Struggling for Immigrants' Rights at the Local Level: The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Initiative in a Suburb of Washington, DC

Beginning in 2005, an unlikely but profound series of events—aimed at providing legal protection to domestic workers and nannies—unfolded in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Against the odds, a group of immigrant women, together with local advocacy organisations, pushed forward the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, an initiative conceived to entitle domestic workers for the first time to a written contract, health insurance, sick leave, paid vacations and other provisions. Such an innovative proposal was the result of a confluence of different factors: the attribution of an opportunity for effective intervention at the local level, in a politically receptive setting; the capacity of the domestic workers to appropriate sufficient organisation and replicate successful models from other contexts; and the deployment of a flexible and complex interpretive construction of the problem that combines a human rights approach, a class harmony perspective, and the utilisation of highly socially valued symbols such as family and home.