The workers many activists forget
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
As we have moved into a primary cycle and the subject of the working class is on the lips of activists and politicians, I know the images that term evokes in the minds-eye of many who hear it—hard hats, lunch boxes and assembly lines—often male, and often white. Organized labor and unions get mentioned, but rarely when one thinks of unions, other than perhaps SEIU or organized teachers do we think of women.
Many of you know I went to an annual women's gathering this weekend where I also celebrated my birthday. Hosted by one of my sisters from the Young Lords Party who is a union organizer, the gathering consists of mainly women of color, who are activists, and artist-activists from different age sets. Some of us have been attending for years. This year a sister I've wanted to meet for many years was there. We had never met, though we are both in the same film, "She's Beautiful When She's Angry," which documents the second wave of feminism, and we know many of the same people.
I wanted you to meet her too. Her name is Linda Burnham, and she is the National Research Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
She is a sister with a long history of activism.
Linda Burnham has worked for decades as an activist, writer, strategist, and organizational consultant focused on women’s rights and anti-racism. Most recently she has been serving as the National Research Coordinator of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and prior to that, she provided organizational consulting to Domestic Workers United and facilitated the Gender Justice from the Grassroots Inter-Alliance Dialogue gathering in March 2010.
Linda Burnham is a co-founder and former executive director of the Women of Color Resource Center. The Women of Color Resource Center is a community-based organization that links activists with scholars and provides information and analysis on the social, political and economic issues that most affect women of color. Burnham founded the center to provide a strong institutional base for an agenda that recognizes the crucial interconnections between anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic organizing.
Burnham was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance, an organization that grew out of a women’s caucus in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and that, early on, challenged the women’s movement to incorporate issues of race and class into the feminist agenda. She has participated in conferences and meetings with women in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Cuba, returning with insights about the global factors that affect women’s status and the unique ways in which women organize to create change in their communities.
Talking with Linda was exhilarating, and as with most black Americans, we have a shared history of domestic workers in our family trees. I was reminded that it has been a while since I've written about the work being done organizing for the rights of domestic and home care workers, a struggle she has played a major role in. She spoke of her respect for the leadership of
Ai-jen Poo.
Ai-jen Poo is the Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Co-director of the Caring Across Generations campaign. She is a 2014 MacArthur fellow and was named one of Time 100’s world’s most influential people in 2012. She began organizing immigrant women workers nearly two decades ago. In 2000 she co-founded Domestic Workers United, the New York organization that spearheaded the successful passage of the state’s historic Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.
Bernham is co-author, with Nik Theodore of "Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work" a report issued in which should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the intersections of race, gender and class in our economy.
How many domestic workers are there in the U.S.?
According to the report (published in 2012) :
The domestic work labor force is large and growing. The Census Bureau’s annual survey, the American Community Survey [ACS], finds that, from 2004 to 2010, the number of nannies, housecleaners, and caregivers working in private households and directly paid by their employers rose from 666,435 to 726,437, an increase of nearly 10 percent.
The actual number of domestic workers undoubtedly is far higher. These ACS figures do not take into account workers who are hired through placement agencies or those who work for private cleaning companies. Nor do they count some types of workers who could be considered domestic workers, such as cooks or chauffeurs. Furthermore, categorical overlap and fluidity complicates how domestic workers are counted. For example, a caregiver to an elderly person might perform many of the same functions as a home health aide, and vice versa.
We also may reasonably presume that domestic workers, a sector of the population with a large proportion of undocumented immigrants, are undercounted in the ACS due to reluctance on the part of many to share information with governmental entities, and because of language barriers. Researchers have confirmed that the Census Bureau undercounts undocumented immigrants for these reasons, as well as other inadequacies in data collection methods.
Ai-jen Poo states that in the United States there are somewhere between one and two million domestic workers, "depending on who you ask, and how you count."
A summary of the report is available online:
Domestic workers are critical to the US economy. They help families meet many of the most basic physical, emotional, and social needs of the young and the old. They help to raise those who are learning to be fully contributing members of our society. They provide care and company for those whose working days are done, and who deserve ease and comfort in their older years. While their contributions may go unnoticed and uncalculated by measures of productivity, domestic workers free the time and attention of millions of other workers, allowing them to engage in the widest range of socially productive pursuits with undistracted focus and commitment. The lives of these workers would be infinitely more complex and burdened absent the labor of the domestic workers who enter their homes each day. Household labor, paid and unpaid, is indeed the work that makes all other work possible.
