Effort informs of domestic workers’ rights

Gov. Neil Abercrombie signed a bill into law last year that protects domestic workers under the state’s labor and civil rights laws. And now state agencies, community advocates and service providers are launching a multilingual public education campaign to spread the word.

"These workers deserve to be treated with the same dignity as any other worker in our state, and now our laws include rather than exclude them," Dwight Takamine, director of the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, said Tuesday at the state Capitol. "But we realize that legal protections lose their meaning if workers and employers don’t know their rights and responsibilities."

Informational signs already posted inside 530 buses in three languages — English, Chuukese and Tagalog — feature a hand holding up a yellow cleaning glove. Additionally, brochures and service provider contact cards have been translated into at least 10 different languages.

Mila Kaahanui, executive director of the Office of Community Services, said, "It became very clear early on that we had to find culturally and linguistically appropriate ways of communicating to domestic workers who are mostly foreign-born that they have certain rights."

Act 248 applies to nannies, housekeepers, cooks, gardeners, caregivers for seniors and other in-home help employed directly by households. State law previously excluded "services by an individual employed as a domestic in the home of any person" from its definition of employment.

"In many instances what we’re talking about is employers that simply don’t know the rules, don’t know that there are rules now, don’t know that this is not an ad hoc operation anymore, that there are standards to be met," Abercrombie said.

When Hawaii passed the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights last year, it became the second state in the country, along with New York, to expand its labor laws to domestic workers.

Within months of the law passing, Abercrombie’s wife, Nancie Caraway, who championed for the bill’s passage, convened a working group of stakeholders to discuss how those affected by the law could best be reached.

A woman who spoke during the event at the Capitol said the law could have helped her in 2009 when she feared speaking up about her employer abusing her and forcing her to work six days a week for a family with children, earning only $400 a month, because of her immigration status.

Kaahanui said domestic workers need to know they are entitled to be paid minimum wage and overtime for working more than 40 hours a week. Also, the law includes anti-discrimination provisions — regardless of immigration status, it protects them from being verbally, physically or sexually abused or harassed.

"You cannot imagine how huge this is for people who live in the shadows," she said. "You cannot imagine how liberating this is for people who live in fear of strangers, of government or anyone representing the establishment.

"Knowing that they don’t have to fear government, knowing that there are services they can go to for help, truly frees them from what we call modern-day bondage and servitude," Kaahanui said.