In subway stations and under the shade of trees across New York City, Allison Julien met with domestic workers. She wanted to talk to them about their basic rights — the ones they’d been denied for decades.
It was the early 2000s, and nannies, home cleaners and home health aides across the state were in the midst of a years-long campaign to pass the nation’s first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, a document that would guarantee protections such as a minimum wage and paid time off after labor laws shut these workers out. Julien, then a nanny without permanent legal status, was one of the leaders of that movement.
Domestic workers didn’t have a shop floor where they could organize or a lunch room where they could talk on their breaks. The work to build their movement had to be done on the streets. But Julien’s pitch, tailored for a workforce composed almost entirely of women of color and immigrants, felt like a moonshot.
One day in Prospect Park, a sprawling green space in central Brooklyn, Julien once again approached a nanny who had repeatedly shrugged her off. “Girl, you’ve been trying to talk to me about this for years,” the nanny told her.
“Look around us in the park,” Julien told her. “Look at that tree. Did you think that tree grew last night? No, it took that tree many years to grow. It had to weather the snow, the rain, the wind, the sun, the elements. This is what we’re doing.”
Since the United States’ founding, domestic workers have been fighting for respect and dignity. When a group of White land-owning men signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 — 250 years ago this July 4 — domestic workers helped make it possible for many of them to travel to Philadelphia and enshrine the nation’s ideals that “all men are created equal.”
If a nation is measured by how it treats its most marginalized citizens, domestic workers are America’s test case.
The first domestic workers were enslaved people. The next wave became one of the country’s most underpaid and undervalued workforces. In the 1930s, lawmakers specifically excluded domestic workers and farmworkers from labor projections, shutting them out of Social Security benefits, minimum-wage protections, overtime laws and the right to form a union. Today, those workforces have some of the highest concentrations of people without permanent legal status.
And yet, domestic workers have continued to fight and win, demanding that they be included in America’s promise of equality and forging a model of grassroots organizing that has lifted other groups of workers along the way.
“In demanding respect, rights and recognition, household workers who do the world’s work, who do the essential work of making people and allowing other people to thrive, are essential to the promise of 1776 and they remind us that we are all immigrants and we are all workers,” said Eileen Boris, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in domestic workers.
Julien, a daughter and granddaughter of domestic workers from Barbados, immigrated to the United States in the 1990s and worked as a nanny for a decade, experiencing wage theft and long hours, with no access to sick time. Then she ran into a labor organizer named Ai-jen Poo in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in April 2002. Poo headed New York’s Domestic Workers United, and she had her eyes on creating a national organization.
Poo gave Julien a flyer for a domestic worker meeting in Brooklyn, scribbling the subway directions on the back in red pen. At the meeting, Julien met others who were also suffering at work and had no mechanism to do anything about it. She thought of the employer who chastised her for missing work when she was deeply ill, and how they implied that she shouldn’t be asking for sick days because “you’re undocumented.”
Meetings like this would lead to the eventual passage of New York’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which would create a foundation of minimum wages, overtime and time-off policies for the state’s workers. It was the first of its kind in the country.
None of it would have happened without domestic workers organizing. The work they did furthered a legacy that began in 1881, when domestic workers first rose up en masse. The movement grew through the Civil Rights era, when workers started to win back the protections they were excluded from. Rarely featured in the history books, the story of domestic workers exemplifies the way women of color and immigrants held America to the very ideals it was founded on.
Julien, who still organizes domestic workers, has always refused to accept that her legal status defined her humanity. That spirit is what she used to carry the campaign for New York’s Bill of Rights, even when it seemed winning was impossible. On the way back from a particularly deflating trip to the state’s capital, Albany, where every legislator told them they would not support the effort, she turned to the bus of workers and asked: “Why the gloom?”
“They just gave us an invitation to come back,” Julien said. “Clearly, they didn’t get enough of us yet.”
The campaigns in Albany only got bigger, the workers packing the Capitol in their yellow shirts, singing and dancing to a remixed version of the popular line dance they renamed the “domestic slide.”
