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Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2012

Premilla Nadasen
Premilla Nadasen*
Affiliation:
Queens College, CUNY
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 74 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

1. “Domestics at Session Ask Gains,” New York Times, 10 October 1972, 47; “Keynote Address: by Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm,” Newsletter, 1972, n.p., Records of the National Committee on Household Employment, MAMC 075 S05 B01, National Archives for Black Women’s History, Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NCHE Papers); Jeannette Smythe, “Hard Act to Follow,” Washington Post, 19 July 1971, B1.

2. For more on connections between the civil rights movement and the domestic worker rights movement, see Nadasen, Premilla, “Power, Intimacy, and Contestation: Dorothy Bolden and Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta in the 1960s,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen, Boris and Rhacel, Parreñas (Stanford, 2010).Google ScholarChristiansen, Lars, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union: The National Domestic Workers Union of America (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1999).Google ScholarBeck, Elizabeth, “The National Domestic Workers Union and the War on Poverty,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 28, no. 4 (December 2001): 195–211.Google Scholar

3. Phyllis Palmer, “Outside the Law: Agricultural and Domestic Workers Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Journal of Policy History 7, no. 4 (1995): 416–40. See also Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, 2010), 128–51.Google Scholar

4. For more on the fight for fair employment, see McLean, Nancy, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York, 2008).Google Scholar

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8. Poole, Mary, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For more on the racial politics of the campaign to regulate domestic work in this period, see Smith, Peggie R., “Regulating Paid Household Work: Class, Gender, Race, and Agendas of Reform,” American University Law Review (1999): 851–918Google Scholar; Palmer “Outside the Law.”

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18. Barksdale-Sloan was a graduate of Hunter College in New York City and had worked for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

19. Boris and Nadasen, “Domestic Workers Organize!” Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement.

20. The first NCHE was formed in 1928 and ceased to function in 1942. It was reconstituted in 1964.

21. “The Householder,” Newsletter by Household Management, Inc., Issue no. 7, 1969, p. 1, NCHE Papers, 003 S01 B06 F24.

22. Statement of Mrs. Edith Barksdale Sloan, executive director, National Committee on Household Employment, Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 15 March 1973, 3, NCHE Papers, 003 S01 B11 F04.

23. Katzman, David, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana-Champaign, 1981)Google Scholar; and Peiss, Keith, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).Google Scholar

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25. U.S. Senate, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 337.

26. Donahue, Thomas, U.S. Senate, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 22 July 1971, 1078.Google Scholar

27. Patricia Mulkeen, “Private Household Workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Connecticut Law Review, 626.

28. Ibid.

29. Statement of Mrs. Edith Barksdale Sloan, executive director, and Mrs. Josephine Hulett, field officer, National Committee on Household Employment, Hearings Before the General Subcommitee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives on H.R. 10948, 13 August 1970, 854, NCHE Papers, 003, S01, B11, F06.

30. Thompson, Robert T., U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Statement Before the General Subcommitee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 1973, 228.Google Scholar

31. Ibid.

32. Reid, Geneva, Household Technicians of America, Statement Before the General Subcommitee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 93rd Congress, 1st Session, 15 March 1973, 205.Google Scholar

33. Brennan, Peter, Secretary of Labor, Statement Before the General Subcommitee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 10 April 1973, 264.Google Scholar

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35. Vaughn, Aletha, interview by Mary Yelling, in Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (New York, 1988), 207.Google Scholar

36. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt.

37. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1964), 121.Google Scholar

38. National Leadership Convention, “NCHE Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977,” May 1976, 1, Esther Peterson Collection, box 58, folder 1124.

39. See Smith, Peggie R., “Regulating Paid Household Work,” and Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt.Google Scholar

40. Loretta Ross, interview with Geraldine Miller, Brooklyn, N.Y., 14 October 2004, transcript, p. 35, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Northhampton, Mass.

41. Ibid., 51.

42. Brozan, Nadine, “Bargaining Legislation for Domestics May Have Wide Impact,” New York Times, 28 April 1975, 48.Google Scholar

43. Statement of Mrs. Lucille Shriver, director, National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Inc., Hearings Before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare on S1861, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 10 June 1971, 283–84.

44. “Mrs. Chisholm Led Fight for Domestics’ Base Pay,” New York Times, 21 June 1973, 45.

45. National Leadership Convention, “NCHE Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977,” May 1976, p. 4, Esther Peterson Collection, box 58, folder 1124.

46. Boris, Eileen and Klein, Jennifer, “Making Home Care: Law and Social Policy in the U.S. Welfare State,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Boris, Eileen and Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar (Stanford, 2010), 187–203.Google Scholar

47. Glenn, Unequal Freedom.

48. Anne B. Turpeau, “NCHE Resource Development Proposed Work Plan,” 28 September 1976, NCHE Papers 003 SO1, B06, F05.

49. Angela James, David M. Grant, and Cynthia Cranford, “Moving Up, But How Far? African American Women and Economic Restructuring in Los Angeles, 1970–1990,” in Sociological Perspectives 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 399–420.

50. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Women’s Work” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. James et al., “Moving Up, But How Far?”; Lovell, “Constructing Social Citizenship.”

52. NCHE, “Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977, Adopted and Ratified at the Fourth National Leadership Convention of NCHE, 28–30 May 1976, St. Louis, Missouri, Legal and Illegal Immigrants,” p. 1, NCHE Papers, 003, S03, B03, F01.

53. Shelton, a graduate of Howard University, who worked previously with the National Council of Negro Women and the National Urban League, replaced Edith Barksdale-Sloan as executive director of NCHE in 1976. NCHE, “Household Employment: Employer’s Market—Worker’s Nightmare,” Press Release, 29 May 1976, p. 30, NCHE Papers, 003, S03, B03, F01.

54. NCHE, “Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977, Adopted and Ratified at the Fourth National Leadership Convention of NCHE, 28–30 May 1976, St. Louis, Missouri, Legal and Illegal Immigrants,” p. 1, NCHE Papers, 003, S03, B03, F01.

55. NCHE, “Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977, Adopted and Ratified at the Fourth National Leadership Convention of NCHE, 28–30 May 1976, St. Louis, Missouri, Legal and Illegal Immigrants,” p. 3, NCHE Papers, 003, S03, B03, F01.

56. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “‘We Were the Invisible Workforce’: Unionizing Home Care,” in The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor, ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble (Ithaca, 2007), 177–93.

57. Hochschild, Arlie, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003)Google Scholar; Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara, Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell, Hochschild (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

58. Gupta, Monisha Das, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, 2006). Ai-Jen Poo and Eric Tang, “Center Stage: Domestic Workers Organizing in the Global City” in The New Urban Immigrant Workforce: Innovative Models for Labor Organizing, ed. Sarumathi Jayaraman and Immanuel Ness (New York, 2005): 105-118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59. See Boris, and Nadasen, , “Domestic Workers Organize!”; Premilla Nadasen “Sista’ Friends and Other Allies: Domestic Workers United and Coalition Politics,” in New Social Movements in the African Diaspora, ed. Leith, Mullings (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001).Google Scholar

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62. Statement of Mrs. Edith Barksdale Sloan, executive director, and Mrs. Josephine Hulett, field officer, National Committee on Household Employment, Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 13 August 1970,” p. 8, NCHE Papers, 003, S01, B11, F06.

63. Shabecoff, Philip, “To Domestics: A Minimum Wage Is a Raise” New York Times, 6 June 1973, 30.Google Scholar