The CARE project brings together Filipino caregivers who are immigrants to the US, Filipino American youth, students and professionals. The training for the first part of the CARE Project joined this intergenerational group to learn how to do research for our community around the conditions of caregivers in their workplace.
The CARE project is just beginning!
Justice in the Home: Domestic Workers Re-define the Labor Movement
The coverage of the domestic worker struggle on this radio story is really accurate and sharp.
If you’d like to get a quick overview of the issues that domestic workers face and the struggle that is ahead of them, listen to this.
This video was made by Ryan Leano, a CARE project graduate, about the launch and commencement that we successfully accomplished last week!
SAVE THE DATE!!!
Caregiver Research (CARE) Project Launch
Wednesday APRIL 4, 2012
6pm-8pm
35 San Juan Ave. SF CA 94112 (Old FCC Space)
A great, quick read on domestic workers’ legislative struggle.
===
Domestic Workers Look to Extend Gains
By Matthew Cunningham-Cook
Labor Notes
March 13, 2012
http://labornotes.org/2012/03/domestic-workers-look-extend-gains
For 76 years domestic workers have been excluded from federal
labor law – from overtime and safety and health protections
in addition to collective bargaining rights. The exclusion
was no accident. When Congress debated the National Labor
Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, Southern representatives
insisted that two groups who were then a majority African
American be left out: farmworkers and domestic workers.
In the last two years, however, initiatives for domestic
workers’ rights have scored important victories. Activists in
New York state won passage of a Domestic Workers Bill of
Rights. Since November 2010 domestic workers receive time-
and-a-half after 40 hours per week (44 for live-in workers).
They are entitled to a day of rest every seven days, three
paid days of rest per year, and protection under the state’s
human rights legislation. The U.S. Department of Labor in
December announced plans to extend the minimum wage and time
and a half for overtime to 2 million home health aides and
personal assistants. (Other forms of domestic work such as
housework and childcare would continue unprotected.)
Last June, an international coalition of unions, human rights
organizations, and domestic worker organizations successfully
lobbied the International Labor Organization of the United
Nations to adopt a new convention. If ratified by member
countries, international law would guarantee domestic
workers’ right to freely associate, collectively bargain, and
be free from discrimination over citizenship status. And the
National Domestic Workers Alliance, a coalition of more than
70 groups, is working for a bill of rights in California,
modeled after the New York version, that would protect more
than 200,000 childcare workers, housekeepers, and caregivers.
They are anticipating a similar push in Massachusetts.
Matilde Vasquez, a live-out housecleaner in San Francisco who
belongs to the Women’s Collective, a group of domestic worker
activists, decided to get involved because of her own
family’s experience.
“My mom used to work as a domestic worker inside the house,”
Vasquez said, “where she cleaned and cooked for more than 10
years. In those days I saw her wake up at 5 and go to bed at
10 or 11, she didn’t have any vacation or insurance, and only
one day off per week. When I do this I think that I’m
honoring her.” Handshake Agreements
Right now, domestic work tends to be informal, with vague
arrangements between employer and employee. The bill Vasquez
is fighting for would entitle workers to the same wage and
hour protections as other California workers, except for
safety and health regulations. Meal and rest breaks, overtime
pay, reporting time pay, and worker’s compensation would
become mandatory.
California already has some overtime provisions for live-in
domestic workers but it mandates only 150 percent of the $8
minimum wage, rather than the worker’s actual pay. If a nanny
making $11 an hour works an extra hour, she gets only $12.
The new law would up that pay to $16.50. Domestic workers
would be legally entitled to uninterrupted sleep while
working 24-hour shifts or as live-in employees, and employers
could not charge for personal access to their kitchens.
Violations would incur a $50 fine, paid to the worker.
Vasquez says she wants not just the better pay and working
conditions but recognition that her work is valued. “We are
like any other employee,” she says. “This kind of job is nice
because you’re helping people; most people work a lot and
they don’t have time to get their house clean. Everything we
do is an art.”
Andrea Mercado, an organizer with the California coalition,
says the long-term goal is to bring domestic workers under
the NLRA. Experience with New Rights In New York, where the
bill has been in place for over a year, organizers are making
sure people are aware of their rights, says Luna Ranjit,
director of Adhikaar, a worker center for Nepali-speaking
people. They are working with the state Department of Labor
and getting members to reach out to others. “This sense of
support has allowed a lot of our members to negotiate for
better working conditions,” Ranjit says. Enforcement can be
difficult; the state Department of Labor is understaffed.
