Labor has to recognize us as a force. And how do you do that? Maybe it’s developing a union of our own.
—CAROLYN REED
In 1971 Geraldine Miller, a household worker, was riding the train to work in Westchester County in suburban New York City when she struck up a conversation with a woman who began to talk about “fringe benefits” for household workers and informed her about the Urban League’s organizing efforts.1 The idea of better working conditions for household workers immediately caught Miller’s attention. “I wanted it, and I wanted it with a passion.”2 She attended a meeting of the Professional Household Workers Union, a New York City group initiated and led by Benjamin McLaurin of the Urban League, and learned about the work of the NCHE and the upcoming national conference of domestic workers. Miller arranged for league sponsorship of a bus for a group of workers to travel to the meeting in Washington, DC. To recruit workers, she created a leaflet that read: “Stop, Look, and Listen. Become Aware of Your Rights as a Household Worker.” She recalled: “I went out on street corners especially near the trains and I gave them out to all the people that rode on my train. Days that I didn’t work, I would catch a corner where [there was] a bus stop . . . we stood outside a couple of the unemployment offices and gave them out.” Some women needed an incentive to get involved. “They said we’ll come if you cook and take something,” Miller, known for her culinary talents, explained. “I said okay, I’ll cook. So I took a certain amount of my money and I gave them what they wanted. They wanted food that I had cooked and they got it.” Through her organizing and culinary enticements, Miller mobilized thirty-three women to attend the national conference. Although she had no prior political experience, after returning home from the conference, Miller formed the Bronx Household Technicians and the New York State Household Technicians, eventually becoming a prominent organizer and leader in the Household Technicians of America.3
Domestic-worker activists, like Miller, were labor organizers attempting to build a movement to transform the conditions of their work. They were continuing a long history of domestic-worker organizing. From the washerwomen’s strike in Atlanta in the 1880s to the upsurge of activism in the 1930s, household workers had repeatedly demonstrated not only their ability to resist and control the work process, but to organize collectively and make demands on their employers and the state. Workers in the 1960s and 1970s received little support from mainstream unions and maintained their autonomy from traditional labor leaders. Because they were not subject to union procedures or National Labor Relations Board rules, they were free to chart an independent course. Their marginalization from the labor movement as well as the distinctiveness of their labor made it necessary for them to develop new and untested patterns of labor organizing. They were isolated workers working in the privacy of the home, typically as an employer’s sole employee. This demanded a more nuanced approach to labor organizing, departing from the confrontational, zero-sum model guiding traditional labor organizing. More often than other labor activists, domestic workers attempted to cultivate support from employers. Workers sometimes used their importance to the household, and their intimate association with family life, as leverage in their negotiations. In addition, they sought state-based protections, such as minimum wage, that applied to all household workers, not only those who were formally organized. They utilized social movement strategies and advocated more egalitarian approaches to labor organizing. Their strategies were often community based, since reaching out to workers in their places of employment was often difficult. So neighborhood associations, public places, and city buses became centers of domestic-worker activity. Activists tailored their tactics to the contours of the occupation. Because of this they broke new ground in worker resistance—mobilizing poor domestic workers, primarily women of color—and expanded the history of American labor activism.4
Miller’s commitment to organizing household workers was seeded during her forty-plus years of experience as a domestic worker. She was born in Sabetha, Kansas, in 1920, in her words, “the same year that women got the vote,” and came from a family with a long history of domestic work, and seemingly few escape routes.5 “Well, housework is something that’s been here for ages and it’s gonna be here after I’m gone if they have houses. It’s something that the average woman does. And that was my one reason for putting the Household Technicians together, was that . . . all the family that I knew . . . did housework. So that meant they was working for peanuts.”6 When her family moved to Atchison, Kansas, her grandmother, mother, and her aunt Retta all worked in the Burns Hotel, washing sheets and dishes, floors and windows. When she was still in preschool her mother started taking her to work, and at the age of six, she was sent to the kitchen to help out. By the time she was twelve, she was fully schooled in housecleaning and worked on weekends and evenings. “Aunt Retta gave me a sense of dignity about the profession,” she said. “She was very particular about what you should do in a home; how the home should look.”7
Her aunt saved money to put Geraldine through college. But when Geraldine was seventeen, her mother was murdered, and Geraldine, distraught, refused to go to college. “I was really interested in doing whatever it was that dulled the pain.”8 After finishing high school she decided to follow her lifelong dream of becoming a dancer, and joined a traveling show that took her throughout the South. “It was my fault that [college] didn’t happen. My idea back then was to run down the road and dance.”9 She married at the age of twenty-one, but her husband was a “womanizer” and within two years she’d left him.10 During and after World War II, Miller held a number of jobs in addition to dancing and household labor—she worked in stores, hotels, and on an assembly line in a chicken-processing plant.
