Jornaleras: The Unacknowledged Challenges of Women Day Laborers

A day laborer is a worker who is employed for a day’s work and gets paid cash at a reservation wage. Women day laborers come together and wait to get hired as nannies, housekeepers, and/or custodial staff. One cannot discuss day laborers without addressing the vulnerabilities they experience at the hands of their employers. Unfortunately, very little is known about day laborers, and the absence of their experiences in scholarly literature further marginalizes them in legal debates on Workers rights. In 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Labor reported that there were almost 100,000 undocumented women working as domestic workers in New York City, but it failed to report how many of those women were day laborers. This thesis will explore the challenges that women day laborers face within the domestic industry. For comparison purposes, this thesis looked at information on the experiences of men and women day laborers in the West Coast. The majority of documented day laborers are men, with only 6 percent known to be women in New York. This thesis used the nonprofit organization, The Workers’ Justice Program (WJP) to interview day laborers, in order to better understand their histories and the extent of the poor conditions in which they work. Some vulnerabilities experienced by the women in this study are: wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and unfair labor standards. This thesis also addressed the federal, state and local laws that continue to exclude day laborers from access to Workers’ rights including: National Labor Relations Act, Federal Labor Standard Act (FLSA), Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Although women day laborers are marginalized and unprotected by the law, the number of women day laborers in New York has continued to grow in an unstable and unregulated market.