Domestic workers make all other work possible – yet have been excluded from crucial federal labor protections for over 80 years. In a historic first, Congress held a hearing on policy that would finally change that.
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What the global left talks about is worth talking about
By excluding jobs held by black and brown workers from basic worker protections, the Fair Labor Standards Act, adopted decade ago during the New Deal, injected institutional racism into a federal wage and hour law.
The pandemic is making clearer the historical and social problems of society, how it is deteriorating to the point of triggering its own decline. Fighting for another society that cares for women and life is a necessary task for our future.
The question of whether parents and grandparents should receive a wage for childcare within the family has been asked repeatedly for at least half a century.
Home-based workers are not even officially recognised as workers, so there have been no special schemes set up for them. Our people have no social security, no pensions and no insurance. Now there’s no work which means no income.
Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become “qualified” for the job? And how important is that worker’s labor to the rest of society?
Domestic work and care work have historically been underpaid and overlooked, and the fact that even today this labor is often referred to as “help” rather than conceived as professional labor betrays the long devaluation of women’s work. T
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