Unpaid

For seventy-five years the United States excluded domestic and home care workers from the basic protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Unpaid tells how a small group of women organized against that exclusion and won the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in American history.

In the autumn of 1996, a recent Columbia graduate named Ai-jen Poo sat across from a Filipina care worker in a Chinatown church basement. The woman had spent four years caring for an elderly stranger around the clock. When her employer refused the last wages, there was no law she could call. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been written to leave her out. Unpaid follows twenty-five years of organizing from that basement to Domestic Workers United, a six-year Albany campaign, and the July 2010 signing of New York's Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, then the national alliance that now works in all fifty states. The book is narrative nonfiction.

Based on historical record, journalistic accounts, and public testimony.