AI-JEN POO

 

Ai-jen Poo is currently the Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance – an organization that works to empower and organize domestic workers across 19 cities and 11 states. Ai-jen knows this work is needed, "domestic workers are explicitly excluded from almost every major labor law."

As a student at Columbia University, Ai-jen Poo became outraged by the stories of domestic workers, often immigrant women, who had little recourse when they labored for long hours, in less than favorable conditions. Her gift for organizing worker-led movements has made the National Domestic Workers Alliance a powerful movement, whose policy initiatives and lobbying has led to New York State’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights (with California following), and the expansion of labor laws federally to protect 2.5 million home-care workers. Ai-jen Poo was recently recognized by Time Magazine as one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World."

 

 

 

                       "Women are going to have to lead the way."

 

                  "It feels like we are making history everyday and
                                              that feels great!"

From an interview with Bill Moyers;

BILL MOYERS: You have been doing this a long time now, I know. And you're not even 40 yet. How did you get started as organizers?

AI-JEN POO: I also come from a long line of strong women. My grandmother and my mother were both really influential on me. They're both incredible, caring women who lived a life of service and who raised children. And did both caregiving work and their work in taking care of other people. And still do with a lot of dignity. And it just inspired me.

And I think I also noticed that a lot of the work that they did in the home was not recognized and adequately valued. And I don't recall my mother ever sitting down as a child. She was always working in some way, one way or another. And I think it's a difficult situation that American families are in. Where we're in isolation, dealing with how we're going to take care of our kids. And how are we going to take care of our parents? And I think that for future generations, it should be different.

BILL MOYERS: You have to be tough to be an organizer. You've got to be willing to wear brass knuckles and have sharp elbows, right?

AI-JEN POO: It's true. It is true.

BILL MOYERS: Come on, confess.

BILL MOYERS: What's the secret?

AI-JEN POO: I will say that even with all the brass knuckles and the times when you have to be tough that we still find that the most powerful force for change in the world is still love.

BILL MOYERS: Love?

AI-JEN POO: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Don't tell me that you won the Albany legislature, one of the swamps of American--

AI-JEN POO: We absolutely did.

BILL MOYERS: --politics over with love? Come on now.

AI-JEN POO: We absolutely did.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, come on, come on.

AI-JEN POO: Absolutely. One of our most effective actions was this children and families march for the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. And it was children of domestic workers together with the children that they take care of, holding signs. "Respect my mommy." "Respect my nanny." And the love and the connection between the children that they take care of and their own children and the employers who really appreciate the service of domestic workers in their home. All of that love and connection was an incredibly powerful force for change.

BILL MOYERS: Those signs and those people who took part in that march, they were very persuasive. They were very impressive. But you don't get legislation passed in Albany, seriously, just by that. What else did you have to do? Did you have to threaten legislators with protests-- withholding your support for them in an election? That sort of thing?

AI-JEN POO: It takes good old-fashioned organizing. It takes bringing people together around common goals, with a plan. When everyday people take action from a place of love and a place of dignity and courage, it's incredibly powerful. So whether that looks like marches or whether that looks like going to the polls and voting. Or that looks like telling your story in legislative offices, year after year after year. It's power. Because people are driving it. And they're committed to it. And they, you know, that's the formula, is really people coming together.

         "Love is the most powerful force for change in the world     
                      and that is a big part of our organizing."

ORGANIZING WITH LOVE: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign
Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible. Like great love affairs, great campaigns provide us with an opportunity for transformation. They connect us to our deeper purpose and to the commonalities we share, even in the face of tremendous differences. They highlight our interdependence, and they help us to see the potential that our relationships have to create real change in our lives and in the world around us.

We learned crucial lessons about personal and social transformation in the process of this campaign. In particular, we learned that the historical assumption on which a great deal of organizing models are based – that we need to build our organizing campaigns based on people’s material self-interests – is not the whole story. Domestic Workers United led a campaign that mobilized many different communities of people based on an expanded sense of self-interest that acknowledged our relationships and our interdependencies.

The personal connections that everyday people of all walks of life had to this workforce became one of the key mobilizing forces throughout the campaign.

We took our first trip – in a 15-passenger van full of domestic workers - to the state capital in Albany in January 2004. As we navigated the narrow streets on that cold winter morning, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, what it would take to win protections for domestic workers.

