Ai-jen Poo (蒲艾真) jumped into a taxi after her flight from Chicago, Illinois, touched down at LaGuardia Airport last week, hurtling straight into Manhattan for four days of back-to-back meetings devoted to improving the lives of domestic workers.
Soon, she was hammering out strategies to help expand access to healthcare for undocumented immigrants. She was planning a state-by-state legislative push to provide tax credits to people who pay living wages to home healthcare aides. She was discussing potential pathways to legal status for millions of foreign-born nannies, babysitters and housekeepers.
All the while, Poo managed to keep her secret. No one knew — not her staff, not her donors and not her partners at other nonprofit organizations.
“I felt like a pipe that was going to burst,” recalled Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the advocacy group based in New York that represents 43 affiliates in 26 cities across the US.
Just after midnight on Wednesday last week, the news finally broke: Poo had won a MacArthur “genius” grant. The fellowships, presented by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, come with a stipend of US$625,000 and are among the US’ most prestigious prizes for artists, academics and professionals. Within minutes, the calls, texts, e-mails and tweets started pouring in.
“It was wonderful and overwhelming,” said Poo, 40, who got her start as a volunteer working with immigrant women on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
She learned about the honor this month.
“At first, I thought it was the dry cleaner,” she said of the call from the MacArthur Foundation. “Then I thought that perhaps they were calling me for a reference for someone else.”
But no: The foundation wanted to shine a national spotlight on Poo, who has dedicated her life to organizing domestic workers, marshaling their energy into a movement that has improved working conditions and created new labor standards for women who have long worked without the job protections that most of us take for granted.
In 2010, Poo’s campaign resulted in the passage of the US’ first Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, a state law that entitles domestic workers in New York to overtime pay, one day off per week and three days paid leave per year, among other benefits. Since then, her organization has helped to pave the way for similar laws in California, Hawaii and Massachusetts. She also mobilized thousands of domestic workers to lobby the US Department of Labor last year to include caregivers for older adults and disabled in federal minimum wage and overtime protections.
It is the kind of success that was unimaginable when Poo, the soft-spoken daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, started reaching out to nannies on New York City’s playgrounds 16 years ago.
“She’s a pioneer,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist and labor expert at the City University of New York Graduate Center, adding that Poo differs considerably from the more conventional break-the-barricades type of labor leader. “She’s very measured, calm, intellectual. She just sort of tells the story that leads people to action.”
It was not the kind life Poo had envisioned. As a young woman, she dreamed of becoming a potter and then settled on women’s studies at Columbia University. Her parents arrived in the US as graduate students — her father is a molecular neurobiologist, her mother an oncologist — and there were no nannies, no housekeepers in her household.
It was her volunteer work in college with an Asian community organization in Manhattan that first put her in touch with the workers she would champion when she created Domestic Workers United in 2000, which is now an affiliate of her umbrella group.
She was moved by the women’s accounts of being underpaid and exploited, and by the pride they took in their work.
“I didn’t think much then about what kind of organization it was going to be,” said Poo, who plans to use her grant to endow a fellowship for domestic workers to do organizing and policy work. “I just knew we needed one. There was such a hunger for it.”
These days, Poo is also focusing on building alliances between home health aides and the patients they care for, working to ensure that a better paid, better trained workforce is in place to support aging Americans. She is adjusting to new rhythms in her own life, as well.
In June, Poo moved to Chicago, where she lives with her boyfriend. For the first time in decades, she has a house — not an apartment — to care for. So, is she considering hiring any household help?
She hesitated before answering.
“I often think it would be great to have some support,” said Poo, who commutes to her Manhattan office several times a month. “But I haven’t crossed that bridge yet.”
NY Times News Service
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