The Work that Makes All Other Work Possible
This week, New York State made history by being the first in the U.S. to pass a law providing labor protections to domestic workers (i.e. people who work in childcare, house keeping, and eldercare). Having previously been excluded from labor laws, this is a tremendous victory for the roughly 200,000 domestic workers in New York City.
At CBST, we are a community that includes people who have worked in others’ homes, descendants of domestic workers, as well as employers of domestic workers—given our complex demographics, what do we make of this? One of the biggest challenges for employers is the confusion around whether or not the home can be a place of work.
Feminists have been saying for years that domestic work is real work. Betty Friedan made a case for that in her influential (albeit homophobic!) book, The Feminine Mystique . Though one thing Friedan did not tackle was what happens when you actually hire someone else to come into your home to do the work? It’s a tricky question for most people.
Fortunately, the Jewish community has picked up where Friedan left off and started to ask the question, "Who cleans your house?" Four years later, we have a law in response to that question.
At the signing of the bill this week, an employer who is a member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justic e spoke out about why workplace standards are important to her in the home (the video is a little shaky, but worth the watch).
As an LGBTQ community, we have created, and continue to create, innovative networks of care and support for each other. HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, alienation from our families of origin, the new ways we welcome children in our lives and raise them—all of these reasons and more have led to networks of care that have remained invisible and underappreciated in most of the world. Fortunately at CBST, we are able to celebrate queer care and love.
Isn’t it great that the invisible workers who make all other work possible are starting to get some of this recognition?