Ranjit says there is a long backlog of cases for all the
workers she aids, not just domestic workers.
But more than 60 workers have resolved claims against their
employers with the help of a legal clinic set up by the Urban
Justice Center and Domestic Workers United, the New York City
group that fought for the law. Activists now want to expand
their gains by winning collective bargaining rights for
domestic workers, bringing them under the New York State
Labor Relations Act. One plan is to create a public or
private entity that would function as the employer of
domestic workers and that a union could bargain with.
DWU member Christine Lewis said organizing for the 2010 bill
lifted the veil of silence around domestic work. “Women have
become aware and conscious that there is a law that stands
for them,” Lewis said. “All of a sudden everyone was sharing
stories; people weren’t afraid any more.”
This picture is from a mobilization for International Women’s Day in the Philippines. The yellow sign says, “Fight (President) Aquino’s Oil Cartel Conspiracy!” and another sign says, “Decrease the Prices of Oil!” The women are hurling paint balls at the US embassy in this picture as a militant protest to the collusion of the US government, its corporations with the Philippine government. This action commemorates international actions for women’s rights but it also reflects the widespread problem of the rising costs of basic goods. This is an example of womanhood in the Philippines.
A recent article in Foreign Policy, entitle “Five Surprisingly Good Places to Be A Woman” lauds the Philippines as its first site to be surprised about when thinking about the good life for women. I read this article and was irritated by its confluence of the closing of the “gender gap” and a good life for women.
Here are three things that I’d urge you to think about a bit more:
1. Foreign Policy lists “educational attainment” and “health and survival” as top ranking statistics for women in the Philippines. But without a discussion on the hotly debated and often rejected Reproductive Health Bill (See Gabriela Women’s Party’s speech)? This bill that prioritizes education about women’s health and survival keeps getting knocked down.
The second paragraph in the Philippine feature states the obvious caveats that religious (and I’d argue, capitalist) patriarchy also puts the Philippines as the only country in the world who hasn’t legalized divorce or abortion or contraceptives. Yay, what a great place to be as a woman.
2. Being a woman in the Philippines can only be good if her father, son, daughter, bakla neighbor, etc. has a good life. The women in that above picture aren’t fighting for oil decrease for women. They are fighting for oil prices to decrease for everyone. The idea that women will have it good because they can read as fast as men is misleading. Yes, education is important. But so is food. If no one has access to basic goods or jobs, how can life be good for women if its not good for men?
How good is it to be a woman in a country where life isn’t good for any person?
I don’t think the only accurate measure of a having a good life for a woman is their ability to work in the same place as men. I think its better to measure women’s well-being in context of their people’s well-being.
3. The only thing I do agree with Foreign Policy about is that women in the Philippines have a good sense of their democratic and revolutionary potential. The picture above which includes one of my personal sheroes, Nanay Neri (in the purple shirt hurling a paint ball) who is a mass leader of women’s organizations from the urban poor sector, shows that women feel the need to act, militantly and without reserve, against the neoliberal retreats of the state. They don’t only feel the need to act. But they act. All the time. Every day. In new ways. That’s good. Really good.
Happy Women’s History Month!
Talk of technology was in every interview, group interview, gathering, observation (you name it) of my dissertation. It was really awesome to see how Filipino women in the middle of their life course, women who didn’t grow up with computers much less knew how to do work on one, pushed themselves to learn new technologies to keep their families together. This talk is about the inventive technology strategies of Filipino domestic workers in NYC and their families in the Philippines as they made meaning of their motherhood and daughterhood from afar. Come kick it with me for an hour, hear their stories and ask questions and give comments!