Julien has always understood that for this immigrant workforce, “America is our home. This is where so many immigrants come with dreams of better, and before we get better, we have to go through the storms, and the storms are in somebody else’s home,” she told The 19th.
That holds true now as organizing enters a period defined by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, which has led to a rise in employers exploiting workers for lower wages.
“Our rights are under attack right now, but there is something in this about those closest to the struggle are also those that are closest to the change,” Julien said. “We understand. We’ve been here before.”
More than a 100 years before Julien sought out domestic workers in parks, a group of washerwomen met secretly in an Atlanta church.
In the post-Reconstruction era, nearly all Black women were domestic workers, and many of them washed clothes. The washerwomen worked six days a week under grueling conditions, carrying gallons of water to boil and rinse clothes, then pressing them with heavy irons. For that work, which they often performed together with other washerwomen in their neighborhoods, they earned $4 to $8 a month — or about $130 to $260 a month in today’s dollars.
By July 1881, a group of Black washerwomen decided to start pushing for a standard rate of $1 per dozen pounds of wash. They called for a strike, then the largest ever staged by Black Americans. Through door-to-door canvassing, the group ballooned from 20 to 3,000 striking washerwomen in just three weeks. And they had leverage. Just about everyone in the city, even lower-income families, relied on Black women for clean clothes.
“The women have a thoroughly organized association and additions to the membership are being made each day,” the Atlanta Constitution reported on July 21, 1881. Cooks, housekeepers, nurses and Irish immigrants joined in support by also asking for increases.
In August, as the city prepared to host the International Cotton Exposition, the city council threatened to impose an annual fee on the washerwomen. In turn, the washerwomen published a letter to then-Mayor Jim English.
“We, the members of our society, are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing,” the women wrote. “We mean business this week or no washing.”
Despite intimidation and arrests, the women succeeded and the city council abandoned its plan.
The washerwomen’s strike would mark the first milestone in domestic workers’ organizing and establish the model that women like Julien would build on.
In modern-day Atlanta, nanny Alicia Cleveland thinks about the washerwomen when she’s out canvassing for domestic workers and encouraging people across the city to register to vote.
“A part of why I do what I do so hard is because of legacies like the washerwomen,” said Cleveland, who is a member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s We Dream in Black initiative, which centers Black, Afro-Latina and Afro-descendant domestic workers. It inspires her to teach others about this history and “to see the resilience and the determination that has always been shown by the women doing this work then — and now just wanting it to be something more.”
Cleveland comes from at least four generations of domestic workers. Cleveland’s aunt, former home care worker Vernell Truitt, remembers watching her grandmother set out to walk for miles to get to work cleaning homes in rural Georgia.
Cleveland’s great-grandmothers “would be shocked because she’s doing stuff they wouldn’t even think of,” Truitt said. “They would just be so proud of her valuing herself.”
Cleveland’s great-grandmothers were domestic workers in the 1960s, during a time when organizing was gaining momentum alongside the Civil Rights Movement. Domestic workers were part of that story, too. They helped feed and support the bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama, selling chicken sandwiches and pies to raise the money that sustained the boycott for 381 days.
It was around this time that Atlanta domestic worker Dorothy Bolden approached her neighbor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She wanted him to help her organize a national domestic workers union, she told him.
“He told me, ‘You do it, and don’t let nobody take it,’” Bolden said in a 1995 interview for Georgia State University’s Voices of Labor Oral History Project.
To build it, Bolden, who had been a domestic worker from the age of 9, rode every bus line in Atlanta to speak to hundreds of workers, asking them if they’d like to organize. By then, the composition of the workforce was changing to become predominantly immigrant women, many of whom received very low wages and faced rampant wage theft and sexual harassment on the job. With few pathways to citizenship at the time, these women had only limited other options for work.
In 1968, Bolden formed the National Domestic Workers Union of America in Atlanta. Though the group was neither national nor an official union, it exercised considerable influence through Bolden’s deep connections in local, state and even national politics. Over the years, she consulted with Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. The union’s members were encouraged to exercise their own influence by registering to vote, and they were trained to negotiate better wages. They were placed in stable jobs and bargained for minimum wages at a time when domestic workers were still excluded from those protections.
