Domestic Workers and the Legacy of Slavery
By 
Training future domestic workers, Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, Bordentown, New Jersey
Premilla Nadasen has an exciting new book out on the history of domestic worker organizing. I’m looking forward to reading it. Jake Blumgart has an interesting interview with Nadasen, where she explains the connection between domestic workers even today and the legacy of slavery:
What was the legacy of slavery in the domestic labor sector, especially in the first half of the 20th century?
After the end of slavery, African-American women increasingly became paid domestic workers. The image that came to dominate their labor in this occupation was the figure of the mammy, an African-American woman loyal to the family for whom she worked and happily served. The image of the mammy becomes essential in the early 20th century to justify an unequal racial order in the South and as an apology for slavery, with its assumption that African Americans were content to serve white families.
The reality is that their work was not treated as real work. They were very often framed by their employers as “one of the family.” That meant they would work longer hours and take hand-me-downs instead of payment because the assumption built into the “one of the family” phrase was that they were working out of love. But Carolyn Reed, an organizer in New York City, put it best when she said “I don’t need a family, I need a job.”
In the beginning of the book you talk about communists and other radical activists who tried to organize with domestic laborers. How successful were those 1930s efforts?
Considering that the occupation was so difficult to organize, I think they were enormously successful. They were isolated employees who often worked alone in a home and were invisible from the public eye and labor organizers. When communists, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Urban League all decided to organize domestic workers, they actually brought these women together in a collective space. Sometimes they reached out to them in the “slave markets,” the name that Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke gave to these street corners in New York City where African-American women waited to be hired as day workers. The Bronx Slave markets became sites of organizing. Then domestic workers and their supporters developed hiring halls where domestic workers could be protected from exploitative employers.
Figured this would be of interest to many readers.