Searching for something better, in 1954 Miller relocated to New York City, where she ended up doing mainly domestic work and living in the Bronx on Morris Avenue, a short distance from the site of the most notorious “slave markets” of the Depression. She recounted hearing stories from women who stood on Burnside Avenue, waiting to be selected for cleaning jobs. “Sometimes they’d ask to see your knees and the women with the worst-scarred knees were hired first because they looked like they worked the hardest.”11 Hearing these stories was transformative for Miller: “This is just one of the things that kind of woke me up.”12 But scrubbing floors on her knees was not Miller’s preferred chore. She prided herself on her cooking ability, a skill she’d cultivated over the years. “Whatever I did, I would try to make it better the next time. You know, if it was cooking, find out more, do what you can, and I did—served on all the Jewish holidays. I’ve had people who would call me back each time. And each time, it was sometimes more money because they would like the way I do things.”13 Geraldine never had children of her own, but she took care of plenty. “I wished I had a dime for every time I helped somebody with a baby, you know, because I love children.”14 Despite Miller’s love for what she did, she recognized it as work and was convinced “that we were a labor group.”15 Miller had previously not been involved in politics. But she did attend the 1963 March on Washington at the urging of her employer. She didn’t know a soul there and didn’t fully understand—until much later—the significance of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. She was nevertheless moved, because “he was a symbol for us . . . the little people he probably didn’t even know about.”16 After learning of the incipient movement of household workers, she dedicated herself to fighting for the rights of those “little people” who she soon realized were not that little after all.
Joining hundreds of other household workers at the first national gathering of the HTA in 1971 thrilled Miller. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before: “Over 500 black women who were household workers, who looked like they was Miss Ann herself—not Miss Ann’s maids, but Miss Ann.” She explained: “When you say, ‘Miss Ann,’ you’re talking about that person you worked for, who had the money, who was able to buy the clothes and think nothing of it.”17 Miller attended the Saturday-night banquet, toured the White House, and listened to Shirley Chisholm and Josephine Hulett. “That was the thrill of my life, to see that many women and listen to their stories and how hard it was for some of them.”18 When household workers gathered in the nation’s capital, they shared their experiences as workers and also discussed how they could wield power.
Like other workers, household workers attempted to negotiate with their employers for higher wages and better working conditions. But they could not do so as a unit, as was the case for workers who had union representatives and bargaining agents and could use the threat of a strike as leverage. The employer-employee relationship in household work was distinct from that of other occupations because of its personal nature and the ways in which employers could easily let workers go. Miller was deeply aware of how the one-on-one relationship structured employer-employee negotiation. After working for one woman for eight years, Miller was let go because her employer thought she was getting too old. “She fired me. She didn’t think it was going to work out. In housework you don’t have any recourse. If a person decides you’re getting too old and you’re not capable of doing the work instead of sitting down and discussing it with you and letting you know that there’s something amiss here.” Miller was deeply troubled by her treatment and wished that her employer had engaged her in a respectful discourse about her expectations. A better model, she suggested, would be to “let the woman know that you cannot do this type of work. . . . You sit down and you talk about your duties” rather than simply disposing of one person and replacing them with another.19 The intimate nature of domestic labor necessitated that positive personal interactions be maintained. Most household workers valued cordial relationships and open lines of communication with their employers. Josephine Hulett said of one employer: “We did . . . learn to communicate, which was an advantage to both of us.”20
Domestic workers had historically used quitting as a form of resistance. Quitting was the primary way of wielding power for individual workers who had few other avenues of resistance. Carolyn Reed learned through her organizing that it might not be the best, or the only, strategy: “Whenever I got tired of a job, I’d just walk away from it. It’s the very things that I tell some of our women not to do today. If there’s something that’s wrong, I should be able to talk to you about it.”21 So, while employers were the source of low pay and poor working conditions, workers navigated the relationship carefully—striking a balance between persuading and educating employers, while also asserting their rights.
