Caring for Caregivers with Ai-jen Poo

Featuring Ai-jen Poo, President of NDWA & Executive Director of Caring Across Generations

Jeff [00:00:01] We can't fix the world alone. But collaborating isn't easy. And systems are allergic to change. So how do we do it without losing our damn minds?

English [00:00:11] That is what we're here to find out.

Jeff [00:00:14] I'm Jeff Walker.

English [00:00:15] I'm English Saul. Welcome to System Catalyst, the podcast that cracks the code for making the world a better place.

Jeff [00:00:29] Hey. English.

English [00:00:30] Hey, Jeff.

Jeff [00:00:31] How're you.

English [00:00:32] Doing? Pretty good. Doing pretty good. It's kind of a dreary day here, so hoping the sunshine soon.

Jeff [00:00:38] And wait for that. Let me tell you about, this great interview I just did with one of my heroes, Ai-jen Poo. And she's, president of National Domestic Workers Alliance for the NWA. And it's really brought back to me my grandfather, who was a labor organizer for the electric workers. And when I was listening to Ai-jen and she was talking about the fact that caregivers and household workers are legally prohibited from joining unions, they and egg workers. Back in the old Jim Crow days, Congress passed that law. So it's crazy. I mean, this is I would definitely join a union if I were a care worker in in homes, etc..

English [00:01:22] It's such an important topic. You know what, an underrepresented group. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you how many domestic workers there are in the United States. And it's an issue that hits so close to home for for everyone. I mean, you know, for us, we've hired household, you know, family assistants or caregivers. And, you know, I know for me, as like a working mom, I couldn't do what I do without having someone else, you know, that I trusted, be able to look after my children. And, it's crazy to me that these people, this, this group of people doesn't have these rights that I think a lot of us recognize and take for granted.

Jeff [00:02:08] Yeah, there's 2 million people out there who are these caregivers. And she talks about this is going to be a bigger and bigger population and more important as we all age and we all need more assistance. There's going to be, you know, a growing population of people that we're talking about here. Yes. You know, I just use uses the powers of movement building, you know, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela style to help bring them together. So, let's take a listen. Here's agent. Tell me about, you know, the early days of your interest in social justice. I know your family was really into it and interested as well. And they were immigrants to the U.S., right. Tell me about, you know, how you kind of developed that passion and sense. Was it from them or others for sure.

English [00:03:05] Both of my parents are leaders in their own right. They both grew up working class, working poor in Taiwan during a military dictatorship, and came to the US to further their education and to really pursue their dreams. And my father is a scientist. He is a neuroscientist and my mother is an oncologist, recently retired. My father spent his life studying the brain, which is this place of the unknown, and I think that he brings a spirit of curiosity to the human condition and a real kind of a realism to it as well. And then my mother, she's probably the most compassionate person I know. Empathetic. And one of the things that she really worked on developing was immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer, which, unlike radiation and chemotherapy, which attacks the toxic cancer cells and everything else, immunotherapy equips your healthy cells to essentially stave off the growth of toxicity within us. And I love the idea of immunotherapy in our culture. How are we equipping what is good and what is healthy within us, investing in that, leaning into that, strengthening that. And so I think they both brought values. But I think just watching them and their work and pursuing their passions to make the world a better, healthier place has also taught me a lot in terms of my own advocacy.

Jeff [00:04:52] So you, you know, then went to college and came out and said, are going, I'm just going to do this. Or how did that evolve? You know, what is the decision kind of looking at your parents and how amazing they are and what you individually could do?

English [00:05:05] You know, it was never so intentional or planned. You know, when I moved to New York for college, I wanted to get involved in the community and the Asian immigrant community because, you know, its sense of home that I've always been searching for and in understanding and getting to know the community in New York, I started to listen to the women in the community. I was a volunteer for a domestic violence hotline in the Asian immigrant community, where women could call 24 hours a day and get access to resources to support. And because my grandparents played a really significant role in raising me, I spoke Mandarin. So I was able to be a bilingual hotline, volunteer and listening to the experiences of women who are working incredibly hard, bringing courage, tenacity, determination to taking care of their kids, keeping themselves and their kids safe and making ends meet. Going to work every day, paying the bills, doing everything in their power to be good moms and still not able to make it work. Not able to pay the bills. Not able to put enough food on the table. Not able to offer the things that their kids deserve. And the question of how it could be that so many immigrant women in our community are working so hard and doing everything right, and still not able to catch a break, how could it be that we have a system that fails so many people so systematically? And so that is the kind of question that I chased from those days, but I really chased them through following the women and wanting to bring women together to build community, to build power, to build a sense of agency, that we could do something about these systems that shape our lives. And I don't think it was all that, you know, intentional. I wasn't like, we're going to change any systems that we care over. Then this is a system problem, but more just trusting that if we bring people together every day, people to address the concerns and the problems and the challenges from a place of possibility and hope and courage, that solutions are possible.

