Just recently, Kenya was on the train heading home from work when she heard what she and the others assumed were gunshots coming from behind. Subconsciously, she ducked under her seat. “I’m a native New Yorker,” she tells me. “I’m not easily rattled. But when people were running around me, I kind of knew something was wrong.” When the train pulled into the next station, a throng of people poured out of it, including Kenya. Police officers were already there, but none of them stopped to ask why the people were in such a rush. And, Kenya wasn’t hanging around to tell them. The moment the officer was distracted, she broke free and ran right out the train station. Unharmed but shaken, she did what many of us would do in a similar situation pick up the phone and call somebody. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this just happened to me. I’m so shaken up,’” she remembers telling the parents of the kid she looks out for in Astoria, Queens. Kenya, 54, has worked for many other families but she also knows these parents to be very nice people. Indeed she was right. That night, the parents offered her to cover an Uber to work the next day, and she accepted it. But over 24 hours later, she was back on the train, with the pit of her stomach churning. There was no other way. After all, there are no work-from-home options for the more than 14,000 women working as nannies in New York City. Also, she has bills to pay and rent and groceries to buy. Unfortunately, paid leaves are an option for her. Caregiving workforce was not a role that called to Kenya, not initially.
Caregiving was not a role that called to Kenya, not initially. She started working at 16, taking all kinds of jobs: a summer camp for kids, McDonald’s, department stores, and even worked as a bank cashier. She did a little after-school pickup and fell into childcare crises with unexpected ease. Ironically, at one time, Kenya dreamed of being a police officer, but back surgery in her 20s dictated otherwise. She has a metal rod in her back, making her unsuitable for service.
“You really have to have a natural love for children to be in this line of work, and you have to be patient because it’s not easy,” Kenya says.
Although taking a job in the field, she had no plan to stay in that line of work, but she started to like her job. If she could have, she would have taken care of children of her own, but: “It just wasn’t in the cards for me, I suppose,” she tells Vestoj. It was not surprising that eventually, she turned to this work.
It was a hard job, as could be expected. First of all, that type of job could be expected to be underpaid. Many childcare workers across the U.S. don’t have paid sick leave, health insurance coverage through their employer, or paid family or medical leave. Moreover, the job is rather unstable: children grow up, and the parents’ needs change unexpectedly. Despite Kenya’s experience, she has to struggle to make ends meet. She admits that it is problematic for her to save as much as she may want. At the same time, “The babies are so joyful, really,” Kenya says, smiling. “I meet some nannies and tell them: ‘I don’t think this is for you.’
It’s not always easy—the work itself and the conditions under which many low- wage jobs women do. That was true even before the pandemic overturned the work arrangements of millions of New Yorkers, who used to require childcare workers to be full-time but now want nannies on call at all hours while paying only a small fraction of those hours. And now, with inflation and a tight housing market sky-rocketing the cost of living, it’s even more true. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” Kenya confesses. She recognizes she is not the only one, there are millions of low-wage working people in a similar situation, especially those who share her precise concerns. For ages, the population of elder care workers that includes Kenya’s nannies as well as those who care for children, old people or sick people—were many but not strong. Across the country, their number has expanded to about 5 million people with an impious gender trench: about 85% of all care giving workforce are women and about 95% of child workers are also women of color. Perhaps, such work is so underpaid and principally feminine because it includes the most intimate labor there is, and there are no Labor rights.
However, it is difficult to organize this sector; such a difficulty is caused in part by the very isolated nature of the work, high rates of staff turnover, and employees’ fear about their unregistered status, which may be a criterion to reject them. Still, I have reasons to assume that the existing situation starts changing, and after decades of silence, care workers’ voices are heard. Several organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance and local associations like the Carroll Gardens Nannies Association in New York, where I organize literacy classes on negotiation for young nannies, work on the detection of this issue, increasing care workers’ awareness of their needs and goals, and revealing their power. Women and minorities, no matter whether they work in this sphere or not, demonstrate that the question of making care work available and valued is on the top of the list. “It gives me so much joy working with the kids, watching their development,” Delores adds happily.
It is necessary to add that similar concerns do not mean similar political biases. According to the SaverJ-YouGov poll, women who live in households with an annual income between $30,000 and $80,000 are almost equally distributed between Democrats and Republicans. In this group, the former party enjoys more trust in healthcare while the latter is assumed to be better in terms of economy. Undoubtedly, such understanding is bound to affect the methods of promotion, the choice of certain themes that are addressed in campaigns, and slogans, and I would like to provide an overview of the current ones. However, the world of Delores is quite different, and the majority of her waking hours are occupied by work, leaving no time for active citizenship. Usually, she can never speak to me earlier than 8 p.m. because before that moment, the time is spent on the preparation for work, getting there, working, and getting home. Her Brooklyn apartment is more than five hours away from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where her employer lives. At the moment, I am sure that this movement will take more than 10 hours each week. In addition, the lady is pregnant, and soon Delores will have to cope with two children instead of one.
