Not long ago Kenya was taking the subway home from work when she heard what sounded like gunshots behind her. Heart pounding, she ducked under her seat. A native New Yorker, she isn’t easily rattled, but now she could see people running around her.
A few moments later her train pulled into the next station, and hordes of people fled the car, including her. The police were on the platform. None stopped her to ask what had happened. Kenya didn’t stick around to volunteer. After she gathered herself, she did what most of us would: She made a phone call. Not to her two sisters or her nephew, who live with her and another roommate in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Not to a friend. Instead, she reached out to two of the people she sees most—the parents of the child she cares for in Astoria, Queens.
Kenya in her home in Brooklyn
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this just happened to me. I’m so shaken up,’” she remembers. Kenya, 54, has worked for at least a half dozen couples and knows these two to be kind and decent. And indeed, both were understanding when she told them. Worried for her too. When they offered to cover an Uber for her to get to work that morning, she accepted. But she was back on the train just over 24 hours later, stomach churning. What choice did she have? There is no work-from-home option for the over 14,000 people in New York City who work as nannies. She has bills, rent, groceries to pay for. She can’t afford a mental health day.
At first, caregiving wasn’t a career Kenya felt called to. She started working at 16, picking up a series of jobs. She worked at a summer program for kids. She worked at McDonald’s. She went to department stores for a spell. She dabbled in after-school pickup. She worked as a bank teller. She landed on childcare without meaning to. In fact, she had once wanted to be a police officer. But she had an operation on her back in her 20s, resulting in a metal rod in her spine that barred her from service.
When she started caring for children, she hadn’t planned to stick it out. But she loved it. She would have liked to have kids of her own, but “it just wasn’t in the cards for me,” she says now. In that sense, it isn’t a surprise that she found this line of work.
The downsides are of course obvious: The work can be strenuous and tends not to be well paid. For some it is unprotected, and abuses can proliferate. Many childcare workers around the country don’t get guaranteed sick pay; almost none have employer-provided health insurance or paid family or medical leave. There is almost no such thing as a stable gig; kids grow up, and parents’ childcare needs can shift without warning.
Even with her years of experience, Kenya has to hustle. She struggles to save as she’d like to. But let’s state at least one upside here, for the record: “The babies are so joyful, really,” Kenya says, smiling. “I meet some nannies and I tell them, ‘I don’t think this is for you.’ You really have to have a natural love for children to be in this line of work, and you have to be patient because it’s not easy.”
It’s not easy. Not the work, not the conditions under which most low-income women do it. That was the case even before the pandemic upended the working arrangements of millions of New Yorkers who once required full-time childcare workers and now seem to want nannies to be on call at all hours, but be compensated for just a fraction of them. And it’s even more true now, as inflation and a tight housing market have sent the cost of living soaring.
“I live paycheck to paycheck,” Kenya says. And while pundits obsess over ups and downs in the stock market, it’s the core economic numbers that affect her personal finances. She knows she’s not alone—that there are not just millions of low-income workers in a similar position, but scores of people who share her particular considerations. For decades the population of care workers—which includes nannies like Kenya as well as those who work in child, elder, or health care—has had numbers but not power. Nationwide the group’s ranks have swelled to almost 5 million people, and the gender divide is stark—perhaps because this kind of underpaid work in general is coded as feminine and also happens to be some of the most intimate labor possible. Around 85% of care workers overall are women; closer to 95% of child carers are. Still, the sector has been hard to organize, not least because of the isolated nature of the work, the high turnover rate, and the fact that some percentage of workers are undocumented and can therefore be hesitant to get involved.
But there’s reason to believe the status quo is starting to change. After decades of silence and invisibility, care workers are making themselves known. Powerful organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and smaller, local initiatives like Carroll Gardens Nanny Association (CGNA) in New York City—where Kenya educates newbie nannies on the art of negotiation—have laid the groundwork, elevating the needs and aspirations of care workers in the public consciousness and schooling care workers on their own influence in the process. And women themselves—those who work in this field and those who do not—have demonstrated that valuing care and making it accessible is urgent. Staggering majorities of American women rank the economy and health care as extremely important to their vote in this election, as shown by the results of the Glamour YouGov poll, where the two issues topped the list of those most important to all women.