Speaker: USF Sociology Department Professor and Dissertation Writing Fellow Valerie Francisco
Date: Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Time: 11:40 am to 12:45 pm
Location: McLaren 251
Cosponsored by the Yuchengco Philippine Studies program, Asian American Studies, and the International Studies Department
This presentation explores the production and redefinition of care in the transnational Filipino family. Scholars have posited that “transnational motherhood” has reorganized the way that migrant mothers participate in family life from afar. Professor Francisco extends that concept by providing evidence that care work changes for all members of transnational Filipino families going and coming from multiple directions: from migrant mothers to families left behind and from families left behind to their migrant counterparts. This talk will focus on a concept Francisco calls “multidirectionality of care,” which highlights the reorganization of care work through the use of technology to redefine new roles, definitions and forms of care in the lives of migrants and their families. The inventive experiences and approaches of Filipino families stretched over time and space allows us to see how the global has been sutured to change the very intimate parts of social life. In an increasingly globalized world, understanding the changes in the family can also help us to understand the social processes that insist on conditions of separation and individuation.
Valerie Francisco is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at City University of New York, The Graduate Center. Francisco’s academic interests include transnationalism and diaspora with a special interest on the Philippine migration, family, gender and labor, and globalization. Her dissertation research is with Filipino migrant women working as domestic workers in New York City and their families in the Philippines. In journals like The Philippine Sociological Review and International Review of Qualitative Research, Francisco writes about how families are changing under neoliberal immigration policies and what types of political subjectivities emerge from those conditions. In the 2011-2012 academic year, Francisco is teaching and completing her dissertation as the Dissertation Writing Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of San Francisco.
One Sunday afternoon when I was 15 years old, I went to visit my father who was working as a caregiver. He was a live-in caregiver with 5 elderly patients, one of them non-ambulatory. He worked 6 days a week, and because he lived in the facility, I can only imagine, he worked 24 hours a day.
He’d been in the US for over a year and this is the only work he could find, and he was happy to take it. He knew that the paycheck would help my mother put food on the table and help with our household expenses. I was just happy he was in the US with us finally, after 6 years of separation. My weekly trip to his work site was a source of joy for me.
On those Sundays, I’d take him to the bank to deposit his check, get deodorant, etc. And this Sunday, my heart sank a little as my father wobbled his way out of the care home doors. He said his back hurt because he lifted a patient the wrong way. “Its okay, Val. Kaya ko to,” he said. When we got to the bank, he opened up his paycheck envelope, and his eyes got a little watery. He asked me to deposit the check for him because his back was hurting. And as I fought to keep my tears back, I said, “Sure, Papa.”
When I got to the teller, I could tell my father wasn’t tearing up about his back. His paycheck for 2 weeks of work was only $500. That day, I wished all my wishes away.
I wished that my father’s back would heal.
I wished that he could get a fair wage.
I wished that he could have better work conditions.
I wished that people, especially his employer, could see his work as dignified and valuable.
If you know a caregiver, your parent was a caregiver, if you grew up in a care home, you’ll want to do this.
Caregivers and domestic workers are one of few American workforces who do not receive standardized labor rights.
The US Department of Labor is taking comments about proposed regulations to standardize their rights.
Follow the steps below and tell the DOL that you support home care workers.
=====
Comments on Department of Labor ‘s Proposed Regulations for MW and OT for Home Care Workers
All comments need to be submitted on-line by February 27, 2012.
HOW DO I SUBMIT IT?
1. Go to http://www.regulations.gov/ .
2. On the “SEARCH” LINE, please type or paste: Application of the Fair Labor Standards Act to Domestic Service
3. You will be taken to a site that has different Titles of Documents. Look for the Application of the Fair Labor Standards Act to Domestic Service. Click on Submit a Comment (which is on the RIGHT HAND side) and
4. Enter your contact information and Type in a comment of up to 2,000 characters OR attach a word or PDF file. You only have 20 minutes, so if you plan to have it typed up beforehand so you can paste it in.
5. Your document should refer to Dept of Labor and RIN 1235-AA05,
NOTE: All comments will be posted unedited, so don’t disclose any information that you don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly. Include as much relevant personal information as you are comfortable sharing. The more specific you are about why you care about this issue and what the new rule would mean to you, the better.
WHAT KIND OF COMMENT SHOULD I SUBMIT?
FROM CAREGIVERS: We want to tell the Department of Labor (DOL) to know about caregivers’ experiences of underpay and overwork. Ask caregivers to describe, as specifically as possible, what it feels like to be underpaid and overworked (i.e. they can talk about how difficult it is to live and support their families in SF because their pay is so low; they can talk about how overwork affects their health, they can talk about what they actually do at work that shows that they are more than just “companions” etc). LIMIT THE COMMENT TO 2000 WORDS, OTHERWISE YOU WILL HAVE TO ATTACH YOUR COMMENTS SEPARATELY.