Bolden would help change that, too. Her organization and several others joined together to form the Household Technicians of America, a group of more than 25,000 members that successfully lobbied Congress to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to include domestic workers under minimum-wage protections. They won those protections in 1974 with the help of Democrat Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the daughter of a domestic worker.
The National Domestic Workers Union of America also launched a national Maid’s Honor Day and was training 13,000 workers at its height. Its prominence drew threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
“Oh, we get to cussing out each other on the telephone,” Bolden said in her oral history. “They talked about whipping my behind. They wouldn’t say behind, they would say ass. I told them any time they wanted to, come on over and grab it. You’ve got a chubby ass to whip. Then, I would hang the phone up.”
Bolden led the organization for 28 years. She died in 2005, as the Bill of Rights campaign in New York started to get off the ground.
“The thing about Bolden that sits with me is how much she loved the work she did,” said Premilla Nadasen, a professor at Barnard College who wrote a book on domestic worker organizing. “We often think of domestic work as an occupation that people did because they didn’t have any other option. It’s the deep understanding she had about the relationship between workers and employers that allowed her to think through how workers could build leverage.”
Asked in 1995 what she was most proud of in her life, Bolden simply said, “Those women out there. The strength and courage of those women.”
The domestic workers’ campaign in New York started to really take off when it gained the backing of other groups, including Jewish organizers, students whose parents were domestic workers and even doormen across the city, who, from their posts, had a window into who the good and bad employers were.
Then, John Sweeney, then the president of the nation’s largest federation of unions, the AFL-CIO, testified in Albany. He gave two reasons for his presence: First, “10 million workers are behind this legislation because we think that it is one of the most critical pieces of legislation in the history of this country,” and second, “because my mother was a domestic worker for 40 years.”
Because domestic work has been so deeply gendered, many of the people who led the movement or were connected to it did so in part because of their mothers and grandmothers. Nearly every worker, historian and expert The 19th spoke to for this story had domestic workers in their family.
It was that connection that helped propel the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights’ passage in the Senate on June 1, 2010. In Albany, every Democratic senator and one Republican who supported the legislation made a speech in support, many talking about their mothers and grandmothers who had been domestic workers.
“I sat down as a child every night and watched my mother’s footprints in the snow as she was a domestic worker, and would only sleep after they were covered up from the snow. Coming home at 7 o’clock in the morning after cleaning house after house. And here I got the right now to vote on a bill that impacts my life,” former New York state Sen. Eric Adams said that day. “I don’t speak for those people; I am those people. We’re going to pass this bill here today. (Adams would go on to become New York City’s mayor.)
That night in New York, domestic workers had their 1776 moment — their rights, enshrined in law. They won a set work week of 40 hours, or 44 hours for live-in workers, at least one day off a week and three paid vacation days annually.
It proved theirs was a movement “that could win,” said Mariana Viturro, who was an organizing director with the National Domestic Workers Alliance for nearly two decades, and it “proved that you could organize a workforce that was deemed unorganizable.” Since then, 13 states and three cities — Seattle, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. — have passed their own Bill of Rights. The most recent, in Washington state, passed this year.
When she thinks back to what it took to get here, Julien, who is now the organizing director of We Dream in Black, thinks of the fall of 2003. Her mom had sewn together little white bandanas with the letters DWU, for Domestic Workers Union, in red for both of them to wear at their first march together. Mother and daughter walked along Sixth Avenue in Manhattan with Poo to their right, standing between them and the police. “You are the reason why I do this work,” Julien told her mother then.
She’s always felt an innate sense of responsibility to the domestic workers who were never able to speak up, like her mother and grandmother, and the ones who are feeling silenced now. She also knows the arc of the moral universe is long — and in which direction it bends.
“Painting a picture of hope is all that we have. That is our resistance,” Julien said. “Our ancestors dreamed, envisioned, sang of their freedom when they were enslaved. That is the same level of hope and resistance that we have running through our veins today. That is why domestic workers, undocumented, documented and afraid, still show up every day. Because it’s in their bloodline to resist.”
