ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 3, 1997 TAG: 9704030042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TERRI GERSTEIN
WANTED: WOMAN, 15-25 yrs. old, for housework and child care, 7 days/week, 17 hours/day. Salary $100/wk. Monthly opportunities to leave worksite. Will begin immigration paper work (after trial period to be announced).
This description fits all too many domestic positions. Sometimes the reality is even worse, as in a recent Miami case.
In 1995, a young woman from a village in India arrived to work in a Florida family's home. Last week, her employers, Kishin Kumar Mahtani and Shashi Gobindram, were sentenced to five years in jail for holding her in involuntary servitude. The charges included beating and burning her, and making her work 16-hour days for no payment.
This case is an extreme example of the abuse that domestic workers often suffer. Many receive grossly subminimum wages, sometimes less than $1 per hour. Few employers pay Social Security or other legally required taxes. And such workers often face sexual harassment and even assault.
Many important legal protections do not extend to domestic workers. They cannot file a sexual harassment claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Under federal law, they do not have the right to organize into unions. If domestic workers are injured on the job in states such as Florida, they are exempt from the state's workers' compensation statutes.
Employers often violate the few laws that do protect domestic workers. They rarely pay the federal minimum wage. Nor do they keep the required record of hours, wages and deductions. The Department of Labor is too poorly funded to effectively enforce the minimum-wage law and gives priority to cases involving large workplaces.
Domestic workers who are immigrants are even more vulnerable. Isolated in private homes, they have little contact with the outside world. Most do not know their legal rights, or where to turn for help. Live-in maids rely on their employers for the most basic necessities. For them, being fired means losing a job and a home.
Employers who bring domestic workers here from other countries wield enormous power. Often they lure people with the false promise that they will take care of the immigration process. The person remains with a family for years, trusting that the process is under way. The worker fears that if she asks for a raise, or begs not to be hit, she will lose her only hope of obtaining legal status in this country. Employers use this fear, threatening to report a worker to the Immigration and Naturalization Service if the person complains.
The Mahtani case should thus come as no surprise. Many other similar cases are hidden behind closed doors all across the country.
Domestic workers do some of the most important work, such as raising children, and some of the most distasteful, such as cleaning toilets. They deserve better. Congress should pass laws to provide domestics with basic protections and should allocate more funding for the Department of Labor to enforce these protections.
Employers should not be able to use the immigration laws as a tool to intimidate workers. With better laws and more enforcement, employers will understand that mistreating a domestic worker will bring legal, possibly criminal, consequences.
Local organizations, churches, women's groups and social-service agencies also have a role to play by helping domestic workers learn about their rights through outreach efforts, hot lines and support groups.
As a nation, we must change our attitudes toward domestic workers. We no longer see domestic violence as a private matter, but rather as a criminal violation. Abuse of domestic workers - from slave wages to literal slavery - is not a private matter, either. It is inhumane and illegal.
TERRI GERSTEIN is an attorney at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami and is in charge of its Workers' Rights Project. She represents the victim in the Mahtani case.
- KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
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