Jeff [00:07:47] At some point. I think you said it was late 90s. Start focusing on the domestic workers.

English [00:07:52] Yeah.

Jeff [00:07:53] And you started to pick that segment because there are a lot of caregivers out there. But, why that segment in particular and define what a domestic worker is for us?

English [00:08:05] Sure. Well, domestic workers are the workers, the mostly women workers who work inside of our homes, providing the kind of caregiving and cleaning services that help our lives maintain order, make it possible for us to go out and work every day knowing that our loved ones, in most cases, the most important aspects of our lives, right? Our parents, our children, our homes are taken care of and in good hands. So it's work that is absolutely essential. And yet some of the most insecure and undervalued work in our entire economy, we still refer to it as help as opposed to the dignified profession which it is from millions upon millions of people in our world. And so I think in some ways, domestic workers really get to the heart of the heart of these systems because they work every day, going to work, coming to our homes, caring for the most important aspects of our lives, and yet don't earn enough to care for their own families and pay their own rent. And if we could transform that equation, that system failure, so much could be possible. The genius and talent that goes into caregiving that is so underestimated. What if we actually put that at the center of how we value things in the society and in our economy? What might be possible then?

Jeff [00:09:46] Yes. And a large percentage of immigrants, too. Is that right?

English [00:09:51] Yes. A third of all care workers. So child care, aging and disability care are foreign born and a higher percentage of domestic workers even. So almost 40%. Well, immigrants.

Jeff [00:10:08] And it seems like a portion of our economy that's been hidden. Right. I mean, remember, there was a whole period of time where people were finally reporting in their income taxes, you know, household worker income, you know, paid, you know, like own that there's somebody there. That's right. So half of it, it's getting us to talk about and own that. There are these people we trust. That's right. That we're not spending the time to support.

English [00:10:31] Now that's right. It's almost like this metaphor of the tip of the iceberg where you can kind of see that tip, but then you can kind of it forces you to imagine that underneath the waterline there's this whole mountain of ice of what's going on. And, you know, the domestic workers have been working under the waterline of our economy forever. And there's so much activity that happens. And all we see is the tip of the iceberg. But really, we must actually see all that's below. If we are to create a sustainable future.

Jeff [00:11:09] Ai-jen founded the Domestic Workers Alliance or the NWA in 2007. It now has seven local chapters and works with 70 affiliate organizations around the country. But as with all big movements, it started out with a small local effort.

Ai-jen [00:11:28] It wasn't just me. It was, there was kind of a generation of US domestic workers and organizers in big cities in the 90s who started to come together and church basements and immigrant community centers. And it was kind of like, if you think about domestic work, it is quite isolated. You have usually one person per workplace, and the workplaces are hidden. There's no signs on the doors. You could walk into any apartment building and not know which homes are also workplaces. So it's kind of millions of unmarked, isolated workplaces. And to be able to break out of that isolation of that work and find community with other domestic workers who know your experience and can relate and create a watercooler in an industry where one would never exist, experience. And that's what we started to do in New York and L.A., Seattle, Washington, some of these cities, we started to come together. And in 2007, we came together nationally across these cities, kind of broke out of the isolation of the local work and had our first national meeting, and there were 50 of us domestic workers and organizers and. The energy and the sense of possibility and potential of having a national voice for this isolated workforce was so exciting to us. We decided right then and there we were going to launch a national organization, and here we are almost 17 years later, and we have a community of almost 400,000 domestic workers nationally in all 50 states, 74 local affiliates and chapters. We get up every day and assert the dignity of this work and fight for it to be valued and compensated and protected, because it deserves nothing less.

