S1E39 / Invisible Women / Ai-jen Poo, Susie Rivera, Glewna Joseph

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Thank you. This is Epidemic. I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. Today is Tuesday, July 28th. When the Senate first passed pandemic relief bills for essential workers, one group was conspicuously left out.

The workforce of mostly women and mostly women of color who provide caregiving and cleaning services in our homes, supporting our families as nannies, as house cleaners, and as home care workers.

This is Ai-jen Poo. As director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, she's spent decades advocating for this often overlooked and undervalued segment of the American workforce. Now the pandemic is creating a rare opportunity.

So much gets revealed in a crisis. We've become so aware of just how many invisible workers are actually essential to our lives.

And her organization is hoping to capitalize on that awareness.

Now that we see them, my hope is that our field of vision about who is working and just how valuable they are continues to widen and that it's not only about awareness and clapping for them at 7 o'clock at night, but we're actively taking action and demanding that they be protected, demanding that they be compensated, demanding that they are able to keep themselves and their families safe, crisis or no crisis.

This week on Epidemic, we're going to hear about that action. But first, we spoke with some of the women the National Domestic Workers Alliance is working to protect. Susie Rivera has worked as a caregiver in Texas since 1986.

Prior to this pandemic, I was working a lot. I was working like between 100 and 110 hours a week. And now I'm only taking care of 2 patients.

One of those patients is a woman who recently survived a stroke.

The family was fearful of her catching coronavirus, so her family did not want to leave her in a nursing home. Her family didn't want to leave her in rehab. They wanted to find 24-hour care in her home.

And so they hired Susie.

I work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I work 16 hours a day. I go in at 6 and get off at 10, and she's really depending on me for all her care. And it's total, total care.

The stroke left the woman with limited mobility.

I assist her in her medications. She then gets up, she gets a shower. I help her brush her teeth. I comb her hair, put rollers on her hair, put makeup on her. Then she gets transferred to her recliner. I give her her breakfast. Then I give her her 8 o'clock medications.

Susie lifts her patient at least 20 times each day, moving her from her bed to her wheelchair, back to her bed for a nap. Susie preps her meals, answers her phone, washes her laundry, cleans the house too.

She just needs a lot of one-on-one total care.

Susie considers this work a calling.

You are an essential part of that family's life, about that their mother or father You know, living the quality of life they have at the end of their life. And you want them to get the care that you would give your mother or your own father, your own family member.

In her 28 years in the industry, she's done all sorts of work.

I've taken care of all kinds of people at different points of their life. I've done end-of-life care. I've done hospice. I've worked in nursing homes..

But she's never experienced anything like this.

This has been the most stressful, stressful of all times of me working. It's just draining me. And I was used to the long hours and the work we put in. But it's just so much stress right now. Making sure they're safe, making sure they have equipment, making sure they have gloves or even hand sanitizers or masks. This is really a total change from work I've done before.

Her patient's family is supplying Susie with appropriate protective equipment, and she wears it to protect her patient, but also—

I'm really fearful because my wife has compromised illnesses.

Her wife's sister and two nieces are living with them right now too, and Susie is trying to keep everyone safe. Then there's her parents, who she tries to convince to stay home.

It takes a toll on you because you want to care for people and it's just so stressful. So stressful.

For millions of others, the pandemic creates a different kind of stress.

My name is Glenna Joseph and I am a housekeeper.

Back in 2014, Glenna had just been happy to find a job. She'd immigrated to the US after a difficult divorce, leaving behind a career as an accountant. Her accounting license didn't transfer to the United States, and friends helped her find housekeeping work.

I was working for a billionaire.

If you didn't catch that, she said she was working for a billionaire, with a B. As a live-in housekeeper, she'd work 5 days per week, starting at 10 in the morning. The first week, her days ended around 6:30 PM. But that didn't last long.

As time went by, a lot of things changed.

Two months in, the employer asked Glenna if she'd like to come to the Hamptons with them for the summer. On their drive out, more news.

Don't forget that your schedule changes at the end of June.

