Struggling for Immigrants' Rights at the Local Level: The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Initiative in a Suburb of Washington, DC

摘要

Beginning in 2005, an unlikely but profound series of events—aimed at providing legal protection to domestic workers and nannies—unfolded in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Against the odds, a group of immigrant women, together with local advocacy organisations, pushed forward the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, an initiative conceived to entitle domestic workers for the first time to a written contract, health insurance, sick leave, paid vacations and other provisions. Such an innovative proposal was the result of a confluence of different factors: the attribution of an opportunity for effective intervention at the local level, in a politically receptive setting; the capacity of the domestic workers to appropriate sufficient organisation and replicate successful models from other contexts; and the deployment of a flexible and complex interpretive construction of the problem that combines a human rights approach, a class harmony perspective, and the utilisation of highly socially valued symbols such as family and home.View full textDownload full textKeywordsDomestic Workers, Undocumented Immigrants, Bill of Rights, Collective Action, Montgomery County, MarylandRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691831003673873