The challenge

As the population of the United States ages and the costs of nursing homes and assisted living skyrocket, most elderly people—and younger people with disabilities—prefer to stay in their own homes. There, they can live with more dignity, independence, and security. Yet many need in-home help with cleaning, cooking, and personal care. For this, the counties they live in typically assign women of color, often immigrants, who work long hours at minimum wage or less and rarely receive raises, much less vacation, paid holidays or sick leave. There are no pensions or Social Security either—and certainly no subsidized health care for themselves and their families. “Their jobs are physically and mentally demanding, emotionally draining, oftentimes lonely, erratic, and incredibly undervalued,” Fahari Jeffers and Ken Seaton-Msemaji write.


Seeds of commitment

In 1970, Seaton-Msemaji, a high school graduate and experienced organizer, was functionally illiterate. When he met Jeffers, then a 16-year-old high school dropout, she taught him to read. He, in turn, encouraged her to return to school. She took his advice, eventually becoming a lawyer and earning a master’s degree in public administration. In the early 1970’s, Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji, both African-Americans, joined Cesar Chávez to work with the largely Latino United Farm Workers (UFW). Chávez dreamed of building a domestic workers movement as a counterpart to his farm workers movement. Domestic workers, Chávez believed, were even more exploited than agricultural laborers because they endured “wages and working conditions inferior to those of farm workers.”


Accomplishments

Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji have built the movement Chávez dreamed of creating. In 1979, they founded the United Domestic Workers of America, the first labor union to represent domestic workers, home attendants, and in-home care workers exclusively. The California-based union is now part of the American Federation of Federal, State and Municipal Employees, with a membership of 62,000 statewide. It is the third union in U.S. history to be founded by African-Americans or Latinos, along with the Sleeping Car Porters Union, founded by A. Phillip Randolph, and Chávez’ UFW.

In the two decades since its creation, the domestic workers union has pushed California’s counties to establish employers-of-record for previously disenfranchised caretakers—in essence, a bill of rights. Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji, who are a married couple, have also successfully lobbied for state laws mandating basic legal rights, decent working conditions, a fair wage, and benefits for the state’s 200,000 domestic workers. They won the right to bargain collectively, and they led the campaign for a $500 million state set-aside fund for wage increases and health insurance over a five-year period.

Today, the union operates the Domestic Workers Home Care Center, a non-profit home-care service center which feeds more than 7,200 people a year, provides clothes to 340 families, and represents home-care workers at government hearings. The center also operates a food bank for low-income people and runs successful welfare-to-work and community-services training programs. Working with government agencies, business and religious groups, and advocacy organizations for the elderly and disabled, Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji educate Californians about the lives of the state’s home-bound residents and the people who care for them.



Their Leadership style

Seaton-Msemaji spreads the group’s message through public speaking and by galvanizing advocacy groups; Fahari leads day-to-day operations and contract negotiations and also speaks publicly. “We believe the ability to trust is as important as being trusted,” they write. “If it’s true that most people will first follow a person rather than an idea, our responsibility is not to betray the trust of our followers. Ultimately…good leadership has one objective: to bring out the best in people towards fulfillment of a common goal.” Intensive field work—meaning door-to door-visits, telephone calls, and direct mail campaigns—is the mainstay of their effort to inform and recruit homecare workers. Union leaders and members alike attend civic, community, and legislative meetings at the local and state levels—anywhere the welfare of their communities will be affected.

The awardees’ democratic leadership style shows in the center’s board, which includes a consumer adviser with a disability (paraplegia) requiring home care. Other members represent the union’s diverse makeup: 25 percent African-American, 30 percent Latina, 14 percent Asian, and 30 percent white – and 90 percent female. Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji write that their greatest challenge has been working with people marginalized all their lives. Their difficult task, they say, is convincing the marginalized that their opinions matter and that they deserve better treatment. “They themselves are best qualified to tell their own stories,” the activists say of their clients. So “it is appropriate and necessary for them to fight for themselves . . . they can become leaders.”



The future

Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji expect to remain active in this movement and to spur similar action nationwide, building “toward a mass movement of poor people and low-wage workers to transform our society.” However, they believe their biggest challenge will be to keep their own organization strong after they move out of the spotlight. Towards that goal, they are grooming new leaders and have launched an alliance with San Diego’s community college system, to secure additional training for their members.


More about Jeffers and Seaton-Msemaji

“In the last couple of years…Fahari and Ken have realized a dream. Things are going much better than they ever thought they would. Their membership has mushroomed, and they’ve brought people together, not in one county but in dozens. And their work is going to increase the quality of care for everyone.”
— Jerry Butkieweicz, San Diego Imperial Counties Labor Council, California.

“Msemaji’s and Jeffers’ supporters lavish praise on the couple and the union. While praise for the pair and their organizing activities are to be expected from their liberal supporters, some of their biggest backers are conservative businessmen, not the type who would usually support labor unions.”
— Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1989