The personal relationship that made this job so capricious and unpredictable could also be a source of power for domestic workers. Families became dependent upon individual workers because of the emotional ties and bonds of trust that had been forged, and because their personality seemed well suited for the job. Some children saw caretakers as “second mothers,” and some employers relied on housekeepers to ensure the smooth functioning of the home. One employer referred to her worker as a “security blanket, always there to help me.”22 Domestic workers—in many cases considered essential to the management of the household—used this power of loyalty to win demands from their employers. “Maids was very valuable to a household,” observed Dorothy Bolden.23 When Geraldine Roberts became aware of how indispensable she was to her employer, she was emboldened: “Many of us learned that we were important to them, which was amazing and surprising to us, and that’s when we began to feel we didn’t have to say ‘yes ma’am’ anymore.”24 The reliance of the family on specific domestic workers enabled employees to use this leverage to their advantage. Bolden explained: “I always understood that the employer was a human being too. You have to learn how to sit down and relax and talk to her.”25 Many domestic workers were able to negotiate higher salaries and better working conditions precisely because employers could not imagine life without “their girl.”
Household workers’ method of negotiating is instructive as a model for contemporary labor organizers. Because each employer—in the vast majority of cases—had only one employee, and because employees were isolated from one another, they engaged in one-on-one bargaining. A lone domestic worker could not be represented by others and had to act as her own bargaining agent. So instead of relying on a union hierarchy to speak for them, domestic workers were individually empowered. As a result, the ability of individual domestic workers to establish ground rules for employment and wield power within the relationship was critical. According to Bolden, the organization “can’t negotiate with private employers, private homes. You have to teach each maid how to negotiate. And this is the most important thing—communicating. I would tell them it was up to them to communicate. If I wanted a raise from you I wouldn’t come in and hit you over your head and demand a raise—I would set out and talk to you and let you know how the living costs have gone up.”26 In this spirit, NDWUA offered mediation for employer-employee disputes to reach fair and just solutions. Rather than placing their fate with union leaders who they may or may not have voted for and who may not effectively represent their interests, activists’ approach put the power in the hands of individual workers who could decide for themselves their priorities and under what circumstances they would work.
Although domestic workers used personal leverage and negotiation, they could not always rely on employers’ goodwill. Even though individuals negotiated by themselves, collective demands and mobilization were central to the movement. And domestic workers routinely relied on other workers as a source of support. They shared grievances and came up with common solutions that strengthened their individual bargaining positions. As household workers reached out to other workers, their stories became a way to convey acceptable and unacceptable standards of employment—including wages and benefits. This kind of informal education was critical for shifting expectations. The stories of scarred knees, for example, became emblematic of what domestic workers would not do. And after that story was told, few wanted to ever scrub floors on their knees again. The formation of community and common standards, even if not a union, was seen as a way to shape labor relations and establish a level of job control.
Unlike more traditional forms of labor organizing that recruited workers employed by a single company or individual, household workers mobilized workers regardless of their employer. But multiple employers meant that strikes were difficult to organize among household workers. When she first began to organize in Cleveland, Geraldine Roberts planned a one-day strike with the goal of having workers attend a daylong seminar. The loss of a day’s wages was significant for household workers, however, so Roberts called for community donations to cover workers’ wages. But little came of this. In addition, many employers threatened to fire their workers if they participated in a walkout. The strike was called off.27 Due to their financial dependency, and because they were dealing with multiple employers rather than a single company, workers instead sought state-based legislative protections such as minimum wage that would apply to all household workers, not only those who were organized or had more enlightened employers. But this also required mass mobilization.