Delores is 60, and she was born in Jamaica. She moved to the U.S. when she was in her 20s and has lived in New York for a long time now. “I didn’t really make any explicit plans to move or anything, but the city just had this energy,” she said. “It was exciting, with all the shopping and the stores. I’m like, ‘I like this.’ Everybody’s moving at a faster pace, not laid back and all of that. I just gravitated to it and I loved it, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to make this home.’” Delores was married when she first came to America and crossed the sea many times to visit her husband on one shore and her children on the other. What was it like? “It’s the lifestyle,” she replied matter-of-factly. I am sure many immigrants would say the same. And many nannies, who raise other people’s children to afford raising their own. “I had someone capable taking care of them,” she says. That’s the principal comfort, though Delores’s children were old enough to talk to her on the phone. “But yes,” she concludes after a brief pause, “it was hard.” Delores has always been good at being her biggest advocate. “What are you, a Homo sapiens without all those business cards?” she asks, looking me up and down. She taught herself to ask for what she is entitled to: “If there’s something I think is out of bounds, I will speak up.” Delores now works for a family she has been with for 14 years, which is more than the average lifetime of someone working in a white-collar job. She still sends cards and wishes the children a happy holiday.
While her work brings her joy and fulfillment, this satisfaction does not result in better wages. Delores has lived in the same apartment since 1998, but recent rent hikes and the cost of living have made things more challenging. In New York, where average wages are below $89,000, just 5% of apartments are low-priced. And while most nannies earn much less, without them, the most important parents in New York City could not function.
Childcare is not just a job for Kenya, Delores, and many others; it is also their only hope. Their experiences show that it is about time that those who provide this valuable service should get the necessary recognition and protection.
Kenya’s biggest worry is money. Since pandemic she has not been able to find a full-time, permanent job. She knows other nannies that share her frustration. “This is a current situation for me right now. I’m constantly getting jobs,” she says. “I just got to worry about finding the work.” She has landed a few jobs that always come with a catch: they either do not give her the hours she wants, or they spell out new end dates. When we talk, she is about two weeks out from the end of her current arrangement, which she was warned would not last past September. That gives her about eight weeks to find something new and a backup plan in case she cannot. The anxiety eats at her, and she dislikes the panicked, desperate state of mind that come with hearing the ticking of an unavoidable clock. She is also too much of an adult for this crap. When she finds work, she will always admit the day she has heard they are going to let her go. “If this is happening, I would want you to know what I feel.”
She recently went on an interview with a job that offered her 40 hours a week. It would have tempted her, but then the lady told her she could do just $600 a week, or $15 an hour—one of the more than two decades all of her experience. Kenya currently charges $25 an hour or more, both because she deserves it—she has the expertise under her belt—and because she cannot afford less. In the CGNA, she taught a class on negotiations. She told her students know what they want. Kenya will remind them, “If you say $25, start at $30, because they’re going to do the back and forth with you.” She heeded her own advice and did not take the job.
Last week, I spent a weekend chatting with a pedigreed economist who told me he would not vote for Joe Biden. “Why,” I asked him, horrified by the senselessness of his decision, and triggered by the fact that he was a PhD economist who had observed the effects of Donald Trump’s policies on the economy for the last 4 years. The economist told me that the livelihoods of people who would lose their job or, worse, kill themselves over the futility of their circumstances was more important to him than any economic recovery indicators that Biden would introduce.
But, of course, he knows as well as this writer does that he’s just one poorly- timed crisis away from financial disaster. In fact, he’s come uncomfortably close. The other today, he had to ask me for a cash advance. He actually pauses and winces a bit before going on when I raise the topic. “It’s not pleasant,” he says. “But I was in a bind. So I was like, “Yeah, hi, I’m sorry, but I have this bill that I need to pay, and I was just wondering if I could advance $100 of my next week’s pay, for living expenses.” I didn’t hesitate. I advanced him the money. He paid the bill. Of course, Incidentally, I’ve yet to see the first month of work. But it’s still not—” he pauses to take a breath, “it still pains me to think about” answering.
However, even though this is the type of grind that one goes through, the related infrastructure does not exist in this writer’s social circle. For that reason, it wasn’t surprising to find that Kenya has not been eager to spend her limited free time listening to politicians make promises she had never known them to keep. She is not an avid consumer of political news, although she does watch Good Morning America, and she enjoys TikTok videos, which sometimes slide current events into her algorithm while she sips Dunkin coffee before work. She has a sister who lives in the nearby neighborhood of Prospect Heights, and she’ll often ask her who she’s planning to vote for. However, other than the work she’s doing with CGNA, national politics are not something she pays a lot of attention to. What do the politicians she sees on TV know of her?
