Mujeres Unidas y Activas

Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) is a grassroots organization of Latina immigrant women with a dual mission of personal transformation and community power.  MUA’s Caring Hands (“Manos Cariñosas”) project is a multi-service workers’ center that provides job training and placements to over 40 women each year as home health care and childcare providers and housecleaners.  It is a workers’ association through which members learn to negotiate contracts and how to best present themselves to employers, while also building skills and participating in workers’ rights campaigns that teach immigrant women how to advocate for themselves. 

MUA recently celebrated its 15th Anniversary and throughout its growth as an organization MUA has prioritized placing more power in the hands of its membership committees.  Today members directly run the organization’s grassroots funding, peer counseling and other outreach activities

Demanding Health and Safety from the Onset: Caring Hands

The Caring Hands project asserts from the very beginning that workers have the right to a job with dignity, respect, and safe working conditions.  To be considered for the program, potential employers must adhere to these conditions.  MUA provides a sample contract that workers use to negotiate their work hours, pay and tasks, and teaches workers how to use the contract. MUA has been able to integrate health and safety into their work in primarily two ways:  standardizing the use of safer household cleaning supplies, and providing health and safety training for MUA members, in collaboration with WISH.  The trainings have focused on ergonomics and chemical hazards for domestic workers, including both strategies to implement solutions at work and using applicable laws and standards. Workers learn safer cleaning techniques and collectively establish standards for employers, such as ensuring that the workers can clean with safe products, to not only protect themselves but the employers’ families as well. Although most employers have been amenable to supplying safer cleaning products, providing safer equipment, like mechanical lifts for homecare purposes, has proven to be a greater challenge due to costs.  Rest and meal breaks have also been difficult to enforce at times.  Caring Hands is always seeking more responsible employers to help expand opportunities for these women to reach economic independence.

Policy Efforts

MUA is also advocating for improved protections at the policy level.  The principle challenges currently faced by MUA are the limitations in labor protections for domestic workers.  Domestic workers are excluded from Cal/OSHA protections and certain wage and hour protections, which makes working in safe environments much harder to guarantee.  They are proactively collaborating with other immigrant rights organizations to strategize on a state-wide legislative level, and have recently worked with the Domestic Workers Coalition (which includes MUA, POWER, La Colectiva de Mujeres, CHIRLA, and the Pilipino Workers Center) to develop and advocate for AB 2536, a legislative effort that would provide improved labor protection for household workers.  It would ensure that personal attendants receive equal overtime protection and give all household workers the right to recover unpaid wages.  The bill passed out of the Assembly with 44 votes on 5/31, out of 80 possible votes, and will now head into the Senate. For more information, visit www.local-impact.org.