Hawaii is poised to become the second state, after New York, to grant basic employee rights to in-home domestic workers by ensuring they be eligible for minimum wage, maximum hours and other protections.
House and Senate conference committee members agreed to a bill Thursday that would add domestic workers — a predominantly female, immigrant workforce often putting in long hours for little pay — to the state definition of employment.
The statutory change would officially protect domestics from discriminatory practices and cover them under the state’s wage and hour law.
"It’s really to first and foremost treat people who work in these types of jobs with a minimum level of dignity and respect that they deserve," said Rep. Roy Takumi, a major supporter of the measure.
Domestics — categorized as irregular, casual or intermittent — who work 20 hours or less per week and employees who "provide fellowship, care and protection" for the sick or seniors would not be covered under Hawaii’s proposed law.
The state currently excludes "services by an individual employed as a domestic in the home of any person" from its definition of employment — but it’s not alone.
Advocates for domestic workers say that nannies, housekeepers, cooks, caregivers for seniors and other in-home help employed directly by households have largely been excluded from wage and overtime protections since Congress passed the federal Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, said, "Southern members of Congress in the 1930s refused to support the New Deal if farmworkers and domestic workers, who were African-American, were covered and protected … so Congress made that compromise."
Poo traveled to Honolulu this week to support Senate Bill 535.
"In some ways this is the unfinished business of the civil rights movement," she said.
The measure now goes back to both chambers for passage before being sent to the governor for consideration.
It’s difficult to know how prevalent domestic work is or how those workers are treated in Hawaii because most of the industry is off the record, said Bill Hoshijo, executive director of the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission.
Hoshijo said the commission has had to turn away domestic workers who wanted to file sexual harassment complaints against their employers.
"Not large numbers, but people have come to us," he said.
New York passed its "Domestic Workers Bill of Rights" in 2010, and Poo said Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, California, Texas and soon Ohio are considering workforce protections for domestic workers along with Hawaii.
Poo said workers are highly vulnerable to being overworked, abused and neglected even though Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974 to cover "domestic service" workers under minimum wage laws.
She recalled a case she worked on in New York in the 1990s that involved a woman from Jamaica who was a live-in nanny raising a family’s three children for 15 years without pay.
In a more recent situation, she said she aided a domestic worker from South America who was hired to care for a child with a disability but wound up doing all of the cooking and cleaning for the family of six — for less than $3 an hour — while living in the basement where an overflowed sewage system flooded the floor by her bed.
Three years later the woman was fired without notice and became homeless.
"We compare it to the Wild West because it’s kind of like this lawless part of the economy where anything goes and you don’t know what you’re going to get," Poo said.
According to Poo, protecting domestic workers is important because they make up one of the fastest-growing workforces in the country. With the baby boomer generation continuing to age, she said it’s estimated that 27 million Americans are going to need caregivers by the year 2050 just to meet their basic daily needs.
"This workforce is just going to continue to grow, the demand for it is going to continue to grow, and this measure will help stabilize and secure the workforce," she said.