Yet, she tells me, this presidential election is a “no-brainer.” She has listened to Donald Trump bluster and lie. She followed his criminal trial and observed his convictions. Many Americans, she knows, have qualms about voting for the other guy. I didn’t need to learn much more about his competitor before I knew I would vote for the Democrat in November. I looked at my options, and I picked the one I can live with. I have also gained the habit of paying closer attention to local races. “It’s the little elections that are the important ones,” she says. “When it’s time to vote for your council members and stuff like that, those little ones are just as important as the presidential ones, because those are the ones that know what your neighborhood is like.” Depending on what was happening with my route on those days, I may have dropped off passengers in the Chicago area. Perhaps one of those days, as I crept down my last block, I heard gunshots and two other local candidates did too. How much longer can Kenya do this? The scramble, the drop-offs, the commute? She does not know. “This takes a toll on your body,” she tells me. “My knees are horrible because there’s a lot of bending. Sometimes, I’m down on the floor and I think, How am I getting up from here? But these are things you don’t want to show in front of your family because they need to be at peace: You are able to do your job.” She steadies herself. She rises.
Both her roommates, meanwhile, have full-time work—one is also a nanny but lucked into a regular gig, and their nephew, a man in his 20s, is a school aide. She hates feeling like she’s the one dragging them down. She’s thankful to her sister, the one who lives in Atlanta but owns the apartment in Brownsville that Kenya and her two roommates live in, for charging them less than she could. All three would like to find a bigger place. But the market is impossible. She thinks about leaving New York “ all the time,” she tells me. But where would she go? At night, she pushes that kind of thinking aside and sets her alarm for 6:30 a.m.
After work, Delores watches World News Tonight on ABC and occasionally gets a breaking-news alert on her flip phone. She’s not a news junkie, but she does like to stay informed. She’s clear on the priorities of the NDWA, which she volunteers for, and she knows that Democrats tend to talk about those issues more than Republicans do, but it’s not as though either of the two major parties thrills her. “We are left out of everything that they do,” she says. “We are never included. And so because of that, we haven’t been able to stand up for all of our rights and what belongs to us.”
“Some people are so big into politics and so big on one party, nothing will change them,” Delores says. “I’m not like that. I look on both sides, and I want to see what both sides are doing, what their policies are, what they’re running on, and what they have for the people.”
As the first presidential debate approaches, she admits to having “mixed feelings” about the election. She identifies as a Democrat but wonders if she might forego voting altogether. She admires the Democrats’ plans for care essential workers. But as a Christian, she also agrees with Republicans on the issue of abortion. “Everyone has their different thing,” she points out. “So I am thinking.”
To a considerable extent, what she has been thinking about is that she dislikes the remaining options. She is not voting for Donald Trump. After all, she is an immigrant and can recall what it was like to come here with virtually nothing. She became a citizen in time to cast her first ballot for Barack Obama. The matter we are discussing at the beginning of June 2024 is whether she can bring herself to the polls to vote for Joe Biden. She is not sure if she wishes to force herself. “One thing that I would like,” she mentions, “is if we had younger people running.”
Three weeks later, she gets her wish.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“We need a president that is there for us, that cares for us and all those who are struggling.”
Delores
Delores has been telling me for hours now, in so many ordinary conversations, of her resolution and her skepticism and her values and her convictions and her overwhelming disappointment in the insufficient pace of progress. She has made it very clear that she is not one Washington, DC smooth talker’s help. They cannot stake their claim on her vote without earning it. So I fully expect to hear Diwali when I ring her up after the Democratic Party throws their weight between one well-before-their-experience political candidates for all the stuff she hates about another.
But she does not sound jaded when she picks up the phone. “I’m thrilled,” she says. “I’m thrilled!” She knows nothing has changed in policy or commitment. If anything, Harris has been even outspoken regarding choice than Joe Biden was. But she waves all that away. “It’s different!” she says, speaking in a different voice. “A stronger voice. She’s vibrant.” After spending months skeptical of getting into politics herself, she has control of her plan and already knocked on doors for the Harris campaign. She earned a donation and friend a cut from everyone she met.
There is no political pressure on her 90-minute drive to tighten her abdomen or hamstring. The river is still polite. The mailbox is full. And a plastic bag in delores can always do the laundry out of pocket, not for free. But there is a new, unignorable lightness. A desire. “We get a hard one,” she said, “A president will be difficult for us. It has to be the people who worry about work-life balance, the care economy, economic justice, and workforce shortages. She is confident this could be Harris. She is hopeful she won’t forget what it took her there, if Harris wins.
She gets teary-eyed as she turns back the car and sees a top ticket black woman. She has lived in this country for decades, but she will soon become proud at the light available. That’s because it seems at every debate that she has missed for years. It seems like crowning an unseen population of people who do something special. It’s like a dream spark for a woman who has spent her life and the unsung life of all female labor’s champions. This being an unfair burden, it will never contribute to a single female candidate. It’s also a reason, being fair, there are so many ladies competing today. No one’s defined by color their shorts.
