The State Senate this week passed a bill that would require paid holidays, sick days and vacation days for domestic workers, along with overtime wages. It would require 14 days’ notice, or termination pay, before firing a domestic worker.WashPost:
The Assembly passed a similar measure last year, and lawmakers expect that the two versions will be reconciled and that Gov. David A. Paterson will sign what they say would be the nation’s first such protections for domestic workers. It would affect an estimated 200,000 workers in the metropolitan area: citizens, legal immigrants and those here illegally as well.
Albany has wrestled with similar legislation for six years. The bill that passed the Senate, 33 to 28, on Tuesday had faced opposition, largely from Republicans, based on additional costs to the employers and the extension of workplace protections to illegal immigrants. Advocates in California and Colorado hope that similar legislation will be introduced in their states next year, said Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Unlike the Assembly-passed bill last year, the Senate measure that was approved 33-28 on Tuesday also guarantees a half-dozen holidays, seven sick days and five vacation days annually, all paid. Both would establish collective bargaining rights. The Senate bill also would require 14-day termination notice or pay and establish a worker's right to sue.
It is not a done deal yet - it still needs to go through the reconciliation process, but for all those families paying off the books (if there are 200K NYC area domestics and only 225K families NATIONWIDE paying nanny taxes we know there are MANY off the books) you will now be in more jeopardy of being caught if the employee files a grievance. The NYS legislature probably doesn't realize it but this will be a revenue raising scheme!
If you can afford a nanny you're not middle class, and labeling oneself as such is part of the old American dodge of "We don't have upper-class elites, just one big middle class with a couple of Bill Gates' up top some poor immigrants and the homeless on the bottom."Americans don't like to cop to actually being "wealthy" to the general public.But we don't really have a functional definition of "middle class", except that it built the country after WWII and it's disappearing. Hell, I grew up in a large home with physician/office manager parents at the beach in New York and we were raised to think of ourselves as "middle class".
In her forthcoming book Servants of Globalization, Parrenas... tells an important and disquieting story of what she calls the "globalization of mothering." The Beverly Hills family pays "Vicky" (which is the pseudonym Parrenas gave her) $400 a week, and Vicky, in turn, pays her own family's live-in domestic worker back in the Philippines $40 a week. Living like this is not easy on Vicky and her family...
Vicky is part of what we could call a global care chain: a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring. A typical global care chain might work something like this: An older daughter from a poor family in a third world country cares for her siblings (the first link in the chain) while her mother works as a nanny caring for the children of a nanny migrating to a first world country (the second link) who, in turn, cares for the child of a family in a rich country (the final link). Each kind of chain expresses an invisible human ecology of care, one care worker depending on another and so on.
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The DWU says 99% of domestic workers are foreign-born, 95% are people of color and 93% are women.
posted by zarq at 8:00 AM on June 3, 2010 [5 favorites]