Household employees worked extended hours in the ostensibly private space of the home, isolated from other workers, sweeping, dusting, scrubbing floors, washing windows, doing laundry, preparing food, and caring for children. During working hours they had almost no contact with anyone other than their employers. It was difficult for organizers to determine which households employed domestics and it was nearly impossible to contact these workers on their worksites. It was an atomized occupation, with an estimated 1.1 million workers in 1970.28 Since many domestics worked for more than one family, there may have been close to three million employers. Given the difficulty of organizing in the home, public spaces became a central site of these efforts. In New York, Geraldine Miller built a political base by painstakingly recruiting private household workers in housing projects as well as other public venues: “We put notices in the washrooms, you know, the laundry rooms, and we would talk to each other—if I could find someone to talk to, as you come in and out of the place where you worked, you’d talk to any of the other maids you’d see and tell them what you were doing and why you were doing it.”29 But she was not the only one. Another New York City domestic worker, Carolyn Reed, also became deeply involved in household-worker organizing and committed to building an alternative labor movement.
Carolyn Reed learned about household-worker organizing after she read an announcement in the Amsterdam News about a meeting for domestic workers in a Harlem church in October 1971. At that meeting she met Josephine Hulett and Edith Barksdale Sloan, and was moved by what she heard: “I identified very much with Josephine Hulett, because . . . she had been a household worker. . . . And it was really Josephine’s whole speech, whole thing, that really got me involved in that.”30 A few months after Geraldine Miller had started the Bronx Household Technicians, Reed joined the organization. And much to Miller’s consternation, other members selected Reed to assume leadership.31 Reed recounted: “I went to this meeting in a woman’s house in the Bronx. And at the first meeting, I became the Financial Secretary. . . . I kind of saw that as a thing of trust.”32 Reed eventually became the head of the National Committee on Household Employment.
Reed connected with Hulett in part because of their shared experience and understanding of domestic work. Like Hulett, Reed had worked as a domestic since she was a teenager and was deeply troubled by the stigma of household work, its culture of servitude and intimate nature. Her early experiences also instilled in her an independent streak and a feminist sensibility. Reed was born on November 25, 1939, in Rockaway, New York. Her mother, who got pregnant as a college student in South Carolina, went to New York to have the baby, then disappeared.33 Reed initially resided with her aunt in New York, who sent her at the age of seven to live with a family friend in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her adopted family in South Carolina had a vegetable farm, but the mother also worked as a domestic three days a week to supplement the family income.34 Reed described her childhood as “painful.” She was not physically hurt, but felt “mentally abused with [my adopted parents] always instilling in me that my parents did not want me.”35 At the age of sixteen, after finishing high school, she returned to her aunt’s place in Brooklyn and soon began live-in household work. Several years later, when she was around twenty, she saved up some money and sent a check to her adoptive parents to repay them for taking her in. For Reed, the check was a final good-bye. She no longer felt indebted to them or any responsibility to stay in touch. She got an unlisted number and when asked about her family told people they were dead.36
Part of what Reed cherished as an employed teenager was her newfound independence. “I knew at my aunt’s that I didn’t have my own room, and I had to share it and everything, so this was kind of my own—even though I could have left [my job] and gone back any day. It was just that whole matter of being in control.”37 After being shunted from place to place throughout her childhood, Reed sought stability and control over her life, and gained a certain satisfaction from being able to take care of herself. “I am on my own. I’m doing what I want to do. And so there was that freedom that I had.” Reed also appreciated her autonomy as a household worker. “Most household workers are their own bosses. And I think that that’s probably what I liked most. . . . There was no one in a factory telling me—because I could have gone to work in a factory on an assembly line to do something to make money to go to school. But I chose this instead.”38
Reed did not see herself doing domestic work for the rest of her life; she planned to return to the South and attend the historically black South Carolina State University.39 “I used to fantasize at being a doctor. And . . . whenever I cleaned the fish, that was my surgical table, and I was dissecting. . . . But I just never thought that I would grow up to be a household worker.”40 Indeed, when she was a child, she hoped to someday become president of the United States. “I had teachers that said you could be anything that you wanted to be. What they never told me about was racism and sexism in this country, and that women did not aspire to be president.”41 Although she couldn’t achieve her dreams, in her words, she ended up doing “the next best thing”: household work.42