Jeff [00:13:29] So part of what we talk about being a system catalyst is, you know, this local action, but a network support that you're not trying to bring your ego in to tell everybody what to do, but you're trying to catalyze them to work together in a more effective and efficient way. You know, we talked to somebody else who was, Mark Solomon, who was one of the co-founders of the Marriage Equality movement, and they found working state by state was more effective for them until they had enough states, where then it became a federal, you know, initiative that the Supreme Court signed off on. How are you thinking about that? You know that. I know you've gotten, last I heard, ten states, you know, coming up with a bill of rights. I know you're meeting with the Secretary of Labor soon to talk about a sample employment agreement and some other things. So talk about this local city, you know, state and federal kind of how you're thinking about it.

Ai-jen [00:14:24] There's this concept that I really like of what we call modeling power. The idea is that you can create an alternative to the status quo, even if it's a small model. But the power of it is that it proves that another way is possible. So it expands the realm of what's possible just by proving that another way can exist. I think what states and cities offer us is the potential for building models that are run and supported by the government, but ultimately need to be scaled at a federal level. Most big sweeping policies started as a local or state level model. And then you learn. You collect data. You you learn what works. And where we are is the first domestic worker. Bill of rights was passed in New York State in 2010. Here we are in 2023 and ten states and four cities have passed legislation, and they have each. Each bill is a little bit different. The consistency is that we are both ending the exclusion of domestic workers. That has existed in our labor laws since labor laws were first put into place. And we are trying to establish as many new rights and protections as possible, so that these jobs have a floor and a baseline to be able to become good jobs. And what we have done is taken some of the learnings about what works and what is needed, and the impact on the lives of workers, and put that into a national domestic worker bill of rights that was first introduced in 2019, by then US senator, now Vice President Kamala Harris and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. Federal level change takes time, but we know it's possible because the the movement is able to mark these milestones along the way, and we're able to create these building blocks along the way.

Jeff [00:16:46] What's your next state or to.

Ai-jen [00:16:48] New Jersey is next? There's an active and vibrant campaign in the state of new Jersey to pass a domestic worker bill of rights. It's really exciting.

Jeff [00:17:00] Impressive. But of course, none of these bills would exist without all the domestic workers who use their precious free time to stand up for themselves and others like them. So we ask agent to tell us about one of them.

Ai-jen [00:17:16] There is a woman, Susy Rivera, who is a home care worker in New Braunfels, Texas, and she's been a direct care worker caring for older adults. And she was 19 years old. And, she's, I believe, in her 50s now. And before the pandemic, she worked on average 110 hours a week. And part of the reason why is because in that part of Texas, to go from one client to another takes time. And so she has multiple clients that she cares for. She really sees this work as her calling, and having done it for as many years as she has, she earns about $12 an hour, which is 3 to $4 more than her colleagues who are newer to the industry. She also has a wife who is immune compromised. And so during the pandemic, when the shutdown happened, she had to make really difficult choices around safety and her clients who needed her and her own family. And this was in the early days when everything shut down. She knew her clients were not going to have the medication, the food, the human connection that they needed if she didn't show up. And so she continued to work, and I think her hours were reduced to about 80 a week, and she kept seeing her. She was hurt for clients only lifeline during the pandemic. And I think she saved lives. And not only that, but for her coworkers who lost their jobs and income, she started to deliver food because she was still working to her other colleagues. And and then when we launched our cash assistance program, she was a leader in helping to make sure that all of the home care workers and domestic workers and her community knew that they had access to emergency cash assistance to our organization. And, she is a part of the Texas Coalition for Domestic Workers. And she had the opportunity to be a part of our campaign at the federal level in the context of President Biden's economic agenda. And we didn't stop. Susie was a part of a National Care Worker summit that we organized in April, where she was able to be a part of the president signing the first and most sweeping executive order on care in the history of the country, directing every single federal agency to do what was in its power to improve access to care for families and to improve the quality of jobs for workers like Susie.

Jeff [00:20:05] It's great, great story, and it's great that she raised her hand and wanted to do more than just her own work helping others. And then, you know, there's a Giving Tuesday. Ashley Curran talks about, hand raisers and that they're more effective in creating movements than going finding somebody that you're going to work on this state and you're going to work on this issue, but waiting for those people to raise their hand, saying, no, I want to work on that. You know, and looking for those. And she sounds like a great hand raiser.