Despite their central role in the economy, domestic workers are often employed in substandard jobs. Working behind closed doors, beyond the reach of personnel policies, and often without employment contracts, they are subject to the whims of their employers. Some employers are terrific, generous, and understanding. Others, unfortunately, are demanding, exploitative, and abusive. Domestic workers often face issues in their work environment alone, without the benefit of co-workers who could lend a sympathetic ear.
The social isolation of domestic work is compounded by limited federal and state labor protections for this workforce. Many of the laws and policies that govern pay and conditions in the workplace simply do not apply to domestic workers. And even when domestic workers are protected by law, they have little power to assert their rights.
Domestic workers’ vulnerability to exploitation and abuse is deeply rooted in historical, social, and economic trends. Domestic work is largely women’s work. It carries the long legacy of the devaluation of women’s labor in the household. Domestic work in the US also carries the legacy of slavery with its divisions of labor along lines of both race and gender. The women who perform domestic work today are, in substantial measure, immigrant workers, many of whom are undocumented, and women of racial and ethnic minorities. These workers enter the labor force bearing multiple disadvantages.
There are also links to
key findings, and
recommendations.
On Mother's Day of 2013, I wrote "Domestic workers and caregivers—fighting for their rights." Since that time there have been some victories. Gov. Jerry Brown of CA, who vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2012, after two vetoes finally signed the legislation in September of 2013, which went into effect in January of 2014.
In June of this year Oregon became the fifth state to pass a bill of rights for domestic workers.
Oregon's domestic workers gain labor protections as Gov. Kate Brown signs new law
The governor signed Senate Bill 552 on Wednesday extending provisions for overtime pay, rest periods, paid personal time off and protections against sexual harassment and retaliation to an estimated 10,000 domestic workers in Oregon. The measure passed the Senate in late April and the House in early June, making Oregon the fifth state to offer basic protections to a class of workers who historically have been excluded from federal and state labor laws.
Since 2010, New York, California, Hawaii and Massachusetts, working with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, have passed laws guaranteeing similar rights.
Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, chief sponsor of the Oregon bill, said it was the right thing to do, noting that 95 percent of domestic workers are women and many are immigrants and many are people of color. A similar bill passed the Oregon House two years ago but stalled in the Senate, she said. "Now domestic workers will be able to adequately provide for their own families, and finally be protected for the valuable work that they do," Gelser said. "And employers who hire domestic workers will have a standard to look towards which will help to ensure quality care for their families."
The new law takes effect January 1, 2016, and directs the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries to adopt rules to implement it.
Five states. That's only 10% at this point. We have to do better. I honor the women who have fought so long and hard for these gains, but as you can see we have a long way to go.
This isn't just a U.S. issue. In "Bad housekeeping: the plight of domestic workers," Kevin Redmayne just wrote:
In Colombo, the sweltering capital of Sri Lanka, the Domestic Workers Union is picketing outside the Supreme Court.Sarath Abrew, a high-ranking judge, has been accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid, fracturing her skull and leaving her for dead. The protesters are not only demanding justice, but also new laws to safeguard their rights. In an exploitative industry, this can’t be just another day – the violence has to stop.
Right now, there are 53 million people working as domestics in countries all over the globe, amounting to 1.7% of the world’s employed. Of this group, 83% are female, which means 1 in 13 wage-earning women is in domestic work. More worryingly, so are 17.2 million children, many too young to give informed consent. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that domestic workers earn less than 50% of the average salary of any particular nation. This means that workers in the developing world could earn a salary lower than $8,000 a year or, worse still, no salary at all. Job titles include housemaid, servant, cook, gardener, governess, babysitter or care-giver. We rarely use the term ‘slave’ but in many cases this is effectively what the workers are.
The ILO recently warned of the ‘invisibility’ of domestic work. The reality is much more damaging than poor pay and long hours. Many employees have no legal protection and are often given unlawful contracts, unfair terms and unethical job descriptions. They are perilously close to being victims of crime or destitution.
Domestic work is essential work, but because so many of these jobs are done by women, both their labor and lives are devalued.
Support the Domestic Workers Alliance to help carry the struggle forward.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Philadelphia's BlackStar Film Festival—known as "the black Sundance"—was this weekend. Here are five documentaries featured in this year's fest that are worth your full attention. Color Lines: Five Powerful BlackStar Film Festival Documentaries to Look Out For.
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Four years after its inception, the Philadelphia-based BlackStar Film Festival has confirmed its reputation as a black Sundance, an independent powerhouse of a film festival where film and criticism powerhouses such as Spike Lee and Marc Lamont Hill converge with burgeoning artists over panels and screenings that celebrate the vitality of independent film from the African diaspora.* This year's festival, which [ran from July 30th to August 2nd] is no different. Featuring appearances from acclaimed indie filmmakers such as Arthur Jafa and Terrance Nance, BlackStar 2015 promises to uphold the standards it's previously set in empowering black artists in a film world that isn't always quick to recognize artists of colors' potential.
