Domestic Workers Alliance, which has taken this movement for workers’ rights to a national level by
creating a coalition of forty affiliate domestic workers’ organizations across twenty-nine states. The group
is working to replicate the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in other states, such as California,
Illinois, and Massachusetts.
Ai-Jen Poo. Reprinted by permission of Gillian Laub, © 2012.
Poo often cites her mother and grandmother as important influences on her work, describing them as
role models who recognized the value of all kinds of labor, including the care work traditionally assigned
to women. “They were both really strong women with a lot of wisdom,” she said. “I always knew that if
we could just see the world through the eyes of women we’d have a much clearer picture of both what the
problems are and what the solutions are.”^76 Poo pursued this goal by encouraging policy makers to listen
to the voices of the 2.5 million housekeepers, nannies, and elder caregivers in the United States. For her
work toward what she has described as “peace and justice in the home,” she achieved international
recognition and numerous awards, including being named as one of Newsweek’s “150 Fearless Women”
and one of Time’s “100 most influential people in the world.”^77 “So much of the unfinished business of
the women’s movement,” she said, “is really about bringing respect and dignity to this work,” work that
has remained feminized—and thus marginalized—throughout the world, even after decades of feminist
change.^78 The National Domestic Workers Alliance is part of a growing transnational movement for
domestic workers’ rights, which includes organizations and trade unions from around the world. At the
same time that women like Poo are working to build a broad, multifocused feminist movement organized
around social justice for all, another contemporary movement has also proven that feminism is indeed
global.