The movement you were never meant to see.
For seventy-five years, the richest country on earth decided that the women who cared for its children, its elders, and its homes did not deserve a minimum wage. This is the story of how a small group of women set out to rewrite that law — and won.
A twenty-two-year-old organizer. An invisible army. A law written to leave them out.
In the autumn of 1996, a recent Columbia graduate named Ai-jen Poo sat across from a Filipina care worker in a Chinatown church basement. The woman had just spent four years bathing, feeding, and medicating an elderly stranger — seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, for a dollar-twenty an hour. When her employer refused to pay her final wages, she was told: What are you going to do? Call the police?
She didn't. She couldn't. Because the Fair Labor Standards Act — the 1938 law that guarantees every American worker a minimum wage and overtime — was written to leave her out. On purpose.
Unpaid is the untold story of the movement that set out to change that. It traces twenty-five years of organizing from a Brooklyn storefront to the steps of the New York State Capitol, through the historic passage of the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in American history, to the national alliance that now operates in all fifty states. It is a story about race, labor, and power — and about the ordinary women who refused, finally, to remain invisible.
"The work that makes all other work possible."Ai-jen Poo
Three acts. One quiet revolution.
A narrative that moves from a single Chinatown intake form to a nationwide movement — told through the women who lived it.
Discovery
A young organizer learns the hidden history of domestic labor in America — a deliberate exclusion rooted in the Jim Crow compromises of the New Deal. And begins, very quietly, to build.
Building the Movement
Domestic Workers United. Park benches turned into union halls. A six-year campaign in Albany. The unglamorous, relentless, astonishing work of winning rights one state at a time.
Victory & Legacy
July 1, 2010: New York becomes the first state in American history to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The movement goes national. And the real work — federal protection — begins.
The woman who would change the lives of two million American workers was twenty-two years old, five foot three, and carrying a cardboard box of photocopied flyers when she first heard the story that would alter the course of her life.
It was the autumn of 1996, and Ai-jen Poo had just graduated from Columbia University. She was working at CAAAV — the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence — in a cramped storefront office in Manhattan's Chinatown, where the walls were covered with posters in Chinese, Korean, and English, and the filing cabinets overflowed with intake forms documenting the daily cruelties inflicted upon New York's most vulnerable residents.
Ai-jen's job was to listen.
What people have said about this story.
Voices from the movement Unpaid chronicles.
"One of the most important labor movements of our time — and the most profoundly overlooked."
"Ai-jen Poo is one of the most remarkable activists you've never heard of."
"I am not invisible. I am a worker. I am a human being."
"Until this country values care as much as it values profit, the fight continues."
Ai-jen Poo
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