Abuse With Benefits for Domestics in Liberal California

California’s legislature will be voting this week on a piece of legislation (AB 889), dubbed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which was authored by San Francisco Democrat Tom Ammiano and Oakland assemblywoman Fiona Ma. The new law would allow nannies, maids, home health care workers and other full-time domestic workers to cook their own meals in their employers’ kitchens and entitle them to the same overtime pay, guaranteed breaks, sick leave and workers compensation privileges already granted to most other workers.

These are certainly important new protections that these workers have been denied up until now. According to a report by the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 90% of the domestic workforce (93% of whom are female) has never received overtime pay. Over 90% reported having their meal breaks cut short or denied entirely. 75% of the child care workers and 35% of the housekeepers in Los Angeles County were paid less than the minimum wage. Domestic workers are also often subjected to physical and verbal abuse, in addition to the long hours and low pay.

However, even with these changes, domestic workers will remain among the poorest paid workers in the state.

The new law says very little about a reasonable living wage. What it says is vague: “The Department of Industrial Relations may (emphasis added by Modern School) apply the provisions of Industrial Welfare Commission Wage Order 15 to domestic work employees.”  Wage Order 15 calls for the state minimum wage to be paid to workers covered by the law. AB 889 would include domestic workers under Wage Order 15 and, according to the wording, “may” require they be paid the state minimum. However, even if the state requires the current minimum wage of $8.00 per hour, domestic workers would still not be earning enough to support a family with any sort of material security or wellbeing.

Attempts to increase the rights and privileges of domestic workers has traditionally been opposed by private health care and homecare organizations, as well as some disability and seniors’ rights groups, out of fear that such rights would impact their bottom lines (in the case of the healthcare organizations) or reduce the quality of their care (in the case of disabled people and seniors).

Both of these perspectives are absurd. Private businesses can (and do) make handsome profits without violating labor laws. AB 889 would merely extend existing labor protections to domestic workers.

The wellbeing of seniors, disabled people, children and others who depend on the services of domestic workers, of course, should be a significant concern. Many of these are private employers of domestic workers and, at the same time, many are also living on minimal fixed incomes. Yet this should not entitle them to deny their employees basic workplace rights or pay them so little. Rather, like most social services, the state needs to dramatically increase taxes on the wealthy and their businesses to generate sufficient revenue to provide generous domestic services to everyone who needs it AND generously compensate those who do this work.

FL Teachers Required to Work Longer Without Compensation?

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Modern School has covered several of the ways that No Child Left Behind and the testing/accountability mania benefit private business (see here, here and here), such as forcing schools to convert to charter schools, hiring private tutors and increasing purchases of canned curriculum and test preparation materials. Florida is on the verge of implementing a new backdoor gift to private education profiteers: using state tests to increase workloads, thus decreasing hourly wages for teachers.

As wages and working conditions deteriorate at traditional public schools, they start to look more and more like private, for-profit charter schools, where unions are rare and working conditions and pay have always tended to be poor.  Not only does this make it harder for the traditional public schools to hire and retain the best teachers, thus harming students by depriving them of quality teachers, it allows the bottom-feeding charters to continue paying poorly and demanding longer hours, which helps their bottom line.

The Florida state legislature passed a law in March, the Huffington Post reports, that requires the 100 lowest-performing schools on the reading FCAT test to provide an additional hour of reading instruction each day. Considering that this extra hour is over and beyond their normal work day, teachers should be recompensed at an overtime rate of at least time and a half. Yet there is no guarantee that they will even be paid their normal hourly rate.

The state supposedly has earmarked $30 million to pay teachers. However, according to Karen Aronowitz of United Teachers of Dade, this is not enough to cover all the affected teachers’ actual hourly rate. According to the Palm Beach Post, their district, alone, will require $7-8 million to cover the new program. Miami-Dade is expected to suck an additional $3 million for the program, leaving only $19-20 million for the rest of the state.

VAM Bashing From the Right

Jay Mathews, the conservative foil to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, admits he likes Value Added Measures (VAM) in theory, but concedes that the reform is misused and abused and likens it to an action film monster that must be destroyed.

The “best” criticisms he has seen came from teacher trainer Grant Wiggins who points out that VAM “models accurately predict over a three-year period, performance at the extremes.”

In other words, if you average VAM scores over three years, you can identify the really great teachers and the really lousy ones.

Assuming this is true, the vast majority of teachers—who fall somewhere in the middle—would be getting inaccurate VAM scores and potentially bad evaluations as a result. Furthermore, because most school districts that use VAM are using them to evaluate teachers on a yearly or biyearly basis, even those falling at the extremes may be getting inaccurate VAM scores. Thus, no one is being accurately assessed by VAM.

While this is a compelling argument against VAM, there are a host of other compelling criticisms.

