On Nov 1, 2022 Executive Director Stacy Kono held an Instagram Live conversation with Angela Garbes to discuss her national bestselling book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change and how it relates to our work at Hand in Hand. Essential Labor was listed by NPR and the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2022.Below is an edited excerpt of their conversation. You can watch the full video here on Hand in Hand’s YouTube page.
Stacy Kono: So in your book, the focus is mothering as social change. However you talk about this essential labor as not limited to the people who give birth to children. Can you tell us more about what you mean and why this work is essential?
Angela Garbes: So let me just start with my big belief, which is that raising children is a social responsibility. When we take care of children, when we take care of families, we are really investing in the health and well-being of our entire society.
And in our country, parents, you’re really on your own until your child is six years old and can go to public school. There are improvements being made on that with pre-K, but it’s far from universal. And then with a lack of guaranteed federal paid leave, it’s so much harder than it should be to take care of your people and to take care of yourself.
The book is primarily about childcare, but I’m not trying to privilege one kind of care over the other. I also think about caring for elders. There are so many of us who are taking care of children and our parents at the same.
Women who provide the majority of care in America. One of the reasons why the gender pay gap exists is because throughout their careers, whether they choose to become a mother or not, women are expected to leave the workforce if there is a care need within their family.
And so I wanted to think about a way to call people into this work and to show people that we all have a role to play. I think if we were to reflect on our life, I can’t think about anybody making it through the vulnerability of infancy or childhood or the tumultuous of adolescence without people caring for them, and that extends well beyond the family.
Stacy Kono: Why do you think it’s necessary to center Black immigrant people of color and immigrant women in the role of care?
Angela Garbes: Well, because it’s fundamental. We can’t have a complete or real conversation if we don’t talk about the fact that the majority of domestic workers, I want to say 67% of domestic workers are either Asian, American Pacific Islander, Latin, and Black African American. And so many of these workers are mothers themselves. So people who look like us are overrepresented in this work. When I wrote my book, I was trying to make sense of the present moment, which at the time was the pandemic— public schools and childcare centers were closed.
What I found in researching was just really how much we need to reckon with the past. The reason why women of color do the majority of care work is structural. It’s by design. And one of the things that we don’t talk enough about is it’s the direct legacy of slavery in America. So generations of Black women worked in the home. The home has always been a workplace for Black women in America. And this is one thing I struggled with in my book. How do I explain that the entire American economic system, all American wealth, is built inherently on the exploitation of women of color?
We have to have some level of accountability in that. But what I’m more interested in really is where do we go from here? How do we value that?
My parents are healthcare workers. My dad is the first person in his family to go to college. He became a doctor, and my mother became a nurse. And really the reason why that happened is because, and we don’t talk about this history that much, but the Philippines was an American colony. And so my parents were raised in an education system that was based on American public schools. They were raised speaking English. And the United States set up medical schools and nursing schools, and they presented it to Filipinos as a way of finding economic opportunity. And it certainly worked out that way for my parents. But internally to themselves, American government officials talked about how they were setting up these healthcare systems because they needed to sanitize the population that was inherently diseased and dirty, and primitive….So my parents benefited from this, but their lives were really shaped by very racist beliefs and imperialists, to invoke Bell Hooks, this imperialist patriarchy. And that’s something that I understood about my family but didn’t really know.
I saw how the story of enslaved ancestors is not my family’s story to tell, but my family’s story is really important. And it’s the same forces that shaped it. It’s capitalism, it’s colonialism. It’s extraction. It’s exploitation. And so when you get at the root of those things, that’s how we can begin to value. That’s how we got a care workforce that is mainly Black and brown women. And so there’s no way, if you don’t understand the roots of it, I don’t know how you can move forward and create an equitable system because you’re just going to be adding bandaids without fixing the fundamental issues.
Stacy Kono: Absolutely. Thank you for that and for contextualizing it within your own personal, but geopolitical story, your own family. My paternal grandmother was a domestic worker here in the Bay Area, and it was really the only work she could get as somebody who could not speak English. And she did share with me different stories of just the way she was treated, a bell being rung to her, to help the kids, or it’s just… And the lack of actual real formality to the work, despite how essential that labor is to so many families. I mean, it got its roots in the National Labor Relations Act and the New Deal, excluding Black workers and ultimately, workers of color from domestic workers and farm workers, from the labor protections that all the rest of us have.
Angela Garbes: Yes, and there’s only one explanation for that.
Stacy Kono: Like you said, it’s built into the system.
Angela Garbes: It’s racism. It’s believing that these people don’t deserve a living wage.
Stacy Kono: It’s the same conditions that create low wages, no benefits, exploitation, discrimination, and harassment for workers, that actually create the vacuum of information for people who are workers in their homes so they don’t know.
Angela Garbes: To see that you are not really different from the people that you employ, I think that’s very powerful and just that sort of pause.
Stacy Kono: Well, and you were naming that feelings come up for people around that. There’s some shame or embarrassment. There are some just pieces around like, “Oh gosh, what does it mean for me to be an employer? I don’t want that.” Especially when they understand the structures we live under of white supremacy, and patriarchy, and the anti-immigrant pieces, all of those pieces, it can feel like a heavy lift, but we really believe all of us actually need each other. There’s no shame in getting support. And in fact, that’s what makes our communities and our families work. So to try to reframe that frame of like, “Oh, now I have the privilege and I’m scared of it,” to, “I can actually play a role hand in hand with workers to transform the way our care economy works.”
We really invite employers to join these fights because we know we have a shared stake in transforming the way this work happens.
Angela Garbes: I know that feeling of I can’t take the rest and time that I deserve because if I do, I’ll fall behind. The lack of money, and when you think about it, most people if you work for a wage outside of the home, no matter what the conditions are, most people get some level of paid time off or vacation, even if it’s just a few days. But those are all things that we deserve. And that’s especially true for domestic workers. I think the piece about guilt or shame doesn’t do anything. It keeps us small. It keeps things private, and it doesn’t benefit the workers.
When you start to formalize those things, it’s about expectations, and it’s really about showing that respect. And I think you can move from a place of silence and feeling weird and awkward about something to having a real relationship with the person that you employ
