After the Victory: Working Conditions of Care Worker after the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights

Background and Purpose: This study investigates outcomes of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in the United States. Only two decades ago, care was mere private activities done by female family member (or slaves in the 19th century). Due to this tradition, care workers have been exempt from legal protection of labor right in most countries despite the fact that care work has formalized and become major target of social policy. Many studies point out that care workers suffer extreme working condition because of the lack of legal protection.

Recently, through the effort of unions of domestic worker, 8 States have enacted the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights from 2010. The Bill protects domestic workers from extremely long working hours and under-minimum wage. However, not much is known about its outcomes. Since the Bill secures care worker’s legal right and promote recognition about domestic worker, it might increase their wage and reduce extreme working hours. One the other hand, there is possibility that the Bill might not affect their working conditions because of obstacles in enforcement. This study verifies these competing possibilities of the Bill’s outcome.

Methods: This study uses 2012-2016 American Community Survey which includes 29,161 domestic workers. Considering the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, domestic worker is defined as who works more than 15 hours a week as a childcare worker, personal care aide, or housekeeping cleaner in private house.

To measure the treatment effect of the Bill, this study conducted Differences-in-Differences (DID) method. Two groups of domestic workers are designated as control groups to account counterfactual trend: 1) workers in States where the Bill didn’t enact and 2) workers hired by other than private houses in States where the Bill enacted. This study only tests cases of Massachusetts and California where the Bill enacted in 2012-2015 and size of sample is enough.

Results: In States where enacted the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, average working hours and proportion of workers who work more than 60 hours a week appear relatively lower than other States. Results from DID also show that working hours is significant reduced after the enactment of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in California. However, no evidence of improvement in wage level is found in this study.

Conclusions and Implications: The results imply that there are both of significant improvement and challenges of the Bill. Since many researchers and activists were pointing out the problems of extremely long working hours of domestic workers, it is grateful that this research found that significant outcome of the Bill upon this problem. This study discusses why there is no effect is found on wage level and in a case other than California