One of the assumptions of VAM is that a good teacher can help low income students improve as much as higher income students. This is not necessarily the case. Wealth does not simply cause students to earn higher test scores, but provides a variety of advantages that benefit affluent students throughout their lifetimes, including better health, greater access to enriching extracurricular activities, and a significantly lower risk of low birth weight, malnutrition and environmentally-induced illnesses. This decreases the chances that an affluent child will develop learning disabilities or impaired cognitive development and may increase how quickly they can learn and how much of the learning is retained. In other words, teachers at affluent schools may see greater gains in student learning because of their students’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

How much a student improves from year to year is also dependent to some extent on their previous teachers. For example, a chemistry student who had a bad math or science teacher the previous year may be lacking so much of the prerequisite knowledge and skills that their growth in chemistry is severely limited.

What Does it Mean to Be a “Really Good” Teacher?

Most would argue that there are certain easy to identify practices that characterize a “good teacher” like having a strong background in the content, creative and effective lesson design, good classroom management and a positive rapport with students.

While any teacher who has these qualities ought to be considered a “good teacher,” in reality the teachers identified by administrators as “great teachers” are often the ones who come in at 6 or 7 and stay until 6 or 7. They may in fact be excellent teachers, too, or their VAM could be a reflection of how many extra unpaid hours they are putting in.

Some would likely argue that this is a legitimate use of VAM: A teacher who puts in long hours for her students and gets them to perform better deserves a good evaluation, promotion, bonus pay, etc. However, it is not fair or reasonable to evaluate teachers on whether or not she puts in unpaid volunteer time over and beyond that required by her contract. Under this scenario, an excellent teacher who works the contractual hours or, as most of us do, who works more than the contractual hours, might still get a lower VAM score than a martyr who puts in 70-80 hour weeks.

Chicago Scab Teachers Volunteer For Longer Hours At Low Wages

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Jean-Claude Brizard, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel have tried to get longer school days at Chicago schools and they have succeeded at 13 of them.

Fiske Elementary Principal Cynthia Miller was quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying "We're all on board," despite the fact that her staff only approved the longer day by a narrow margin. "There's no rift here,” she delusionally proclaimed. “I've been in constant conversations with my teachers. … Everyone understands what the expectation is when the majority rules."

To most Ed Deformers and Autocrats, “Democracy Rules” means stifling dissent, ignoring honest and intelligent criticism, and shoving a new policy down people’s throats. Contrary to the Ed Deformers’ and Autocrats’ beliefs, however, participation in a majority rules vote does not guarantee participation or consent in the majority rules decision.

Over and over again in my 14 years of teaching I have seen similar bogus “democratic” or “consensus” processes. Even when everyone “agrees” to abide with the final decision, there are still those who subvert the decision and undermine it in their own private way. In this case, there will be those who refuse to work during those extra hours or who refuse to teach or who simply show videos or some other low effort activity. And they would be completely justified in doing so considering they will paid significantly less than their regular wages for the extra work.

Nevertheless, teachers at 13 Chicago schools have voted to defy their Union and extend their work days, supposedly securing bonuses for themselves and financial incentives for their schools.


Emanuel and Brizard have offered schools $150,000 in discretionary funds and $1,250 in bonuses to each teacher if they extend their school days. However, if teachers are expected to work an extra 30 minutes each day, they would be working an extra 2.5 hours per week. Multiplied by a nine-month school year, they would be toiling an additional 90 hours. Their $1,250 bonus divided by 90 hours would come to less than $14 per hour, less than half the $35 per hour starting salary earned by beginning teachers in Chicago ($50,500 per year). However, some schools intend to add more than 30 minutes to the work day. Teachers at schools that add 60 minutes to the day will earn a whopping $7 per hour for their extra labor.

In other words, it’s a terrible deal for teachers. They are effectively giving away their labor at a cut rate price, with no reasonable expectation that it will benefit their students. In some cases, they may be working for less than the federal minimum wage. And there is no reason to make such a compromise. They are not being threatened with layoffs. There is no risk of unemployment should they vote intelligently and oppose such nonsense.

However, it is not just a dumb move for those who voted for it. By accepting longer hours, even if they were able to earn their normal wage, they set a precedent and embolden their district to make further ridiculous demands. Supposedly, CPS intends to impose longer hours on all teachers next year, with or without the consent of the union, something they would be less likely to attempt if the union had any teeth.

One should wonder how the union even allowed things to get this far. Generally, for an egregious violation of working conditions such as this, a school would have to take a waiver vote to override their contract. However, waiver votes are not generally permitted without the union first approving such a vote. In order to approve a waiver, the legislative body of the union would typically hear the proposal from teachers at the schools interested in taking a waiver vote, and require proof that it was a teacher led initiative supported by the majority. Then they would have to agree that it was not against the interests of the union and the other teachers.

So how did this terrible anti-labor initiative get as far as it did?

My guess is that a bunch of conflict-adverse factotums were on the legislative board and felt it better to let their colleagues dig their own graves than to take a principled stand and risk being seen as a meany.