Here are sample questions to ask workers:
SINO KA?
Are you a caregiver, child of caregiver, or an employer? For how many years? Is being a caregiver your only job? Do you have family you are supporting? Are you a part of a caregivers organization?
ANO ANG TRABAHO MO?
What state do you work in? How many hours do you work? How much are you paid? Do you have to get up when you sleep? What do you do for the people you care for (Shower? Dress? Cook?…)
ASK FOR DOL’S SUPPORT.
Bakit sinasuportahan mo ang mga karapatan para Overtime pay & Minimum Wage for Home Care workers? (Halimbawa – it will recognize our important work, it will help us stay at our jobs longer, do our jobs better, care for our families.)
Here is a sample template for answers/comments to post:
· As a caregiver, I strongly support the DOL’s proposed regulations (RIN 1235-AA05) that ensure all home care aides receive minimum wage and overtime protections.
· I have worked in the caregiver field for ___ years.
· Every day, I help my clients with [list what you do for your clients - include any things that you do like turning the patient, changing wound dressing, giving medications, dressing, bathing, feeding , grooming, toileting, laundry, housekeepring, etc].
· I often work ___ hours each work and do not get paid any overtime. Even though I am supposed to get minimum wage in California, I have often work at wages below minimum wage
· [If not getting minimum wage and./or overtime ]- I think it’s unfair that I don’t have the same rights as other workers.
· My work helps my clients stay healthy and independent. I take great pride in my work, which takes skill and compassion. I care deeply about my clients, but I also need to earn a fair wage to support my own family.
REMEMER: only include details the worker is comfortable having posted on a public website)
FROM YOU: As advocates, we want the DOL to know that we support revisions of the regulations.
Here is a sample of what you can submit for yourself:
· I am a concerned individual and I support the proposed regulations (RIN 1235-AA05) to ensure minimum wage and overtime protection for homecare workers whose work is so important. It will help to stabilize this critical workforce that is experiencing high turnover because of low pay and long hours. It will help ensure dignified care for the elderly and people with disabilities so they can stay in their homes and out of institutions.
· I also support requiring employers of live-in domestic workers to make and keep records of domestic workers’ hours worked because live-in workers need this basic protection around their work hours. In addition, employers should ALSO be required to keep other records — like the rate of pay, total wages, or deductions for meals and housing. Deductions from pay are common, and without this additional information, the possible wage and hour violations are impossible to spot. It will not be burdensome for employers to keep such records—because they have home computers, smartphones, and workers can keep such information, which employers can use to keep their records.
· Personally, this issue matters to me because [HERE YOU CAN PERSONALIZE IT]
The RH Bill has and continues to stir all kinds of frenzy in the Philippines, the only country in the world that still hasn’t made divorce illegal nor has it legislated comprehensive reproductive health education and services. In the 21st century, the resistance of the Philippine government to provide women with access to pap smears, breast and cervical cancer scans, etc. is at best negligent and, at very worst, abhorrent.
Of course we can’t keep the Catholic church’s influence out of this disucssion. A relative of mine, a staunch anti-RH Bill person, has said before its ‘population control’ that we need not birth control or abortion. The problem with that is that ’Population control’ attributes a growing population to the unruly behavior of poor people, without taking into consideration the lack of education and health services that is needed for family planning.
Anyway, just recently the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has tried to catch the Gabriela Women’s Party (GWP), one of the co sponsors of the House Bill 4244 otherwise known as the RH Bill, in the snares of the population control debate, claiming that GWP admits that the bill they themselves are proposing is not “pro-poor and pro-women.” They left out the rest of the sentence that said that the RH Bill can’t be pro-poor and pro-women “as long as it espouses population control.”
Bulatlat has a better written piece on this HERE.
I think we, Filipino Americans, who think we’re thousands of miles away from the islands from this debate need to listen up (or at least READ up), since similar retreats from basic women’s health care and attacks on women’s bodies are happening right here at home too.
