Bill that would give rights, labor protections to domestic workers announced in NJ

Mary Ann Koruth
NorthJersey.com

State lawmakers were in Newark on Wednesday to announce a bill that provides rights and labor protections to New Jersey’s nearly 50,000 domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and health caregivers who work in people’s homes.

Sen. Richard J. Codey, D-Essex, and Assemblywoman Britnee N. Timberlake, D-Essex, addressed a 100-strong crowd of domestic workers who rallied outside Newark Penn Station to mark International Domestic Workers Day. The bill will be introduced in the Senate within the next two weeks, Codey said.

The bill was championed by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a nationwide advocacy group that led a grassroots coalition of local labor and immigrant organizations including Wind of the Spirit, Casa Freehold, Adhikaar, New Labor, Unidad Latina en Acción and Lazos America Unida. Virgilio Aran, an organizer with the NDWA, called it a huge milestone in the social justice movement for workers’ rights in New Jersey, because it protects home-based workers from wage theft, denial of breaks and lack of sick leave.

More than 90% of domestic workers are women and about one-third are immigrants, according to a 2018 Rutgers study that was used to draft the bill. The study also found that one-third of households in New Jersey employ domestic workers, and that number is growing.

Sen. Richard Codey addresses domestic workers and their advocates outside Newark Penn Station at an event introducing New Jersey’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

“Domestic workers across the United States face challenges that are more severe than other occupations due to the low value attached to care work and the difficulty of regulating work that occurs in private homes,” said Debra Lancaster, a Rutgers researcher who contributed to the study. The bill puts domestic workers on par with other workers in the state by guaranteeing them protections from unsafe working conditions, a weekly day of rest and mandatory employment contracts.

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Jennifer Bouchard, who has owned and run Nanny Poppins, a full-service domestic staffing agency with locations across the country, since 1995, said her agency has most of its New Jersey clients in Bergen and Morris counties. The demand for nannies is only going up, she said, but she wishes those lawmakers and the people behind the bill had spoken to employers like her. “They don’t talk to agencies. I fully advocate for my candidates,” she said, but private families do not always sign W2s with the caregivers they hire, even though her agency recommends it. This denies the caregivers even the basic protections they are entitled to by federal labor laws, she said.

Domestic workers and their advocates outside Newark Penn Station at an event introducing New Jersey’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

Mirian Mijangos cleans houses in Lakewood. She was hopeful about what the bill will do for workers like her. “We’ve worked on this for 13 years,” she said.

“Domestic workers have historically been excluded from basic workplace protections that most of us take for granted. There is no excuse for this practice to continue today,” co-sponsor Sen. Loretta Weinberg said in a press release issued by the NDWA. The bill addresses inequities created by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which left out agricultural workers and domestic workers, who were then mostly African American but are now mostly immigrants and women of color, said labor organizer Lou Kimmel.

Ten states and two major cities have passed similar legislation. New York State was the first to do so, in 2010, and Virginia in 2021.