Would You Support a Nannies’ Union?

When I was a little girl, my parents hired a housekeeper who babysat for us three kids, cared for our grandmother, cooked, cleaned, and did errands, including driving us to activities. Evelyn had a network of church friends and newly arrived relatives whose mothers took turns babysitting her kids. It was a typical scenario—many immigrant women are similarly employed in households across the country.

Every day, armies of domestic servants quietly man their posts at dawn, allowing others to go to work in turn and keep the economy humming. Rarely do parents think of their nannies as "employees" and themselves as "managers."

You may employ a babysitter yourself. What would you do if she demanded better pay (and no longer “under the table”)? What if she insisted on paid vacations and health insurance? What if you said, “Sorry,” and she and 100 nannies picketed your house? What if, at the same time, hundreds of thousands of organized nannies, au pairs, and babysitters refused to work until their demands were met? Would your city shut down for the day if parents were forced to stay home with their kids and figure out what to do, how to respond?

I know what I would do. I’d support the union. Here’s why: Nannies are helping to raise the next generation, and they need support and resources.

Isolation is the opposite of collaboration, which so many experts have verified is a great way to tick up the baseline in innovation, strategy, practical knowledge, and pretty much everything else. The main reason is that when you have no one to team up with, no one to back you up—though millions of others just like you are doing similar work—you are left to reinvent the wheel time and again. If you’re a nanny, this is most likely your situation…

Unless you join a union.

Sadly, it’s illegal, under U.S. labor law, for domestic servants to unionize, but they can form groups—and with sufficient numbers and courage, these groups can wield a little power. Ai-jen Poo, an activist working to organize nannies, helped pass a law in New York, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which spelled out employers’ responsibilities to their servants. She is working on another one in California, and argues that many parents think of their nannies as “helping” and don’t really consider themselves “employers,” though they are, of course, paying someone to work in their home.

I can see why parents might regard their nanny as doing them a favor—and that they, in hiring and paying her, are returning the favor. The relationship that can develop between employer and employee becomes more intimate in a household setting than in a daycare or school.

As the oldest of three kids, I got to know our nanny almost as an older sister, someone to ask advice of and to tell my school stories to. We talked about her childhood in Jamaica, about picking green coconuts off her uncle’s farm, and about the hopes she had for her boys. Evelyn came here to live the American dream, and my parents regarded their paying her, in cash, as helping her fulfill it.

Just as early-childhood educators in corporate daycare centers and schools benefit from standardized curricula and professional days, conferences, and classes to improve their teaching, so do nannies need a collaboration mechanism to learn from one another. Domestic Workers United, the organization that Ai-jen Poo helped form, wants to establish a basic standard of pay, benefits, time off, and so on. But more importantly, this union of sorts offers people dignity and the chance to get together as a group of professionals, exchanging best practices, strategies, and useful anecdotes. Unions provide job training and legal help when employers refuse to negotiate. Most nannies have only their wits and the children as collateral, when it comes to negotiating with their bosses.

When I was a high-school sophomore, Evelyn decided she wanted to go back to school and get her GED. She only had a sixth grade education, and my parents were reluctant to let her go to class during dinnertime, twice a week. I argued hat this was Evelyn’s chance to better herself, just as their parents had when they came here—and wasn’t this the point of the American dream? It’s to my parents’ credit that they agreed. (I’m sure there are millions like them.) Evelyn studied, took the test, failed, studied some more, passed, and went on to get trained and certified as a nurse’s aid. She got her green card, took a second job at a nursing home. Once my siblings and I moved out and my grandma died, she got a full-time job there.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran a profile of Ai-jen Poo and the NY law, and parents responded with strongly worded comments. Some were very supportive. Some said they would fire their nannies if they joined a union.

Are you afraid your nanny might demand the right to collaborate with her peers, higher wages, or affordable health insurance? Maybe that day will come, and maybe you should be afraid, because you know deep down that you can’t pay her enough for the good work she does. Maybe you realize that you have a responsibility, as her employer and manager, to allow her what you expect for yourself. Maybe you know in your heart that all people deserve dignity—and that some will even rise up to demand it.