Most South Asian domestic workers are employed as live-ins and forced to work 16–17 hours a day.

Part 2 of 2

Many people who first hear of the egregious conditions that domestic workers in this country face are shocked and incredulous. Even Chinese garment workers, who have toiled in midtown Manhattan garment sweatshops and are not new to exploitation, express surprise that such conditions exist in people's homes. However, the conditions of domestic work have much in common with other industries in NYC and the US.

These conditions are part of what many worker centers in NYC call – the sweatshop system. Extremely long hours and an intense pace of work under dangerous and unhealthy working conditions characterize more and more jobs in the US. Immigrant workers, especially women, bear the brunt of these dehumanizing working conditions that are literally working us to death. Domestic workers experience the sweatshop system at its most brutal extreme because domestic workers perform very important but least valued work - what is traditionally known as "women's work." They also work alone in people's private homes, are often intimidated by threats of deportation and deliberately isolated from the community. Cultural and language barriers only exacerbate their situation.

Most South Asian domestic workers are employed as live-ins. Forced to work 16–17 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, they are paid as little as $1 an hour or in some cases, nothing at all. Their work is not recognized or respected and the long hours they are forced to endure leave them little or no time to rest and attend to their own health and needs. Many like Ms. P. work under conditions of forced servitude – denied contact with the outside world, forbidden from leaving the house, and at their employer' beck and call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Workers call such working conditions modern-day slavery.

Sometimes the demands made of domestic workers tantamount to gratuitous cruelty. For instance, one of our members, Ms. Kaur, was forced to wait until 11 pm to eat her meals, after she had fed everyone else; and required to clean the grout between tiles in the large kitchen, dining room and greenhouse of her employers' home, with a toothbrush. Her employer, Dr. Manjeet Chadha, refused to use an alarm clock, forcing Ms. Kaur to wake up as early as 4:30 am on several weekdays to serve her tea in bed. When Ms. Kaur finally spoke up against the exploitation, she was fired and asked to leave the house immediately, late at night. Like Ms. P, Ms. Kaur had had enough. She came to WA and decided to "teach her employers a lesson" by getting involved in the CAWS campaign .

The Campaign Against Workplace Servitude (CAWS)

It is women like Ms. P who are at the heart of WA, a membership based workers center of South Asian workers, the majority of whom are women domestic workers. What makes WA unique is that it is an example of South Asian women workers' leadership. Those traditionally considered helpless victims - single, poor, undocumented women who don't speak much English and are devalued and dehumanized in their workplaces - are the ones who lead WA and are organizing for change.

Many of the workers leading CAWS, like Ms. P, are live-in South Asian domestic workers who are struggling to fight for better workplace conditions. As part of our efforts to outreach to domestic workers, expose exploitative and abusive employers and fight for a better life for workers in our community, we have been building a campaign for the rights of domestic and other workers in sweatshop conditions, especially those who experience conditions of servitude like many babysitters and housekeepers in the South Asian community

Shahbano Aliani and Monika Batra are members of Workers' Awaaz, active in the Campaign Against Workplace Servitude