She'd now be working weekends. The Hamptons house was twice the size of the other house. And there were people in and out all summer, plus weekly parties. Most nights didn't end until 11 or 11:30 at night. Despite the extended hours, the pay remained the same: $600 per week.

There's no overtime.

Other things changed too.

But by the third to the fourth year, when they started to travel, I had to go clean the grandmother's house. I had to go clean the daughter's house. I had to— when the If my fiancé was moving out, I had to go help clean that house. So I found myself constantly taking care of so many different households. And my compensation was, "Thank you, Glenna.

I appreciate you." When she joined the National Domestic Workers Alliance, she started to see all of the ways her employers were taking advantage of her and how much better things could be with a fair employer. And so she quit. She's been out of work since January, but in March, she felt like that was going to change. She was finalizing details for a new job, and then the pandemic hit New York hard.

Everything just went on a standstill. So the job that was promised went down the drain, and that was it for me.

She's still looking.

I am looking into housekeeping, into nannying, but it's, it's tough. It's tough. And the competition is so high because so many people are unemployed right now that it makes it even more difficult to find employment.

She's burned through her savings and is now getting by with the support of friends and a local food bank. Her son helps with some bills too.

Still, I'm not sure how long I could continue doing this because July is almost coming to an end and I'm not sure what's, you know, what's going to happen. So I am just praying that something happens and my landlord to be as patient as possible with me. So it's, it's, it's rough. It's tough.

Glenna has also received support from the National Domestic Workers Alliance. That's the organization that Ai-jen leads. In March, they established a coronavirus care fund.

To provide emergency cash assistance to domestic workers in need who've been affected during the pandemic, because we were hearing over and over again that there was no other relief coming.

There are more than 2.5 million domestic workers in the United States. Actually, some estimate it's closer to 4.5 million. And the National Domestic Workers Alliance understood that this community would need relief as much, if not more than, most others. And most, like Glenna and Susie, are trying to manage it all with less income.

A lot of us have multiple jobs.

That's in normal times.

Just to get what you need, your insurance, your medication if you take it, you know, because medication is expensive too.

There's internet, cell phones, rent, utilities, grocery bills. In her last job, Glenna made $34,320 per year. That's assuming she worked every week of the year, that she never took a holiday, that she never got sick.

So many women in the immigrant community work incredibly hard and still cannot make ends meet. The average annual income of a home care worker is $16,000 per year. One-sixth, $16,000 per year.

And now it's worse.

This pandemic has been devastating. Nothing short of devastating. It is a crisis of impossible choices. Early on in the crisis, we started to hear about people worrying if they got sick, what would they do? And then we started to hear about dramatic losses in jobs and income. House cleaners were some of the first people in February to tell us that they were losing clients and losing income and worried about food security for their families.

And some are— some workers are even fearful because the family's not taking precautionary measures. They don't want to go in the house because they're having family come in, exposure. A lot of people are coming and going in the house. That puts the worker at risk.

And if a worker has two jobs, one where the employer follows strict rules and another where the employer shirks the rules, they can't keep both jobs.

You can't go to a house if you know they're not abiding by the rules.

The crisis of impossible choices. But for some, there really is no choice.

You don't work, you don't get paid. That's the bottom line.

No matter how hard some workers tried to avoid it, encountering the virus seemed to become inevitable. Many fell ill, and when they did, they faced yet another impossible choice.

A lot of them fell sick and some of them stayed at home and tried to use different remedies to, you know, to try and get better because of course a lot of them are undocumented and they are afraid to go out there to seek medical attention because they are afraid if they go out there, they're afraid of ICE, they're afraid that, you know, they're going to put themselves and the family at risk.

And many never recovered.

Some died on the job, some died at home. They caught the virus and then passed away.

This is a workforce that came into the crisis without job security, without any kind of access to a safety net, without paid sick days or paid family leave. And the wages are poverty wages. So there's not savings to stock up on groceries even.

And there was no help in sight.

There's no access to testing. There's no access to protective equipment. And there's no access to care should you get sick.

