Here’s How One Domestic Worker Emphasizes Workplace Safety, Even Without Official Rules

One recent morning, Andrea López León swept the hardwood floor of a three-bedroom house in Alhambra, part of her regular cleaning routine as she prepared to mop.

She pulled out a bottle of old-fashioned oil soap. “Since it’s wood, we use a special oil (soap) for wood,” she explained in Spanish.

The floor cleaner she uses is also a product that she considers safe. This is by design.

When López began working for this family a couple of years ago, she asked her employer for a contract, “a written contract in which we ensure my health and safety,” López told LAist, “mine as well as hers.”

The gist of the contract between López and her employer, Marba Reyes, is simple.

"I’m not going to use chemicals,” López said. “They’ll give me my lunch hour. If I work a long day, they can pay me extra hours. And I am not going to lift heavy objects, so as to not hurt my back.”

Domestic employees are excluded from many labor laws

Safety rules for domestic workers are not the norm. Domestic employees, many of them immigrants, are excluded from many labor laws, and there are no official workplace safety regulations for domestic work. Household domestic workers are excluded from protection under California’s Occupational Safety and Health Act.

Worker advocates have long argued that workplace safety regulations for domestic employees are needed, given the harsh cleaning chemicals used, heavy lifting at times, and the risk of slips and falls.

Andrea López, a domestic worker, cleans a home in Los Angeles.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

In California there have been two recent legislative attempts to include domestic work in Cal/OSHA safety regulations, both vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Last September, in his veto message for the most recent bill, Newsom said homes can’t be regulated like traditional businesses. He was also concerned about the bill, which included potential fines, creating cost burdens for lower-income domestic employers “given that approximately 44% of the households that employ domestic workers are low-income themselves,” the veto message read.

Domestic worker advocates say they’ll try for legislation again.

“With the right guidance, and by making guidance more accessible to employers, employers will see it's actually not that onerous,” said Maegan Ortiz, executive director of the Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California, or IDEPSCA, a group that helps domestic workers organize.

The accessible guidance she refers to are new voluntary health and safety guidelines for domestic work, as well as day laborers, that were issued by California’s Department of Industrial Relations early this year. The most recent bill incorporated them. These voluntary guidelines, the nation’s first, are not enforceable, but they act as a template for domestic employers and employees to understand best practices when it comes to workplace health and safety concerns. Among other things, this includes identifying and controlling workplace hazards, and agreeing on tasks to be done.

“Not only does it protect the worker, it protects the employer as well…and the household of the employer,” Ortiz said. “These are commonplace things and common sense things that really we all should be doing in our homes anyway.”

In the meantime, some domestic workers have drawn advice from worker advocates and are taking it upon themselves to negotiate safety agreements where they work.

Heavy lifting and a miscarriage

Andrea López said she learned about workplace safety the hard way. In 2015, she’d only been in the United States for two years after arriving from Veracruz, Mexico. López was working for another employer then, a restaurant owner; she said she worked both in the restaurant and cleaning her supervisor’s home.

That year, López learned that she was pregnant. One day while cleaning the house, her employer asked her to carry a heavy plastic container full of water.

“I had told her I was pregnant, that I couldn’t,” López said, but her employer insisted. López, fearing for her restaurant job, complied.

“And then, I felt like something was tearing in my belly,” López said. “That was a Saturday at 5 p.m. The next morning, Sunday at 10 a.m., I was already bleeding.”

López suffered a miscarriage. The loss was devastating, she said, but it steeled her resolve to learn now to push back. Eventually López joined a domestic worker rights group and learned to advocate for herself with employers.

“Now, every time I go with an employer, I talk with them about that,” she said.

Andrea López worked with the Reyes family, one of her clients, to create a contract to ensure her safety on the job.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

When she interviewed with the Alhambra family a couple of years ago, López asked if they’d be up for a contract with basic safety rules. Her new employer, Marba Reyes, was on board.

“I agree with her,” said Reyes, who works as a massage therapist. “Of course I’ll be taking care of her, I know that cleaning houses is not an easy job, you know.”

Reyes, who lives with her elderly parents, already used simple cleaning products, “just like water and vinegar…only like healthy stuff.”

A sympathetic employer

The family’s personal experience plays a role, too. Both of Reyes’s parents are immigrants themselves.

“I’m also from Mexico,” said Marta Rolón, Reyes’s mother. “And I arrived here doing the same thing.”

Rolón said she took cleaning work in San Marino as a new arrival, before she married her husband, who is from Puerto Rico. Rólon said she understands what it’s like.

“I also had to do it, so we’re going to treat her well, and help her as much as we can,” she said.

Andrea López with her daughter Samara.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

López says things have gone well since. These days, she’s only cleaning for this family because she’s working part-time. That’s because López and her husband, who works in a restaurant, recently welcomed a new baby girl.

She said this time during her pregnancy, “I tried to take care of myself, and they took care of me.”

Her employers have gifted her baby clothes. There’s also a perk to working for a massage therapist: After cleaning, López gets to unwind her back on one of the automatic massage beds that Reyes uses for clients.

López also hopes there can be official safety rules one day for the work she does. But even if it’s just using the voluntary guidelines, she hopes to see more domestic employees and their employers agreeing on best practices.

“It would prevent miscarriages, it would prevent injuries,” she said. “We are human beings.”