When she arrived in New York in the mid-1950s, Reed perused the newspaper ads and found a live-in position in East Meadow, Long Island, working from 7:30 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. for fifteen dollars a week. The family had two children who were so unruly they turned Reed off motherhood: “I’ve never seen brats like that in my life. Maybe that’s when I made the conscious decision not to have children.”43 The family was “kind and everything, but, you know, they worked the shit out of me.”44 Although she was hired to take care of the children, she ended up also doing the washing, cooking, and cleaning. Reed’s “room” was a tiny space in the basement near the furnace. “That’s when I realized that we were supposed to be poor . . . and I was really upset for the first couple of nights, having to be there.” The cramped quarters were compounded by isolation. As she explained, “I was very lonely.”45 Reed worked for the family for two years. “One day, I brought the children home from school, and I walked out of that house, and I never went back. I never said a word to anyone. I just left. I’ve learned a lot in these 20 years. And . . . what I’ve learned most is: we’ve got to organize.” One journalist wrote of Reed that her “passion is the ultimate organization of her sister workers into the mainstream of American labor.”46
The longer she labored as a domestic, the more critical Reed was of the occupation. “I became acutely aware of the differences in the people who were doing [domestic work] . . . and the stigma that was attached to it.”47 In addition, her employers wielded a great deal of control over her life, leaving her few opportunities to learn of her rights, let alone assert them. The first family she worked for warned her not to “mix with the people in the neighborhood.” Her employers, she believed, were afraid she would “find out that those people were making fifty dollars as opposed to my fifteen dollars.”48 Her employer promised to “save” her money for her, although when she tried to collect it, there was disagreement about how much she was owed. According to Reed, employers defined a good worker as deferential and submissive. She explained, “The trouble is, people regard their homes as their empires. I say that you have no more right to exploit me in your home than you do to exploit me in your office. The good household worker is usually a slave. She doesn’t complain, she doesn’t know her rights, she doesn’t ask for paid holiday or pay increases. She is indeed a gem. I was known as a good household worker. For five years I worked without a holiday. Sometimes I worked from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.”49 Despite the difficulties she encountered, Reed spoke positively about the work she did. “I really love the work, and that’s why I chose to organize the work—because I love what I chose to do as a profession.”50
Reed dates her political awakening to the 1963 March on Washington, which she saw as historic, a cathartic moment that would bring the racial injustice she had endured into the national spotlight. Ironically, it was precisely the racial politics of household labor that prevented her from joining the 250,000 people who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial that day. Reed wanted to attend the march, but her employer insisted that she serve at a dinner party instead. Perhaps it was the disjuncture between the massive mobilization for black freedom and the ways in which the occupation inhibited her participation that fueled her commitment to reform. As she explained it, “I was just grouchy, really grouchy all day long, because I knew I was supposed to be in Washington. I would have gone—no doubt about it.” As Reed was serving the meal that evening, the news footage of the march played in the background. One dinner guest commented: “I wonder what they want. . . . What they need is an education.” Furious, Reed “accidentally” dumped a tray of green beans on the guest’s lap, exclaiming: “Gee, I am so sorry. I really have to be educated as to how to serve beans.”51
The stigma and exploitation Reed experienced, and her incipient feminism, convinced her that she needed to get involved. She “began thinking over my own life and trying to figure out how all those horrible things had happened to me in those houses I worked in. . . . And I began to think of the thousands, the millions of women just like myself who were working like slaves. . . . I thought, I’ve got to do something. So, then I heard about Dorothy Bolden who was organizing household workers in Atlanta, and then I made contact with the Women’s Political Caucus and they put me in touch with the Household Technicians of America here in New York.”52 After her initial contact with the Bronx Household Technicians, founded and led by Geraldine Miller, Reed went on to form the Progressive Household Technicians and the New York State Coalition of Household Technicians. Despite some initial tension between Miller and Reed for control of the local chapter, the two were deeply committed to upgrading the occupation and organizing private household workers and found ways to work together.