Ai-jen [00:20:31] Oh, we have this workforce full of hand raisers. We have so many volunteers who knock doors to register voters, to make sure people know when election days are, to make sure that they have their voices heard and their votes counted. We have workers who are volunteering to share their stories. Writing op eds about their stories so more people understand what it's like to do care work every day, and what it's like to try to survive on $12 an hour. If you have your own family. There's just so many hand raisers. There's a thousand ways that women like Susie are powering change in our communities every day, and it goes away from taking care of the people we love to changing laws and state legislatures. It's quite a range. The thing about story is that are tapping into an emotional truth. There's what's factually true and there's what's emotionally true. And both truths have a profound impact on our behaviors, on the way that we make meaning, the decisions that we make. And I think oftentimes in this kind of systems and social change world, where we lean heavily into what's factually true, when we make our arguments and we have our data and we have our research and analysis and and at the end of the day, I think we cannot underestimate the power of the emotional truth to drive change in behaviors and norms and culture. And that is what storytelling helps us tap into, is, is our emotional lives. And until we can connect to people at scale, at an emotional level, it will be very hard to catalyze anything close to systems change, because at the end of the day, systems are embodied by humans.

Jeff [00:22:34] You wrote a book called The Age of Dignity, and, you also created another organization called Caring Across Generations. And you've expanded, at least my eyes, is to creating this viewpoint of the care economy. One of the things I kept saying is, you know, everybody deserves someone to care for them across the country. That's right. Everybody. One person could be your mother, your sister, your next door neighbor, your caregiver, you know, whatever that might be. And we don't have that. It's the 46% of adults over 65 are lonely. And, there's a great company called Devoted Health that I work with. But you can't join an organization unless you believe in love, unless you treat others as if they're a member of your family. And so that changed everything because they started finding out who the caregivers were. And they started saying we need to talk to the caregiver as well, so we can make sure your meds are all right and make sure that you're, you know, not lonely, you know, and connected if there are caregivers at all or let's go find some. So I think it is kind of related and integrated into everything. You've been working on this larger care question.

Ai-jen [00:23:40] Yeah. Anyone who's paying attention can see, we have a growing aging population in this country every single day, 10,000 of us turning 65 and 10,000 of us are born. And then because of advances in technology and in medicine, we're living longer. So we've essentially added an entire generation on to our lifespan since our safety net was first put into place. But we haven't adopted any of our systems or our policies or culture to support quality of life for a longer lifespan. And so on. Both ends of the generational spectrum, there's increased amounts of pressure to care for people that we love. And on the child care front, we have a situation where 70% of children and the young children in the US are growing up in households where all the adults have to work outside of the home in order to make ends meet. And we have a situation where 1 in 4 moms has to return to work within two weeks of giving birth, because we don't have a federally mandated paid family and medical leave program. So there's all of our human need are a universal human need to take care of our loved ones from birth to death through disability has not changed. The demand, the scope and the scale of the need has changed because of longevity, because of modern life. And we have not changed our systems, our policies. Social scientist Jessica Colaco says it kind of crisply. She says other countries have a social safety net. The US has women. And that, in a nutshell, describes how we've gotten to where we are now. But it is not sustainable. And I see this kind of growing older population as a huge opportunity for us to take a step back. And if if that wasn't enough, we had a pandemic to help underscore the point that this is a generational opportunity to establish the kind of care systems and infrastructures that can support us, to take care of the people that we love in this next era. And I think that that is that the movement that you feel the energy of the moms who are demanding change to their dads, the millennial dads who are demanding paid paternity leave, like there's all this new momentum that exists because we're all feeling the pressures of care, and we all instinctively recognize that this is no longer about a personal failure. This is actually a system failure. We're finally fighting for the care we deserve in this country, and it feels exciting. It's energizing to me. I think it has the potential to unlock generational change.

Jeff [00:27:11] That's it for today's show. Please don't forget to subscribe to System Catalyst so you don't miss out on the new episodes. Also, do us a huge favor by reading our podcast ID, leaving us a review. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll catch you all in the next episode. Before we go, I'd like to thank our producers at human Group media. We'd also like to thank our incredible network of partners who are supporting our mission the School Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Echoing Green Dark Foundation, Maverick Collective, Virgin Unite. Charlize Theron, Africa Outreach Project, Boldly Go, Philanthropy, senior goes for Global Nexus and new profit. If you're interested in becoming a system catalyst, you'll like to learn more about our partners. Please visit System catalyst.com.