had previously worked in Hong Kong, where such workers have a union and a standard contract with a set number of vacation and sick days.
“And here in the U.S., it was like the Wild West,” she said. “They were shocked that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they had less rights than in Hong Kong. That was an immediate topic of conversation, like, why don’t we have a standard contract here? Why don’t we have rights? And we were all just like, ‘Right. Why?’”
They set their sights on passing a law, and organized the Having Your Say convention, which brought 250 domestic workers out to share their stories in a range of languages. Then the organizers teamed up with a group of law students from the NYU Immigrant Rights Law clinic, drafted a bill, and drove to the state capitol to find a sponsor. It worked.
“New York in 2010,” Poo said, “became the first state in the country to pass a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.” It’s now just one of many examples of how women’s independence and agency is coming directly from financial power.
Hear more from the Smithsonian’s We Do Declare oral history project here.