Just as Dorothy Bolden organized on city buses, Reed traversed communal spaces in New York in search of household workers who would be receptive to her recruitment message. In the mid-1970s Reed worked for a family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from 7:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. and then returned at 5:30 to prepare dinner. Carolyn had a very close relationship with her employer, Mrs. Clayburgh, the mother of actress Jill Clayburgh. “She was wonderful. She was marvelous. . . . There was just general respect for what I did.”53 Mrs. Clayburgh encouraged Reed to become involved in the household technician movement, worked out a schedule to accommodate her activism, and even attended organizational meetings with her. She offered her a written contract, and always paid her on time. When Reed first applied for the job as a live-in housekeeper, she and her husband were warmly greeted at the door as “Mr. and Mrs. Reed.” She took the job for $125 a week plus food and lodging. She and her husband, who was an accounting clerk at Columbia University, moved into the basement apartment of her employer’s brownstone.
Reed devoted her afternoon break to organizing for the HTA. She entered the laundry rooms of apartment buildings: “The first rule of thumb is to get friendly with the doorman.” Everyone in the neighborhood, not only the doormen, knew Reed. She also recruited at bus stops, service entrances, and neighborhood gourmet shops. Shopkeepers on Lexington Avenue regularly sent household workers her way. The Village Voice called her a “natural organizer at large.”54 There were no clear geographical boundaries for household-worker organizing, especially as the workplace was often off-limits for outreach efforts. Reed firmly believed that household workers had power, which she suggested may take the form of a strike with the support of other service workers. One reporter explained Reed’s position this way: “The idea of striking entire residential streets of Manhattan with delivery and repairmen honoring the picket lines doesn’t faze Reed in the least.”55 Her sense of the potential to strike came from her view of the fundamentally indispensable labor power of household workers: “The houses could not be run. You could never know how helpless people can be—especially wealthy people—until you’ve worked in their homes. Just one day of true hardship or true inconvenience and they’d want to bargain.”56 Only through this kind of collective power, she argued, could wages be raised and working conditions improved. For Reed, “Housekeepers, mostly black women, are the last frontier of labor organizing.”57
As Miller and Reed embarked on building a labor movement of household workers, their uneasy relationship with mainstream labor unions became clear. The largest and most influential unions had created a male-centered mass-production manufacturing model that has dominated US labor history. Since the early twentieth century, steelworkers, autoworkers, and mine workers, among others, initiated walkouts or sit-down strikes that very often stopped the wheels of production, forcing employers to recognize the union and meet their wage and benefit demands. The power of these workers stemmed from their large-scale workplaces. Coworkers could conspire on the production line, share grievances, and congregate and strategize in the break rooms and bathrooms. Utilizing mass power, they organized slowdowns and strikes that effectively shut down the factory.58 In the 1960s service-sector workers—teachers, social workers, postal workers, clerical workers, health-care workers—shifted the focus to the service counter.59 This wave of service-sector organizing was an important turning point for the labor movement and brought more women and people of color into the fold. But like manufacturing employees, these new union members also worked in collective spaces. As powerful as these models were, domestic workers could not easily replicate them.
In addition to the circumscribed history of the union movement, the unequal development of social policy ensured the marginalization of household workers. The exclusion of domestic workers from key labor rights, such as minimum wage and the right to organize and bargain collectively, placed domestic workers outside the category of labor in the eyes of many people. Domestic work was one of the occupations that was not granted the protections extended to other workers with the passage of New Deal legislation in the 1930s because of racial politics as well as assumptions about what constituted work. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act that set up the National Labor Relations Board to facilitate collective bargaining between labor and management and guaranteed workers the right to form a union and negotiate with employers, for example, did not apply to household workers. The way both the union movement and social policy unfolded generated a perception that domestic workers were “unorganizable.”60 But the long history of household-worker activism belies this assumption. The view that domestic workers are unorganizable stems from cultural and legal constructions of “work” generated through law and patterns of mainstream labor organizing, rather than some inherent characteristic of household labor. That is, labor law in the 1930s, by creating distinctions among different kinds of work, as well as labor organizing that focused attention on the manufacturing sector, fostered a perception that household workers could not be organized. Certain categories of work were privileged as work and given the right to organize, while occupations such as domestic work were not.
