“Take us out of slavery!” “I am not a slave.” “Invisible no more.” These were the slogans used by personal attendants and home care aides in the United States during the 1970s to campaign for workers’ rights. Excluded from national wage and hour laws due to the nature of their work, which was seen as identical to women’s household and family labour, these workers, then disproportionately African American, were misclassified by the US Department of Labor as “elder companions” and treated as nothing more than casual teenage babysitters. This remained true even when they were employees of for-profit franchise health care and manpower firms, and their non-recognition as workers made them appear to many as ‘slaves’. The Obama administration’s attempt to rectify this designation has met fierce resistance from employers, who have gone to court to block any change in the exclusion.
Thus, forty years later, the circumstances of care and other domestic workers—wage theft, long hours, sexual harassment, and personal abuse of all sorts—remain hidden in the home, still venerated as a private family space. Isolation magnifies ill treatment, especially for live-in labourers, a group in the US increasingly composed of immigrant women of colour. Tales of passports confiscated, food and sleep denied, imprisonment in residences, and constant monitoring additionally defines what commentators across the political spectrum lament as a new slavery.
