This report sheds light on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Spanish-speaking domestic workers. The pandemic has demonstrated how essential domestic workers are to our economy and society, yet they continue to be underrepresented in official economic data. This invisibility further marginalizes this essential workforce and reinforces their exclusion from relief.
In addition to sharing insights from a unique dataset, the full report discusses our methodology and describes how we’ve adapted a popular chat technology into a rigorous research tool. This report shows that it is possible and urgently necessary to develop tools to bring more of our country’s essential workers into our month-to-month, and week-to-week, understanding of the economy.
Domestic workers need economic security and safety at work. That means providing access to pandemic relief to this essential workforce and winning policies to ensure that domestic workers are paid higher wages, have access to benefits like paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, health insurance, and are offered a path to legalization and citizenship.