Unions, because they established boundaries of privilege around their members, contributed to the marginalization of household workers. Most US unions didn’t develop a commitment to a broad working-class politics. They pursued what historians have referred to as “bread and butter” politics—ensuring the economic well-being and advancement of their members, sometimes at the expense of other workers. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Cigar Makers Association in California at the end of the nineteenth century. It opposed the hiring of Chinese workers, denied them union membership, and affixed a union label verifying cigars had been made by white men to encourage consumers to buy only cigars made by white labor. Even when exclusions were not so blatant, unions had rarely organized workers who seemed to be on the margins of the American workforce.61
Because of this history, household workers had a degree of ambivalence and outright distrust of unions. Geraldine Roberts viewed organized labor as largely white and male with little interest in either women or workers of color. “I think that only males have control of organized labor.” As Dorothy Bolden explained: “A lot of the maids were afraid to join. They were skeptical because they knew what unions had done in the past. . . . I don’t think we realized how much ‘union’ frightens people.”62 In fact, Bolden, who had originally named her organization the National Domestic Workers Union of America changed it to the National Domestic Workers of America. Many of these women reached out to the labor community but found little support for their grassroots organizing. Roberts lamented the disregard for her own work: “I haven’t had very much support at all from the labor unions.”63
Despite the checkered history of the mainstream labor movement, Carolyn Reed had a clear sense of the importance of class-based politics and the role of unions in shaping and redirecting political debate. Skeptics of unions, she argued, only looked at the negative: “What people see are the Teamsters’ Union, or . . . they see the rip-off. They don’t see the positive things that unions did.”64 Reed believed unions minimized class differences and created greater equality among Americans: “If it had not been for unionizing in this country, we would have a royal class.”65 Her vision was to create union-like structures and collective formations for domestic workers that could similarly reshape the political landscape. This could only be done effectively, however, if household workers had autonomy. Reed didn’t want outside forces in control. “What I’d like to see is a strong union of household workers. . . . I think it has to be on our terms, not on the terms of some union organizers who see it as another membership—as another fee. I would never sell my household workers out to a union on that level.”66 Household workers could be much more effective organizing one another because they understood the occupation better. “I listen and I try to speak to the needs that they want,” Reed explained.67 “Unions . . . are run by men. I want the household workers union to be run by women.”68 Like Reed, most household technicians insisted on female control of organizations seeking to represent them.
Although most household-worker organizations were activist-type community-based groups, there were a few attempts by domestic workers and their allies to form labor unions. Notably, Mary McClendon, based in the union-stronghold city of Detroit, was closely allied with the labor movement. Lillian Hatcher of the UAW spoke at the founding meeting of the HWO. McClendon had considered the possibility of HWO joining the radical black auto union the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, which had organized in 1968 to obtain concessions from Chrysler and challenge racial inequality in the United Auto Workers local. She also launched a drive to unionize workers in the cleaning firm Dial-A-Maid with the goal of “building consciousness among the workers, informing them of the advantages of collective bargaining.” McClendon joined Dial-A-Maid in 1972 to learn about the working conditions. Teams of two workers cleaned two houses a day earning $11 each. Workers received no benefits and only about 50 percent of the fee that the company charged the householder. McClendon persuaded enough Dial-A-Maid workers to sign authorization cards to hold a vote about whether to unionize in November 1972. But the day before the election, the company unexpectedly paid an additional bonus to its employees, who subsequently voted against unionization.69
In New York, longtime African American labor leader Benjamin McLaurin of the National Urban League and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized the Professional Household Workers Union with chapters in New York City and Westchester County.70 Born in Jacksonville, Florida, McLaurin joined the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1926. He worked with the union through the 1930s, serving as vice president and national secretary. McLaurin was broadly concerned with working-class and civil rights issues and was a key organizer, along with A. Philip Randolph, of the planned but not executed 1941 March on Washington, designed to pressure President Roosevelt to desegregate the defense industry and the armed forces. McLaurin also chaired the Mayor’s Committee on Exploitation of Workers under New York mayor John Lindsay. As head of that body he drew attention to the plight of private household workers. This history and political commitment, as well as his hope to revitalize the Brotherhood, prompted McLaurin in the early 1970s to organize household workers.71
The Professional Household Workers Union, chartered in 1971 as Locals 1 and 2 by the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, claimed a membership of two hundred to three hundred.72 It called for a minimum wage of three dollars an hour, Social Security protections, and a standard contract, and ran a benefits and training program to upgrade the occupation.73 It was the Professional Household Workers Union that Geraldine Miller first came in contact with when she began to organize. Although the union and McLaurin helped organize the trip to the NCHE conference for several dozen household workers at Miller’s urging, she was not impressed by the organization. Few domestic workers attended the meeting, and middle-class supporters crafted the agenda and set priorities. Needless to say, Miller was turned off. “I don’t think that someone else can tell me as a person what it is that I need if I’m a household worker.” Miller valued household worker autonomy and decided not to join the union or any organization run by McLaurin. “He did not strike me as being the person that I wanted to be under and I’d found out through NCHE that I could . . . get my own group together and it could be woman-run.”74 Miller, like other household workers, eagerly embraced the idea of establishing a labor organization of household workers but she staunchly resisted control and domination by individuals outside the occupation.