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Why a tiny South American country can't escape the ugly legacies of its idiosyncratic past. Foreign Policy Magazine: CIA Meddling, Race Riots, and a Phantom Death Squad.
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A jumbie, in Guyana, is an evil spirit. The term derives from the same Kikongo word — West African, like many of the enslaved who once toiled in this tiny South American country — that zombie does. A rich cast of jumbies, evocative of Guyana’s history, populates the nation’s folklore and its country lanes, many of which were unlit well into the late 20th century. The lack of electricity was bad for economic development, but good for telling stories of the supernatural. In the glow of kerosene lamps, tales were spun about the Land Master, a spectral planter on horseback placated only by rum and cigarettes, or the churail, a wild-haired woman walking the night, inconsolable after dying in childbirth; pregnant women who saw this figure were fated to lose their babies.
A different kind of jumbie stalked the political landscape in May, when this onetime British colony, wedged between Venezuela and Brazil and populated by the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians imported as plantation labor, held a significant election. The Indian-dominated People’s Progressive Party, led by incumbent President Donald Ramotar, was eager to hold onto the rule once unjustly denied it due to U.S. meddling during the Cold War. In the early 1960s, the PPP was maneuvered from power because its leader, Cheddi Jagan, was a Marxist; it remained sidelined for three decades before regaining authority in independent Guyana’s first-ever clean election and keeping it for nearly a quarter century. By this spring, however, the party seemed poised for an undoing of its own making, having lost whatever moral authority it had earned as a victim of America’s global fight against communism. Critics charged that Guyana had become a corrupt narco-state under PPP rule and, even more unnervingly, that the government either tacitly condoned or actively sponsored a death squad run by a drug lord now in U.S. federal prison. Local government elections had not been held in two decades. Faced with a no-confidence vote in parliament last November, Ramotar simply suspended the body.
In this embattled context, the PPP resorted to telling its own ghost story on the campaign trail for May’s special election — one of a racially riven, at times violent political history pitting Afro- against Indo-Guyanese. The party repeatedly resurrected black leader Forbes Burnham, installed by the British and Americans as a lesser evil than Jagan. A London-trained lawyer and gifted orator who founded a rival to the PPP, the People’s National Congress, Burnham maintained a firm grip on Guyana from 1964 until his death in 1985. He declared his party paramount to the state, changed the constitution at will, tightly controlled the media, and used state violence to suppress dissent. Indians experienced systemic discrimination, and during his rule, many of them fled the country. (My family was part of the exodus.)
The PNC’s present avatar led the multiracial, but majority-black coalition seeking to unseat the PPP this year; the coalition’s presidential candidate was retired Brig. Gen. David Granger. Summoning the specter of Burnham, and the fact that the armed forces in which Granger built his career have long been predominately Afro-Guyanese, Bharrat Jagdeo, a former president and the PPP’s current motive force, told a rural rally to fear the opposition. “When they link with the military, as they have done,” he said, “and come into your homes and start kicking the doors down and when they come after you, who is going to be there?”
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Rapid development and testing of drug may bring current epidemic in west Africa to an end and control future outbreaks, experts say. The Guardian: Ebola vaccine trial proves 100% successful in Guinea.
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A vaccine against Ebola has been shown to be 100% successful in trials conducted during the outbreak in Guinea and is likely to bring the west African epidemic to an end, experts say.
The results of the trials involving 4,000 people are remarkable because of the unprecedented speed with which the development of the vaccine and the testing were carried out.
Scientists, doctors, donors and drug companies collaborated to race the vaccine through a process that usually takes more than a decade in just 12 months.
“Having seen the devastating effects of Ebola on communities and even whole countries with my own eyes, I am very encouraged by today’s news,” said Børge Brende, the foreign minister of Norway, which helped fund the trial.
“This new vaccine, if the results hold up, may be the silver bullet against Ebola, helping to bring the current outbreak to zero and to control future outbreaks of this kind. I would like to thank all partners who have contributed to achieve this sensational result, due to an extraordinary and rapid collaborative effort,” he said on Friday.
A World Health Organization (WHO) health worker gives a demonstration on how to put on a protective suit.
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A year ago Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. What has followed has been the greatest national reckoning on racism since the beating of Rodney King. Slate: How Ferguson Changed America.
