Nannies, caregivers, and house cleaners in Philadelphia have workers’ rights, but their employers may not know that

Annie Johnson, a longtime nanny in the Philadelphia region, recently started working for a new family in Conshohocken. She was recommended for the job by another family she had worked for, and she went into the interview prepared to discuss a fair deal for wages, time off, and other basic working conditions.

“I already knew my value,” Johnson said. Even though this new family lived just outside of Philadelphia, she was able to use the Philadelphia Domestic Workers Bill of Rights as a framework for her new contract, she said.

“I believe that most families want to do the right thing,” Johnson said. “They want to have a conversation about what is fair, not only for themselves, but what is fair for the people that they’re hiring.”

The legal protections for Philadelphia’s domestic workers — such as nannies, caregivers for seniors and people with disabilities, and house cleaners — have improved considerably in the last three years, especially for people whose employers really do want to support their workers.

But the employment relationship remains unbalanced for many, according to a new report from the Philadelphia Domestic Workers Task Force.

The families who hire these workers often do not see themselves as employers with a responsibility to create fair working conditions, the report said, and they might not be aware of Philadelphia’s three-year-old Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

The ratio of “one worker to one employer makes it really, really challenging to fix the big, structural systemic issues that we’ve seen,” said Nicole Kligerman, Pennsylvania director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “We knew that enforcement would be difficult when we were fighting for the law, and boy, is it challenging.”

Meanwhile, Kligerman said, the impact of these protections remains limited by Pennsylvania’s state laws and political climate — for instance, domestic workers are excluded from minimum wage requirements, and state law prohibits Philadelphia from making changes to minimum wage within city boundaries. Federal worker protections also exclude domestic workers, she said.

“We are seeing an improvement in working conditions. Scaling that is quite challenging,” she said.

The Philadelphia metro area has more than 16,000 domestic workers, and Pennsylvania is home to more than 28,000. These workers are overwhelmingly female, and the majority are women of color.

The city created a task force in 2019 to improve working conditions for these workers and passed a bill of rights for domestic workers in 2020. In looking at their progress over the last several years, the task force highlighted this law as a top achievement.

The bill of rights codified requirements such as a written contract for domestic workers in English and the worker’s preferred language, regular paid breaks, two weeks of notice before ending employment — four for live-in workers — and one day off per week for live-in workers. Similar laws exist in 10 states, not including Pennsylvania, as well as the cities of Seattle and Washington D.C.

“I’ve seen a lot of our workers become stronger. When they go on interviews, they understand what they should and shouldn’t do,” said Johnson, who became involved with the NDWA’s Pennsylvania chapter in 2017 and serves on the city’s task force. “They understand that they’re speaking from a law — the law is applicable to me and applicable to my employer.”

Many employers appreciate that, too, according to the report from the task force, which includes two employers of domestic workers. They noted that nannies, house cleaners, and caregivers have an intimate role in their employers’ lives, and having a contract makes it easier to navigate those relationships.

Aside from the lack of supporting state and federal laws, domestic work often involves “off the books” payment, which makes it difficult to document a worker’s pay, work schedule, and track record. The onus of enforcement often falls on the worker, and they’re frequently worried about their employer retaliating against them by damaging their reputation. Those who are undocumented have additional concerns that raising a complaint with government might draw attention to their immigration status, the report said.

Another challenge, which the task force could not have foreseen, was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic just as the bill of rights was taking effect. Many domestic workers were struggling with the loss of work or abrupt changes in their employment conditions, but many of them weren’t eligible for federal relief funds. In Philadelphia, National Domestic Workers Alliance helped get emergency cash for hundreds of domestic workers from the Philadelphia Worker Relief Fund, the report noted.

The task force is planning to make specific policy recommendations in the next year, including increased resources for investigations and outreach through the city’s Office of Worker Protections. They also plan to pinpoint which state and federal policies are obstructing improvement of working conditions, the report said.

Johnson would like to see a statewide law protecting their rights before she retires from nannying, which she hopes to do in the next few years.

“I don’t want those who are coming behind us to be fighting as much,” she said.