Of course, shared concerns do not necessarily mean shared votes. According to Glamour’s YouGov survey, women with household incomes between $30,000 and $80,000 annually are split 50-50 in their support for Democrats and Republicans. That same population trusts Republicans more on the economy and Democrats more on health care, which helps explain the strategies that both parties have taken up in this election. Donald Trump has hammered Kamala Harris’s approach to the economy and has worked to tie her vision to voter dissatisfaction with the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Harris has made health care—and the care economy generally—a pillar of her pitch to voters. When she became the de facto Democratic presidential nominee over the summer, she namechecked care work twice within her first week of campaigning. In a pair of speeches, she vowed to expand access to paid leave, housing assistance, childcare, and elder care.
That attention has thrilled organizers and advocates, with Ai-jen Poo, president of the NDWA, calling Harris one of the “biggest champions on the care agenda” in an interview with The Washington Post. But it has also put care workers at the center of social and cultural debates that conservatives are advancing—about women and work, about children and whose job it is to look after them, about the role of immigrants in American life. Republicans in the Senate blocked an expanded child tax credit, which would have helped millions of low-income families. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has said he wants to raise the child tax credit to $5,000, but he skipped out on the recent Senate vote. Still, regardless of the politics, too often lost in the chess moves and political strategizing are the voices of care workers themselves.
Dolores in her home in Brooklyn
To be fair, schedules do not tend to be amenable to much off-the-cuff musing. Delores, who has been caring for children in one form or another for the best part of four decades, is almost never available to speak to me before 8 p.m. Her waking hours are spent preparing for work, commuting to work, working, and returning home. Making the trek from her apartment in Brooklyn to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she spends more than 10 hours in transit each week. When she’s on the job, she’s often on her hands and knees. Her employer is pregnant, which means Delores will soon be caring for two children instead of one. One is easier, of course, but two doesn’t faze her. Three times, she’s cared for twins.
Delores, 60, grew up in Jamaica. She emigrated in her 20s, finding work on the Cayman Islands and then later in Florida. She visited New York not intending to find a new place to live, but she fell hard. “It was exciting, with all the shopping and the stores. I’m like, ‘I like this,’” she remembers. “Everybody’s moving at a faster pace, not laid back and all of that. I just gravitated to it and I loved it, and I was like, ‘Well I’m going to make this home.’” She has been here ever since.
Delores is no longer married, but she was when she first moved to the States. At the time she was ping-ponging back and forth between her husband, who lived here, and her children, who were still in Jamaica. It’s a setup familiar to countless immigrants and poignant for nannies in particular, who spend their time caring for other people’s children in order to provide for their own. “I had someone capable taking care of them,” Delores says. It helped that her two kids were then old enough to talk to her on the phone and communicate. “But yes,” she adds, after a pause. “It was hard.”
She made it a point to talk to them every single day, and to do her “parental part,” as she puts it. She gave advice, she counseled them, she was clear about her expectations for them. She watched them grow up, albeit from a distance. Now one lives not too far from her in New York. The other is in England.
It was a friend in New York who introduced her to care work. When she lived in the Cayman Islands, she worked with children with special needs, so she had some experience. She loved it. “It gives me so much joy working with the kids, watching their development,” she says. “I love the kids, and the kids love me. I think I’m just a kid person.”
Still, her first jobs were disorienting. She’d never worked in a stranger’s house before. She had no idea what to expect or what she could ask for. Twice she took live-in gigs but started to feel claustrophobic. In the beginning she took what was offered to her. Before long she learned what she could demand. She became “someone who stands up for herself,” she explains. “And if there’s something I think is out of bounds, I will speak up.”
She spent 14 years on one job, far longer than most of white-collar America now spends at any single gig. She still talks to the children. “We’re almost like family,” she says. So much so that they still exchange cards at Christmas and Hanukkah, and she receives another on Mother’s Day.
The work gives her purpose. The kids charm her. She feels fulfilled. But that kind of satisfaction doesn’t translate into better wages. Delores has lived in the same apartment since 1998, decorating it to her exact specifications. Last year her landlord raised her rent. She has watched her electric bill go up. At the laundromat she gets charged double what she used to for a plastic bag.