Although the Professional Household Workers could not sustain itself, established unions soon came to see the value of organizing women who worked in the home. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several unions took up the task of organizing women employed by cleaning companies or state agencies as home-care workers. In 1977 New York State, with the support of Bronx state assemblyman Seymour Posner and local activists such as Carolyn Reed, gave domestic workers the legal right to organize and bargain collectively. Household workers in New York mobilized in support of the legislation. They took time off work on Tuesdays and traveled to Albany to speak on behalf of the bill. The original bill, which included all household workers, encountered opposition in the state senate and was whittled down to apply only to workers employed by cleaning firms and employment agencies. In the end, the legislation didn’t affect the vast majority of private household workers. Many workers were critical of their lack of autonomy when employed by private firms and chose to work independently. As Carolyn Reed explained: The employment contracts with private firms are “like something out of the 19th century. Those agencies are run strictly for the protection of the employer. I’d like to see them all closed up tomorrow. No, we must have a union, and it must be our own union.”75 Nevertheless, activists who supported the legislation saw it as a first step, as a tool to bolster their own organizing campaigns that established an important precedent.76
Home-care workers, who were paid by the state but hired by private individuals who needed home-care assistance, had many more organizing victories. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) started a Household Workers Organizing Committee in New York City, which unionized workers in the housekeeping programs of charitable agencies as well as the city’s Division of Home Attendants. By 1982, SEIU represented fourteen thousand workers in their home-care division in New York City. On the West Coast, the California Homemakers Association engaged in collective bargaining on behalf of home attendants. The organizing of home-care workers was effective because multiple employees worked for and were paid by a single agency, so even though the work was isolated, they were able to use collective pressure to secure concessions.77 This new phase of organizing represented important shifts in the labor market because of how the labor of care and cleaning was increasingly paid for by third parties when it was done in the home. Still, it didn’t address the problems of private household workers paid by individuals.
The particular character of private household work, the long-standing distrust of unions, and the inapplicability of traditional organizing models fostered distinctive strategies for domestic workers. They relied on nonhierarchical approaches to movement building, empowered domestic workers to negotiate individually with employers, and lobbied for legislative and state-based protections. They utilized the personal nature of the relationship to their advantage as well as collective demands to empower workers and claim control over the work process. Domestic-worker organizations were never able to achieve the same kind of institutional standing as other labor formations. Nevertheless, household workers embraced their status as labor activists and this became an integral component of their identity. As a category of workers not protected by—or subject to—NLRB rules, domestic workers were able to develop different kinds of mobilization methods and, in some cases, a more democratic process. Out of necessity and with an arsenal of creativity and imagination, these poor women of color developed alternative approaches to labor organizing in the 1960s and 1970s.78
African American women brought visibility to the domestic workplace, turned public spaces into organizing sites, made claims for social and economic rights, and worked to raise the status of their employment. They offered new narratives about the sense of themselves as workers who deserved rights and in that process shifted conversations about the meaning of labor organizing.