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On Aug. 9, one year ago, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown after a brief scuffle in the middle of a small street in Ferguson, Missouri. There wasn’t any video of the encounter, but many bystanders and local residents saw the aftermath. For four hours, Brown’s body sat in the summer sun, slumped and face down, blood pooling in the street where he was killed. Neighbors, shocked at the violence and the police’s disrespect for Brown’s corpse, took photos and shared video. “They killed him for no reason … they just killed this n—er for no reason,” said one man in a video recorded just after shooting. “Do you see a knife? Do you see anything that would have caused a threat to these motherf—kin’ police? They shot that boy because they wanted to shoot that boy in the middle of the motherf—kin’ day in the middle of the motherf—kin’ street.”
But Brown wasn’t the first unarmed black person killed by police officers in 2014, although he was the first to inspire mass demonstrations, riots, and an unprecedented, draconian police response of armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and tear gas. He wasn’t even the first unarmed black person killed that summer. That was Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who was killed a month earlier. In the video of his arrest and death, he’s surrounded by police, arguing. “I didn’t do nothing,” he tells an officer. “Every time you see me, you want to harass me, you want to stop me.” An officer puts him in a chokehold, while others hold him face down on the sidewalk. He pleads, “I can’t breathe,” but police continue the arrest. They turn over his unconscious body. An hour later, he’s pronounced dead.
On that Saturday, the only thing anyone knew was what they saw and heard: An unarmed teenager was dead in the streets.
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Garner’s death sparked outrage. It even produced protests and demonstrations. But it didn’t cause anything like the events in Ferguson. What was different about the death of Michael Brown?
Part of it was the place where Brown died. St. Louis County, shaped by decades of redlining and white flight, was segregated and thick with racial tension. Worse, in small towns like Ferguson, municipal governments were openly predatory, extracting heavy fees from black residents through overpolicing and an opaque system of municipal courts.
Mike Brown's family at 2943 on Canfield at the exact spot of Mike Brown's death
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He'll need to do more to appeal to minority voters. The New Republic: Bernie Sanders Is Starting to Talk About Race—Awkwardly.
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He’s certainly trying. After facing shouting protesters at Netroots Nation two weeks ago, Sanders quickly stepped up to denounce Bland's treatment (“That happens all over this country, and it especially happens to people of color”) and connect his economic message to race (“Providing free tuition at public colleges and universities will be a huge step forward for this country and the African-American communities”). But in his brief remarks on Wednesday, his appeal to identity politics remains vague—in contrast with, say, his call for a $15 minimum wage—and he seemed disconnected from his core economic message. After describing what happened to Bland, Sanders remarked: “We’re seeing that all over this country.” He went so far as to describe “institutional racism” as the problem, without elaborating further about what needed to be done.
That had the effect of addressing race and identity politics—“he was pretty blunt,” one white Bernie supporter told me—without making it clear how he’d address “all that stuff,” as Sanders put it. ““Inartful’ might be a way to say it,” said Sam Reggio, 34, at a Sanders house party in Washington, D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood. Reggio, who is white, supports Sanders for his fight against wealth inequality and support for single-payer health care, but he acknowledges that race and criminal justice are “hot issues for a lot of liberal voters”—issues which Sanders needs to tackle head on. For supporters like Reggio, Bernie’s struggle to grapple with these issue is coming from a real place, like everything else that he likes about the Vermont senator. “He’s a human being—it’s not something built up in a focus group,” he says.
Tom Beach is similarly passionate about Sanders’s dedication to standing up against Wall Street and fighting for ordinary workers. A self-described political novice, Beach felt inspired to host a Sanders house party in his Petworth home. But like Reggio, he also raised an eyebrow when Sanders tried to address race and criminal justice in his remarks. Bland’s story was “just plopped in there,” says Beach. “He felt like he did the race thing.” But Beach believes that the candidate’s ability to broaden his appeal will be a critical test for him—“a measure of his leadership,” he explains.
For Sanders to appeal to more minority voters, they need to be in the audience first. The house parties were the official kickoff for the campaig’s grassroots organizing effort, to expand field organizing beyond the few early—and largely white—primary states of New Hampshire and Iowa. And Wednesday’s gathering in this historically black, rapidly gentrifying corner of Washington made it clear why the Vermont senator needs better outreach. There were recent college grads, married couples, and gray-haired professionals; political greenhorns and seasoned field organizers; fresh transplants and D.C. natives. Many spoke about Bernie’s fight to get big money out of politics; others loved his support for free public college or labor unions. But almost all the two dozen Bernie partygoers were white.