Rep. Luz Ilagan, one of my modern day heroines has written a response which I’m quoting below:
21 February 2012
CBCP for Life
470 Gen. Luna St., Intramuros
1002 Manila, Philippines
Dear Editors,
In the interest of fairness and accuracy we hope that the “CBCP for Life” will find space for this clarificatory statement in response to an article which appeared in the “CBCP for Life” website on February 20, 2012. The undersigned was quoted out of context thus making it appear that Gabriela, a primary author and advocate for the RH bill supposedly admits that the RH bill is not pro-poor and pro-women.
Gabriela Women’s Party has long advocated for a national reproductive health policy that will guarantee marginalized women’s full access to comprehensive maternal and reproductive healthcare.
The consolidated RH bill currently contains several provisions that will help ensure poor women and children’s access to healthcare, such as the following:
§ Mobile health clinics that will ensure the delivery of health services to far-flung communities and barangays.
§ Improvement and upgrade of equipment available in public health care facilities, including barangay health centers to ensure that they are able to conduct basic reproductive health care procedures such as pap smears.
§ Pro-bono reproductive health care services for indigent women by making it mandatory for all health care workers to provide at least 48 hours annually of reproductive health services free of charge to indigent patients, especially pregnant adolescents.
However, the RH Bill currently contains three provisions pertaining to population control:
§ Section 2, Guiding Principles, (l): The limited resources of the country cannot be suffered to be spread so thinly to service a burgeoning multitude that makes the allocations grossly inadequate and effectively meaningless;
§ Section 12, Integration of Responsible Parenthood and Family Planning Component in Anti-Poverty Programs; and
§ Section 25, Implementing Mechanism, where the Population Commission, rather than the DOH per se, is mandated to serve as the coordinating body in the implementation of this bill.
Gabriela Women’s Party believes the RH bill’s provisions on population control will overshadow its pro-poor provisions and threatens to effectively confine the delivery of reproductive and maternal health care services to the implementation of population control programs, the distribution of contraceptives and population control mechanisms.
Moreover, the population control aspects of the RH bill conveniently blame poverty on women’s bodies, fertility and population while disregarding the impact of social inequities and neo-liberal policies on the country’s growing hunger and poverty.
Gabriela Women’s Party remains firm in its position against population control. It will continue to push for amendments to the bill, including the removal of provisions pertaining to population control.
Gabriela Women’s Party will continue to fight for full women’s access to healthcare and fight not just for the retention of the pro-poor provisions in the RH bill but will also fight for increased budgetary allocation for healthcare as well as the granting of increased maternity benefits for women workers, among others.
Lastly, it is our fervent hope that the Catholic hierarchy, with its preferential option for the poor, will join us in the struggle for genuine reforms to help uplift the lives of poor Filipino women and their families.
Respectfully,
REP. LUZ C. ILAGAN
The erstwhile president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, launched a domestic worker training program called, the “Supermaid” (or “Supernanny”) Program in 2006 to increase the professionalization of Filipino women leaving the country as domestics. The program teaches Filipino women things like seven ways to cook eggs or how to change a diaper with speed and precision. The Supermaid Program prides itself with shipping the best kind domestic worker all over the world: a Filipino woman whose innate domestic skills have been honed and sharpened.
Since the export of migrant workers tops the national list for exports in the Philippines, administrations from Corazon Aquino to the current president, her son, Benigno Aquino II, have invested in managing the profitable $19 billion per year migration industry. In recent years, these investments have rode the international feminist wave, claiming that migration leads to women’s autonomy and empowerment. The gendered rhetoric of “bagong bayani” or modern heroes often rely on tropes of mothers, daughters, and sisters obligation to their family; twisting an old patriarchal logic on its head while distracting Filipino women with tales of travel and ability to support their families.
In reality, even if Filipino women are the best domestic workers in the world, the false hope of “empowerment” through migration leaves women in low-wage gendered labor often without worker rights in their different destination countries. Without international standards and varying national labor regulations, domestic worker jobs are often insecure, contractual and highly susceptible to exploitation. So what’s so super about being a maid anyway?
Today, it’s easy to say that women’s presence in any and all workplaces can be called a feminist victory. But we must be wary of what we trade for those victories. For women in developing nations, celebrating advances based only on gender liberation oftentimes fall flat as women are still exploited as low-wage workers, in their own countries and abroad. Although Filipino women are working, traveling the world and bringing home the bacon, they are still seen as third-class citizens in their new homes as they take up gendered work as immigrant workers. And that’s not super at all.
