Angela Alvarez in her office in IDEPSCA (Sinduja Rangarajan)

As a live-in housekeeper, Angela Alvarez quietly worked 15- to 18-hour days; She ate her employer’s throwaway food; She stayed up late after her boss’s parties to clean up the mess.

It was Alvarez’s first job in the United States and she thought the long hours were normal.

Once when she took a day off for being sick, her employer penalized her by paying 25 percent less for the entire week. That was the last straw and she quit her job.

 “They never gave me money for taking care of their grandson,” Alvarez said. “They never gave me money for cleaning their daughter’s house.”

Today, Alvarez educates other domestic workers about their rights, teaches them how to negotiate with their employers and coordinates efforts to lobby for legal reforms. She is one of the leading organizers for the domestic workers’ movement in Southern California. 

Alvarez works at the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, a non-profit organization that educates and organizes immigrant communities. In addition to domestic workers, she also works with day laborers to spread awareness about the different health issues they face and how to avoid diseases. 

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As part of her job, Alvarez has walked the streets of South Los Angeles, convincing uninterested and busy day laborers the importance of staying healthy. She has taken groups of domestic workers to Sacramento to argue that they deserve more rights—even buttonholing a state senator outside a men’s restroom. She has organized rallies and marched when she was five months pregnant. 

“Women feel more convinced about what Angela says because they know she can understand exactly how they feel,” said Nancy Zuniga, her colleague from the institute. Zuniga said domestic workers opened to up to Alvarez easily as Alvarez shared the same background as them.

It has been nearly 13 years since Alvarez last worked as a domestic worker, but she says their plight hasn’t improved much since her fight for worker rights began. 

“I receive mostly the same complaints that I had,” she said. “Nothing has changed. All the normal rights that other laborers have, domestic workers don’t have.” 

According to research conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the University of Illinois at Chicago, domestic workers are excluded from key federal and California employment and labor laws. They also work in sub-standard conditions that make them vulnerable to injuries. Studies have revealed that more than 35 percent of workers suffer from work-related injuries, but only one to two percent receive workers’  compensation or health insurance coverage. The researchers said that 25 percent of domestic workers in California are paid below minimum wage and work long hours without breaks.

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Alvarez said she believes the reason domestic workers were excluded from labor laws when they were enacted more than 70 years ago is due in part to enduring traces of slavery and racism. Domestic workers were usually women of color and their work was taken for granted for several centuries, she said.

“You are a person and sometimes, they don’t see that,” she said. “They treat you like you are nothing or you are less because you are a domestic worker and it’s not like that. Domestic work is a real job…. It needs to be recognized as that.” 

Alvarez emigrated from Guatemala to the United States illegally in 1995 to escape poverty and the Guatemalan civil war, after members of her extended family were assassinated, she said.

“It [was] really hard for me to make the decision to come here because I love my sisters and brothers,” she said. “But sometimes, the necessity you have is stronger than your love for the people.”

Alvarez found her first job as a domestic worker through her mother who was already working as a housekeeper in Los Angeles. 

For five years, Alvarez did different types of domestic work for different employers. She did everything from walking dogs to taking care of children to cleaning houses. Though Alvarez wasn’t making much money, she sent a portion of her salary to her siblings in Guatemala each month. 

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In 2000, Alvarez got married and stopped working; her husband, who worked as a butcher at a retail store, made enough to support both of them. After four years, her marriage culminated in divorce. Alvarez, a single mother with no job, had to support three children— two of whom were diagnosed with autism.

“It was a really hard time,” Alvarez said. 

Alvarez moved to her mother’s house and was looking for jobs when the pastor at her local church suggested she join a six-month training program to become a health promoter at a nearby community center.

Alvarez went through the training and joined the institute in 2006 as a health promoter volunteer. 

Her job was to reach out to Latino immigrant day laborers and spread awareness about cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and other health issues—a challenging task according to Marlom Portillo, the institute’s executive director. 

“The first thing [most workers] cared about was getting a job,” he said. “And the second they cared about was getting a job too. They don’t care about workplace safety or their health.”

Portillo said he first saw leadership potential in Alvarez when he saw her convince day laborers on the streets of Los Angeles to participate in a research survey about their health—successfully tripling their response from laborers.

“She would walk a mile here and a half a mile there talking to workers and distributing flyers,” he said. “She has the ability to pour her heart out and engage with people.”

He soon hired her as a part-time staff member. Portillo said she honed her leadership skills further, learned English and rose quickly in the organization. She soon became the manager of the institute’s health program.

In 2010, when the institute expanded to help domestic workers, Alvarez plunged into the project.

She started meeting with domestic workers every Wednesday, leading discussions on important issues, like their long working hours, exposure to toxic detergents and wage theft. She discussed lobbying strategies and the need for a bill of rights for domestic workers that would provide caregivers and childcare providers with overtime pay after nine hours of work per day or 45 hours of work per week.

“Angela was their friend, confidante and leader,” Portillo said. 

It was in one of these meetings that Lidia Aguilar, a domestic worker, heard Alvarez talking about the bill of rights. According to Augilar, it was surprising to learn that there were people pushing for reforms in her line of work. 

“When I heard about this, it motivated me immediately to participate,” Aguilar said. 

Alvarez led a team of women, including Aguilar, and lobbied along with the National Domestic Workers Alliance for the bill of rights, making several trips to Sacramento and other cities.

She organized and marched in rallies on the streets of Sacramento—even during the later stages of her pregnancy.

“She treated us like a human being,” Aguilar said. “She always put us in front of herself.”

Once the team made a trip to Sacramento to meet with Sen. Ronald Calderon to persuade him to support the reform. They had an appointment but were told when they arrived that the senator had a “last minute change of mind” and didn’t want to meet. 

One of the women in the group saw Calderon sneak out of the back door of his office and go into a restroom. Alvarez asked the team to follow and they waited for 15 minutes outside the door to confront him. He came out, but refused to have a conversation with them, Aguilar said. 

Alvarez did not give up. She booked a new appointment to meet him and returned a couple of months later with her team. This time around, Calderon met with them. He eventually supported the bill. He did not return a call for comment.

Alvarez’s team was up against powerful opponents in the form of senior care centers and third-party home care agencies that employed domestic workers. 

But in September 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights into law.

“It was one of the most special moments of my life,” Alvarez recalled.

The National Domestic Workers' Alliance

One of them is the right to take 10-minute breaks after every three hours of work.

“It’s a hard job involving physical labor,” said Alvarez. “We deserve a break. There are employers who don’t want to see you resting. If they see you even for one or two minutes they say, ‘What are you doing, why you not working?’” 

Another of her desired reforms is the right to safe working conditions. More than 50 percent of workers have reported using toxic cleaning supplies without protection, according to the research report. Alvarez regularly hears complaints from workers about nosebleeds and skin rashes after they have had to work with chemicals for five to six hours. 

“We try to teach workers to negotiate with their employers to give eco-friendly materials, but employers don’t listen,” she said. “Eco-friendly detergents take more time.”

For Alvarez, working for the rights of domestic workers isn’t about money. Officially, Alvarez works as a part-time health manager and gets paid only for that. All the extra hours she puts in to aid domestic workers is on a voluntary basis and without pay. 

“I want those who come [after] me to have the things I didn’t have,” she said. “I have four children and a big family. I want to do the right thing for their futures.” 

Reach Staff Reporter Sinduja Rangarajan here. Follow her on twitter here.

A shorter version of this article was first published in Intersections South LA.