There are 2.2 million domestic workers in the US.

Domestic workers are the nannies who take care of our children, the house cleaners who keep our homes tidy and sanitized, and the home care workers who enable our elderly and disabled loved ones to live independently and age in their homes.

Domestic workers do the work that remains in the home so that others can work outside the home, in offices and schools and hospitals. As more families have two working parents, and our elders live longer and prefer to age in place, our society and economy rely more and more on the professional domestic workforce.

Domestic work is unique by nature.

The nature of domestic work is unlike that of other types of work. Domestic work is by nature intimate; workers are caring for the people we love the most, and their work takes place in our most intimate places: our homes. Employment relationships can last years, even decades, and the line between “worker” and “family” blurred.

Domestic work takes place behind the closed doors of private residences. Many domestic employers don’t consider their home a workplace, and often don’t consider themselves a formal employer, instead relying on informal or verbal contracts.

There is a 1:1 relationship between employer and employee in domestic work, whereas most other work is between 1 employer and many employees. Domestic work can be isolating for workers, making it difficult to protest unsafe working environments, harassment or wage theft as there is no HR department to turn to.

The conditions of domestic work today relate directly to
gender discrimination, slavery, and the exploitation of immigrants.

Domestic work has traditionally been the work of the women in the home, and this is reflected in the domestic workforce today: 91% of domestic workers are women . The devaluation of domestic work as “women’s work”, and therefore unskilled or unprofessional work, has resulted in poverty level wages: domestic workers earn an average salary of $15,980, whereas other workers earn an average salary of $39,120.

Some of the earliest domestic workers in the US were enslaved African women, and today 21.7% of domestic workers today are Black, compared to 11.9% of other workers. When the worker rights and protections of the New Deal were being passed, domestic workers were excluded as a concession to Southern lawmakers unwilling to extend these rights to a workforce that was disproportionately people of color.

Domestic work is often paid cash and “off the books”, without any formal contract, and taking place In the shadows of the economy. While only 8.7% of other workers are foreign-born noncitizens, 20.3% of domestic workers are foreign-born noncitizens, including undocumented workers. The exploitation of domestic workers extends from employers threatening to report undocumented workers to ICE if they complain about wage theft, to human trafficking such as in the case of workers who have entered the US attached to their employer’s visa.

The robots are not coming for these jobs.

The Future of Work is coming: work is becoming more automated, some jobs are being replaced by robots and automation, and we are all unsure how artificial intelligence will change how we work.

But domestic work - the work of care - cannot be replaced by robots.

The care economy will continue to grow: as we live longer (10,000 people turn 65 each day), prefer to live at home as we age, and more families have two working parents, our reliance on the care workforce will increase. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of home health and personal care aides will increase by 34% between 2019-2029.

Care - and empathy - are not skills that can be programmed into a robot. We must make these jobs into good jobs.