An organization "Genius" for domestic workers

Ai-jen Poo AP testifies at a Senate hearing on migrants, March 18th-2013.

His profession is likely to be less protected and less attention from any legitimate practice in the United States, but to quote Ai-jen Poo, the activists are "women who work that make the rest of the work possible."

You are maids or nannies or caregivers to the sick and elderly. The vast majority of them are women, immigrants and women of color.

Until recently they were exempt from virtually all federal and state labor laws, except in theory and in some cases the minimum wage. Laws to limit the number of hours required an employee to work. The laws to protect employees from harassment, racial discrimination and workplace hazards. Laws, the minimum standard of living for the residents employed. Domestic workers have been specifically excluded from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the National Labor Relations Act and the Occupational Safety and Health at Work.

This is beginning to change, thanks largely to the efforts of a woman who for 16 years, juggled a dizzying number of warrants for non-profit organizations to improve the lives and work of domestic workers.

This week, Ai-jen Poo was awarded a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She says she will use the $ 625,000 research grant to continue his work as CEO of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

After years of partisan debate, federal labor regulations that extend the rights of overtime, the health care workers that are used by a third party corresponds to lead. A new California law overtime pay is extended to domestic workers. Massachusetts now extends to protection of maternity leave for domestic workers and requires only cause for dismissal.

All this has been recognized as a benchmark, but most Americans probably do not know how this work was unprotected modern labor law.

You can learn in the not too distant future about the world of domestic workers. The large number of domestic workers and caregivers were decades as more and more women into the labor market full time. Since now based somewhere between one and two million of them are on the way they are counted.

But now, the need for foreign aid is increasingly, with attention focusing on the provision of adult "sandwich generation" from beginning to end of the Middle Ages juggle the responsibilities of their two children and their elderly parents.

A study in 2013 by the Pew Research, nearly half of adults between the ages of 40 and 50 have both a father and a child, have financial or emotional support or possibly care.

Remains to be seen whether they will be better conditions for domestic workers harder to find or bring benefit alone.

Ai-jen Poo course has a plan for that too. In 2011, she created over generations dedicated to create an organization, systems and supports needed dedicated to the elderly.