We spent the first legislative sessions in the Bill of Rights Campaign learning the ropes in Albany. We needed to understand the dynamics in this new world of power relations: What power did we have? What power did we need to win? Who had that power? Where did the legislature stand on our agenda? This was the moment when it became clear that we would not only need to continue building our base of domestic workers, but that we would also need to significantly expand our base of support among other social sectors. So we started by building a network of support among our current allies, recruiting people to get involved in our work in concrete ways like collecting postcard signatures and attending our trips to Albany. We expanded our support base by speaking at other organizations’ meetings and in classrooms and churches. This expanded base of support enabled us to convince more legislators to sign on as co-sponsors on our bill. By our third year, we decided to strengthen our support base by creating a"Campaign Organizing Committee" which our coalition partners and supporters could join to become a part of campaign planning process. We invited anyone who had the desire and energy to attend: students, union members, attorneys and individual activists. By opening that kind of space to all the people who were interested in our struggle, we developed a core group of supporters who could lead independent organizing in their own networks. And the tide started to turn; you could hear a buzz around town about the Bill of Rights Campaign. That was the year when we also started to receive significant support from high-profile labor leaders like John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, whose mother had worked as a domestic worker for over 40 years.

Drawing on the Stories of Domestic Workers: The work of Domestic Workers United is based on the premise that our power is rooted in our membership, specifically on the capacity of our membership to lead our organization and to provide leadership for broader movements that reach beyond domestic workers. The Bill of Rights campaign strengthened that resolve. But it also taught us the ways in which workers stories can play a crucial role in drawing people into a struggle, particularly when those stories emphasize connection and interdependence.

We knew that the stories and leadership of domestic workers would be a driving force throughout the campaign. What we didn’t expect was how many other people would feel that their own life stories were so closely connected to the stories of domestic workers. These connections turned out to be an electric cord that energized the campaign from beginning to end.

But every worker who has stepped up and who has provided the hard work and leadership that helped drive the Bill of Right campaign was motivated by more than a narrow sense of self-interest. They didn’t only talk about bigger paychecks or days off for themselves. Like Allison, they talked about their mothers and their grandmothers who had done this work before them, and they talked about their children for whom they wanted the opportunity to choose different futures.

Framing Our Work Broadly: Rather than framing our work as a narrow workers’ rights campaign focused strictly on the issues of domestic workers, we intentionally built the campaign around broader axes of structural inequality. We based our frames on our analysis of the root causes of the problems facing domestic workers including the devaluing of "women’s work" in the home, the legacy of slavery in the United States, and the lack of a social safety net in the United States and internationally. This broader framing allowed us to develop messages for the Bill of Rights Campaign that then helped us to broaden our campaign by forging key alliances. Our message that we need to "Respect the work that makes all other work possible" allowed us to build relationships with women’s organizations, mothers, and long-time advocates for gender justice and women’s equality.

We learned that it is possible to frame any campaign broadly enough to allow you to pull in unexpected allies and therefore to bring more power to your agenda.

And we didn’t only build the tactical power we needed to win our fight; we changed the nature of relationships between domestic workers, the children they raise and their employers in the process.

The Power of the Children: The Children’s March: On a hot Sunday morning in the summer of 2009, children of all ages and backgrounds colored in chalk on the sidewalks outside New York’s City Hall. They wrote messages like, "Respect My Mom" and "I love my Nanny." Then, with red balloons tied around their wrists that read "DWU," children of domestic workers walked together with children who were cared for by domestic workers. They led a march down Broadway to demand the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The "Children and Families March for Domestic Workers Rights" began with a rally outside City Hall in front of a fence strung with cards made by children with messages like, "I want to thank my nanny for taking me to the zoo."

The affinity between doormen and domestic workers combined with the commitment of progressive union leadership to embracing new forms of organizing offers a glimpse of the potential of an inclusive labor movement, reflective of the hopes and dreams of the new working class.

As a movement, we face enormous challenges ahead. The Bill of Rights Campaign is an example of the types of campaigns – full of hard work, risk and uncertainty – that we will need embrace in order to make a real difference for the next generation. It provides a hopeful push, despite the unknown, toward campaigns based on love, to bring us into the right relationships with one another for the change we need. In taking these risks, we may become who we were meant to be as a movement.
http://www.cew.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Organizingwithlove--FullReport-Cover.pdf



          "Every single one of us can be an agent of change
                        and we can change the world."

                                             ~MORE~

Watch the full interview with Bill Moyers
http://billmoyers.com/segment/ai-jen-poo-and-sarita-gupta-on-workers-rights/


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