As Martin Luther King. Jr. Day approached, we here at the Direct Care Alliance found ourselves reflecting on Dr. King’s influence on our lives and work and wondering what he would think about today’s campaign for better jobs for direct care workers. We asked some of our current and past board members to share their thoughts about that.
Here’s what they had to say:
Economic justice for today’s version of “the help”
Almost 50 years ago, when Dr. King went to the Washington Mall with hundreds of thousands of people, there were thousands of domestic workers in the crowd. The domestic worker of the 1950s and ‘60s could be compared to the home care worker of today. They did the cooking and cleaning. They cared for the babies. They cared for the owners of the house when they became sick. And most of them—about 99 percent of them in the South—were African American.
These workers were so closely involved with the lives of the families they worked for that they weren’t even called workers. They were called “the help.” They didn’t get a salary. They just took whatever the owner of the house decided they deserved for the time they worked—and they worked from sunup to sundown. That same way of thinking led to the so-called “companionship exemption” that denies us home care workers the right to Fair Labor Standards Act protections.
