To find Ai-jen Poo more than a decade ago, people would come to the city’s Union Square Park. There, at a birthplace of labor activism, the recent Columbia University graduate would hand out fliers asking if she could help the nannies strolling with their charges past the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi.
Then as now, Ms. Poo sought to help domestic workers get better pay and treatment. Back then she wasn’t working with established unions, but forming one herself, which wasn’t appreciated by all of the established union leaders.
Today Ms. Poo, 39, is herself a powerful labor leader—and one who has won the support of a host of major foundations. She is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and in one decade she has researched and organized many of the 1.8 million caregivers and home-health workers who had been ignored for generations.
In addition to her work heading the alliance, Ms. Poo also now is a leader of Caring Across Generations, a nonprofit that seeks to improve wages, benefits, and the quality of and access to home health care, which will be a growing need as baby boomers reach old age and the average life span increases
“What the domestic-workers movement is trying to assert is that dignity,’’ Ms. Poo says in a voice that stays soft and warm, even when speaking with a bullhorn. The feeling that dominated for too long was “it’s not work.’’
A Growing Movement
But building the labor movement that Ms. Poo leads has been hard work indeed.
She and her followers lobbied and picketed for more than a decade until New York’s legislature in 2010 adopted the country’s first law granting rights to caregivers and household help, giving domestic workers time off, overtime pay, paid vacation, and other protections.
The efforts of the National Domestic Workers Alliance sparked sister movements in cities, counties, and states nationwide.
Ahead looms the battle in Congress over immigration laws, which strongly affect the workers she represents, many of whom are in the United States illegally.
Ms. Poo has succeeded so far, say her supporters, by conscripting a coalition of unlikely allies — blue-chip philanthropies, university economists, immigration nonprofits, a diaspora of independent, self-employed workers, and, most surprisingly, the families who hire them.
Advocates and donors say she made the savvy calculation to embrace employers, unlike traditional unions that have believed that to succeed they must pit groups against one another.
“Enlisting the good employers on the side of the people was just brilliant,” says David Beckwith, the recently retired executive director of the Needmor Fund, which supports nonprofits in Ms. Poo’s coalition.
“It’s thinking outside of the bifurcated politics of employer/employee in a way that puts more power on the side of the least powerful.”
Ms. Poo’s early emphasis on collecting data, which underscored her arguments, also helped the alliance win grant makers’ attention, says Helen Neuborne, a Ford Foundation official involved in making grants to spur jobs in the United States.
In addition to Ford, Ms. Poo’s efforts have been backed by the Open Society and NoVo foundations, among others.
She was included last year in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. And she was considered to be a major influence in the 2011 United Nations’ International Labor Organizations decision to adopt an international conference, which awarded household workers the right to collective bargaining and other legal protections.
“Suddenly it was a global discussion,” Ms. Poo says, her eyes widening at the memory of that meeting. “It felt like history was opening up. It was super cool.’’
Collecting Data
To help make its case, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has a budget of $4.4-million, has long conducted surveys and recruited researchers who have produced comprehensive reports about the poorly understood treatment of domestic workers.
A report last year by the alliance found that 23 percent of workers were paid below the state minimum wage and fewer than 9 percent of employers of domestic workers pay into Social Security.
Many workers told the alliance’s network of volunteers that they had endured verbal, psychological, and physical abuse on the job — but the vast majority did not complain to their employers, fearing they would be fired or reported to immigration authorities.
Ms. Neuborne, of Ford, said her foundation has backed the alliance’s work — with $1.3-million this year alone — and paid for the report because having the data validated what Ms. Poo had been saying about these largely invisible workers.
“She’s making dual arguments that the work force needs training, because the care they do is critical,” Ms. Neuborne says. The data also helped make the alliance’s case that such workers need to be paid better, she says.
‘Heart and Brain’
In recent months Ms. Poo has been marshaling thousands of participants from the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s sister movements to prod the federal government to change immigration laws.
She urged the Senate Judiciary Committee in March to consider women’s domestic employment—not just formal jobs with pay stubs—as a qualification for legal immigration status.
On a recent evening, as her staff works on plans for a forthcoming lobbying campaign related to the proposed immigration law. Ms. Poo says goodnight to her employees at their office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Several of the employees say they’re excited about the group of undocumented workers they’ve gathered who will talk to congressional staffs.
Ms. Poo’s many fans speak of a core decency that belies her toughness and sharp intelligence.
Says Mr. Beckwith, “I think she has the kind of heart and brain that allows her to look at a situation — the mess of sick people who need people to care for them and the poor people who help them — and see the potential for good.”
Advocacy in the Family
Ms. Poo inherited her interest in advocacy. Her parents were both scientists from Taiwan, and her father participated in the student democracy movement in the late 1960s before coming to America.
She had an itinerant childhood, living on both coasts, moving every few years to a new university town, where a research center would employ her parents. Women in her family did most of the work at home. Ms. Poo has said that the cleaning and shopping and child rearing was not lauded, the role invisible.
In 1995, when Ms. Poo was an undergraduate at Columbia, she was arrested during a rally to protest police brutality and education budget cuts. In 1996, she helped organize a student strike to prod Columbia to create an ethnic-studies department.
Ms. Poo says the U.S. domestic-workers movement started 20 years ago when reports of abuse—including the trafficking and virtual imprisonment of some household workers—bubbled into the news. In 1998, when she started organizing domestic workers, just a few organizations were trying to help such people.
One of the biggest challenges was finding the workers to organize. Most domestic workers were employed by families and were in the United States illegally. She couldn’t knock on apartment doors. She literally built a coalition by pounding the pavement, meeting nannies and maids on the New York streets.
Simon Greer, now president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, met Ms. Poo back in 2001 as she canvassed Union Square Park and was impressed with her efforts to organize.
“There was this group of workers—hundreds of thousands that most people don’t think are workers,’’ says Mr. Greer. He put Ms. Poo on the board of the group he then led, New York Jobs With Justice.
Back when they first met, he says, he was “really optimistic’’ about the prospects for legal protections for the workers that Ms. Poo organized. After five, six, seven years with no legislation, “I was like ‘ay yay yay, really?’ But she never wavered.”
Looking Ahead
The roots of Ms. Poo’s current advocacy efforts stretch back to 2007, a year that was a watershed for the alliance, marking the first national meeting of domestic workers.
By then New York City and Nassau County had passed laws protecting those workers’ rights. “I felt the potential of having a national movement for domestic workers and the power that it could bring,’’ she says.
In the next five years, she hopes that her organization will build on those accomplishments, not just creating advocates for better care, but also helping to lay the groundwork for good-paying jobs for highly skilled caregivers.
Says Ms. Poo, “We believe that figuring out solutions to how people take care of generations can help strengthen the economy and help strengthen democracy and social policy.”
National Domestic Workers Alliance
Mission: To advocate for and protect the rights of caregivers, home health workers, and other domestic employees
Founded: 2007
Top official: Ai-jen Poo, director
Key supporters: Nathan Cummings Foundation, Ford Foundation, NoVo Foundation, and Open Society Institute Annual budget: $4.4-million
How it has succeeded: Forging alliances between employers and workers to fight for change and conducting careful research to back advocacy arguments