And while some qualify for unemployment, The majority do not.

The undocumented workforce has not been eligible for any of the federal relief, and many are certainly not able to get access to unemployment insurance. Many are not even showing up in the unemployment numbers, and really the only safety net they have is the community and their networks, including organizations like ours.

In IGEN's experience, this is not at all surprising.

The fact that it has been work that has always been associated with women, right, caregiving work has always been associated with women, and as a profession associated with Black women and immigrant women, it has really fed into and been a part of the ways in which our, our economy is structured to value the lives and the contributions of some over others.

She points to history, to the 1930s, when Southern congressmen refused to support New Deal reforms and labor laws that included farm workers and domestic workers, work that even then was primarily done by people of color.

And that legacy of racial exclusion has really shaped conditions of this work for generations.

It was clear that things needed to change even before the pandemic.

These are really the jobs of the future. If you think about just how many people need care work and care support in their homes, and then you add on top of that the fact that people are living longer than ever, and the baby boom generation, this huge defining generation of ours, is, is aging at a rate of 10,000 people per day turning 70, we need a really strong and large workforce of care workers to provide support to that growing older population.

Experts say the United States will need more than 8 million new long-term care workers by the year 2028.

And it's one of the reasons why we've been working so hard for so many years to help domestic workers get access to a safety net.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance created an online platform to help domestic workers negotiate benefits with employers. The website is myALIA.org. That's A-L-I-A. They've also championed domestic workers' bills of rights. New York was the first to adopt one, signed 10 years ago. It offered all domestic workers, regardless of their immigration status, several basic rights.

3 paid days off per year, as well as some basic protections from discrimination and harassment, the right to a day of rest per week.

It provides disability pay, overtime pay, and protection under the New York State Human Rights Law.

Nothing revolutionary, um, but it was really important, especially as a step forward to say Domestic workers are workers and are protected and have rights equal to other workers.

6 states and several cities have since signed similar bills. A federal version is currently on the Senate floor. The original bill came to Glenna's attention in 2018 when she joined the Alliance.

This is where I learned what my rights were. I was given a contract. I was told, well, take this contract to your employer. And I looked at the contract and I said, if I take this contract to my employer, I would get fired immediately because she has violated 80% of what's on that contract.

She knew what she wanted to find in her next job. She would no longer live in an employer's home. And she'd negotiate a few other things.

I would negotiate for sick days. I would negotiate for holiday, holiday pay. I would also would negotiate for them to pay health insurance for me. So I would negotiate for paid time out because for me, as far as I'm concerned, as employers, they get those benefits on their job. So I think it's only fair that I, me coming to your home to take care of your home, whether it's your baby or your house, as an employee, I deserve the very same thing, so I would negotiate for that.

She'd be negotiating for many of the things that one of Susie's employers has started to offer.

There's another lady that I take care of on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. She is a very wealthy lady. She takes care of her employees very good. We— she runs her care like a business. We have sick days, vacation days. She pays for our medical. But that's an ideal job. Nobody, the whole time I've done this kind of work, has ever done this for me or for any worker. And I really feel this lady that does all this for us, she actually appreciates us and she knows how hard we work.

And thanks to the pandemic, that awareness is spreading.

We are all caregivers now. I mean, with our kids home from school and daycare and camps closed for the summer and parents getting evacuated from nursing homes, we are all trying to figure out how to manage care for our families while some of us are able to work at home, some of us are trying to figure out how we find work again. It's so much, and I think it's really awakened us to this part of our lives that we have really not paid enough attention to and not invested in.

And in Ai-jen's opinion, now is the perfect time to create lasting change.

If we made every care job in America a living wage job with benefits, it would not only get a whole set of people to work immediately, those jobs are job-enabling jobs. They make it possible for all of us to go and figure out how we get back to work again as a country, knowing that our loved ones have care and are in good hands. And what could be more fundamental and what could be a better stimulus than that, really? And so that's kind of what we're advocating for. Now we just have to kind of jump through that window and make it happen.

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