As in the other areas of life, at work intelligent and forceful women don’t simply get offered a lot of breaks; they create them.
That’s part of the story of Barbara Young, a former Barbados Transport Board conductor who, by the force of her personality, has risen to become a key organizer for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an umbrella organization pushing for a better deal for the estimated two million domestics in the United States.
“I believe passionately in what I am doing and it is more than a job,” said Young, the former Barbara Scantlebury who grew up in Four Hill, near Indian Ground, in St Peter, but lived for many years in Lower Carlton, St James.
“It was quite a shock to me when I came to the United States in 1993 to discover that domestics were excluded from the country’s labour laws and regulations and they didn’t have the rights of other workers. It was an eye-opener for me.”
As one of three national organizers of the New York-based Alliance, Young, a highly articulate woman who once represented Transport Board workers on the Barbados Workers’ Union’s executive council, is in the forefront of a campaign to improve conditions for domestic workers in America.
She has travelled to Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York to talk about a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. She addresses activists, trade unionists, government officials, lawmakers and a host of others on university campuses, in neighbourhood, state and local government facilities and community institutions to get her message across: domestics are people who deserve a better deal.
Just last February when Viola Davis, the actress who played the role of a maid in the segregation era movie The Help, was up for a Best Actress Oscar, and Octavia Spencer won Best Supporting Actress, Young was flown to Hollywood to attend an Oscar-viewing party and to participate in a session about the movie and domestic work.
“I was disappointed that Davis didn’t win but I was happy for Octavia,” said Young. “But I was grateful to the producers of the movie for bringing domestic work to the forefront. When we watched it as a family there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. It brought back memories of my experiences as a live-in domestic on Long Island.”
The highly acclaimed film was criticized in some black communities as yet another case of black performers being relegated to roles as maids, and not as top-shelf corporate executives, innovative scientists or heads of successful middle class families.
Young, who worked for 17 years as a domestic before taking on her current assignment, disagreed with much of the negative reaction to the movie because, she complained, being a maid was “not recognized as real work”.
Much has changed in her life since she came to America and became first an “elderly caregiver” in Queens and later a nanny looking after the young children of working couples. By 2001 she was agitating for better conditions for domestics and joined forces with Domestic Workers United, a Manhattan organization fighting for the inclusion of nannies, housekeepers and domestics in the regulations that set basic labour standards.
“We fought alongside activists to get domestics included in the categories of workers protected by the regulations,” she explained.
The New York State legislature – the Assembly and the State Senate – recently approved a Domestic Bill of Rights which stipulates that domestic workers have a 40-hour week, are given paid days off after a year, are eligible for overtime and earned the right to organize as a group in the labour force.
“Our next target is Washington D.C. to get a Bill of Rights for domestic workers there,” said the Barbadian.
