On October 1, California’s self-professed liberal governor, Gavin Newsom, vetoed SB-1257, the Health and Safety for All Workers Act. Advocates for the 300,000 domestic workers impacted by the veto, overwhelmingly women of color, call this action reckless and racist.
Renee Saucedo, program director at the ALMAS/Graton Day Labor Center, says Newsom’s veto will cause “more hardship, suffering and potential deaths” than any actions rightwing fringe groups like the Proud Boys could ever have taken.
The governor asserted that he vetoed the bill because the places people live cannot be treated the same as a traditional workplace or worksite from a regulatory perspective, saying “many individuals to whom this law would apply lack the expertise to comply with these regulations.”
“Vetoing SB-1257 will have a devastating impact on not only the 300,000 domestic workers in California but all of their family members,” says Sauceo, a civil rights attorney. “Governor Newsom has vetoed a bill that offers basic health and safety protections to the women, primarily women of color, who work inside people’s homes.” She sees the veto as an example of structural racism. “To us, it’s a stab in the heart; it’s a slap in the face; it’s an insult.”
On the day of the veto, outraged domestic workers gathered in downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles to protest. Workers held signs with messages such as “Governor Newsom, Your Veto is Killing Us” and staged a die-in on the steps of state buildings in both cities.
SB-1257, which was approved by both houses of the California state legislature in the waning days of August, would have ended the forty-seven-year exclusion of domestic workers from the Occupational Safety Health Act. Domestic workers—including house cleaners, nannies, caregivers for the elderly and children, gardeners and others—remain the only workers in the nation who do not have the legal right to a healthy and safe work environment.
The bill would have required the state to assemble an advisory committee of employees and owners to develop specific regulations for domestic service, including an injury-prevention plan. Domestic workers would receive additional training and have to be told of dangerous job hazards. Some eleven million California homes and apartments would then come under the jurisdiction of California’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration office.
The governor asserted that he vetoed the bill because the places people live cannot be treated the same as a traditional workplace or worksite from a regulatory perspective, saying “many individuals to whom this law would apply lack the expertise to comply with these regulations.”
Maegan Ortiz, executive director of the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, says the governor’s claims reveal a “very racist, a very anti-worker and anti-immigrant sentiment.” She also disputes his contention that homes cannot be regulated in the same way as other workplaces.
“What are they going to tell women who can die from coronavirus because they contracted it at work?” Or if an accident happens? That’s why owners have home insurance. There are many regulations that the owners have to follow.”
A recent City University of New York study of 700 California domestic workers found that more than 75 percent have experienced at least one serious work-related injury, illness, or other harm in the past year.
“Governor Newsom has made it very clear,” says Kimberly Alvarenga, director of the California Domestic Workers Coalition. “His message to us is that low-wage immigrant women workers in the State of California are second-class workers. He has made it very clear that they’re good enough and essential enough to clean up toxic ash after wildfires inside people’s homes. [But] they’re not good enough to get the same health and safety protections that other people enjoy,” including protections from COVID-19.
Ortiz recently received a message about a housecleaner in Hollywood who has COVID-19, along with her four children. “We’re trying to figure out how to get her groceries as she isolates in her house for the next two weeks and hopefully recovers,” she says.
In another case, she describes a nanny named Claudia “who was at our event this morning, who rushed over from the Pasadena area. She works where the Bobcat Fire is currently raging. She was rushing because she had to make it back so that she could help someone else’s kid log on to their Zoom classes on time.” Claudia, a working mother who “is literally down to her last N95 mask in an area with worsening air quality,” is risking her life to go to work, Ortiz says.
Ortiz adds that her group “did a study of domestic workers and day laborers impacted by the Woolsey Fire, and on average they experienced five days of nonstop exposure to toxic smoke.”
Marisella, a worker in the Malibu area, contracted COVID-19 from on-the-job exposure, Ortiz continues, “and had to isolate in her house while [sending] her two other kids somewhere else.” She had to serve her children food on plates left outside of the door for fear of coming into contact with them.
Lee Plaza, a domestic worker and an organizer with the Pilipino Worker Center, recently came out of quarantine after being exposed to an outbreak in the senior center where she worked. While she has been given the proper PPE, many of the people she works with have not. “I have a lot of co-caregivers who also tested positive, and there are three in our center, in our worker center, who died of COVID.”
Plaza is determined to continue to push back against Newsom’s veto.
“We won’t stop because we are unstoppable now and we can say the domestic workers are invincible in our beliefs,” she says. “We are strong and we will not stop until he signs SB-1257 and gives us the rights we deserve as essential workers.”