Aaron Allen, 29, was one of the only attendees who was not. Half black, a quarter Latino, and a quarter white, Allen identifies as “all of the above” and hasn’t committed himself to supporting a Democratic 2016 candidate. The problem, he says, is that Sanders isn’t fluent in certain issues because he’s never had to be, representing an overwhelmingly white state. It’s not just with issues like race and criminal justice. “He’ll talk about equal pay for women, but it kind of stops there, as a footnote,” Allen said. He added that Sanders would do that rather than address a thornier cultural issue such as reproductive rights.
Bernie Sanders Speech at Urban League Conference: 'We need some new thinking'
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Born in Munich of an American mother and a German father, educated and graduated from Harvard in 1909, Ernst Hanfstaengel later became one of Hitler's first financial supporters, even hiding him in one of his country homes in the Black Forest after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The two men remained close and in 1937 Hitler appointed Hanfstaengel Foreign Press Chief of the Nazi Party.
After a dispute with Goebbels, he was informed in March of 1937 that he was in danger of being murdered. He fled to the United States and was employed by the Office of Strategic Services as a political and psychological warfare adviser in the war against Germany.
Freedom of Information Act releases about ex-Nazis in our Intelligence apparatus reveals the extent to which the US used techniques and rhetoric the Nazis developed and it remains with us today. From the Big Lie used by the Right Wing, to calling torture enhanced interrogations, "this country has moved so far to the Right," as Spiro Agnew gushed in the 70's, "you won't recognize it."
But we recognize exactly what has been going on. Will we continue to fight it?
At This Precise Moment of History
1. At this precise moment of history
With Goody-two-shoes running for Congress
We are testing supersonic engines
To keep God safe in the cherry tree.
When I said so in this space last Thursday
I meant what I said: power struggles.
2. You would never dream of such corn. The colonials in
sandalwood like running wide open and available for
protection. You can throw them away without a refund.
3. Dr. Hanfstaengel who was not called Putzi except by
those who did not know him is taped in the national
archives. J. Edgar Hoover he ought to know
And does know.
But calls Dr. Hanfstaengel Putzi nevertheless
Somewhere on tape in the
Archives.
He (Dr. H.) is not a silly man.
He left in disgust
About the same time Shirley Temple
Sat on Roosevelt’s knee
An accomplished pianist
A remembered personality.
He (Dr. H.) began to teach
Immortal anecdotes
To his mother a Queen Bee
In the American colony.
4. What is your attitude toward historical subjects?
—Perhaps it’s their size!
5. When I said this in space you would never believe
Corn Colonel was so expatriated.
—If you think you know,
Take this wheel
And become standard.
6. She is my only living mother
This bee of the bloody arts
Bandaging victims of Saturday’s dance
Like a veritable sphinx
In a totally new combination.
7. The Queen Mother is an enduring vignette
at an early age.
Now she ought to be kept in submersible
decompression chambers
For a while.
8. What is your attitude toward historical subjects
Like Queen Colonies?
—They are permanently fortified
For shape retention.
9. Solid shades
Seven zippered pockets
Close to my old place
Waiting by the road
Big disk brakes
Spinoff
Zoom
Long lights stabbing at the
Two together piggyback
In a stark sports roadster
Regretting his previous outburst
Al loads his Cadillac
With lovenests.
10. She is my only living investment
She examines the housing industry
Counts 3.5 million postwar children
Turning twenty-one
And draws her own conclusion
In the commercial fishing field.
11. Voice of little sexy ventriloquist mignonne:
“Well I think all of us are agreed and sincerely I my-
self believe that honest people on both sides have got
it all on tape. Governor Reagan thinks that nuclear
wampums are a last resort that ought not to be re-
sorted.” (But little mignonne went right to the point
with: “We have a commitment to fulfill and we better
do it quick.” No dupe she!)
All historians die of the same events at least twice.
13. I feel that I ought to open this case with an apology.
Dr. H. certainly has a beautiful voice. He is not a silly
man. He is misunderstood even by Presidents.
14. You people are criticizing the Church but what are
you going to put in her place? Sometime sit down with
a pencil and paper and ask yourself what you’ve got
that the Church hasn’t.
15. Nothing to add
But the big voice of a detective
Using the wrong first names
In national archives.
16. She sat in shocking pink with an industrial zipper spe-
cially designed for sitting on the knees of presidents in
broad daylight. She spoke the president’s mind. “We
have a last resort to be resorted and we better do it
quick.” He wondered at what he had just said.
17. It was all like running wideopen in a loose gown
Without slippers
At least someplace.
-- Thomas Merton
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.