Ai-jen Poo has been organizing immigrant workers since 1996. She is the Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Co-director of Caring Across Generations. NDWA is the voice of the cleaning and caregiving workforce in the United States, representing 64 local domestic worker and homecare worker organizations in thirty American cities. She is the author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America, published in 2016 by The New Press.
How did you get involved in organizing care workers and advocating for better care?
I was raised by proud women who were forced to make some impossible choices between work and family at the expense of their own health and well-being. I very much wanted to honour their work. The other key is my grandfather, who helped to raise me. He became frail as he grew older. At a certain point my father could no longer care for him at home, and he couldn’t find the right homecare support. Against his wishes, my grandfather ended up in a nursing home. I visited him and it was dehumanizing. I remember feeling heartbroken that somebody who cared for us was now unable to live on his terms at this important stage of life. That experience stayed with me. I came to commit myself to ensuring that our older loved ones, many of whom cared for us, have real choices to live well as they age.
What does the crisis of care mean to you? How would you describe the contours of the care crisis in the United States now?
What the care crisis means to me at this moment is tied to a paradigmatic change, a generational shift, in American families. On the one hand, the baby boom generation is aging: four million people reach retirement age every year in the US. People are also living longer: the cohort that’s eighty-five or older is about to double what it was a decade ago. We’re about to have the largest oldest population we’ve known—and we are woefully unprepared for the support they need and for the dreams and aspirations they have. On the other hand, the millennial generation is turning thirty-five, and having almost four million babies per year.
At both ends of the generational spectrum we have a massive increase in the need for care. And we have less capacity at home to provide that care. Seventy-five percent of American children grow up in households where all the adults work outside the home. We are no longer a society that can count on women as default care support—and we haven’t, at a time of incredible need, put systems in place to account for this. That’s creating a crisis for so many families. It’s a crisis that is emotional, material, practical, and spiritual. Seventy-five percent of the American workforce earns less than $50,000 per year, and the average cost of a private nursing home room is about $90,000 per year. The math doesn’t add up. There’s no way it works for the vast majority of working families.
So, yes, it is creating a crisis. But it is also probably the single greatest opportunity we have to unite cross-sections of our population, across lines of race, geography, and class, and work together to create the kinds of care infrastructure that support all of us who are working and caring for our families.
The struggle to raise the status of care and care work is in no small part a cultural battle. What do you see as the most urgently needed shifts in how care is narrated or represented?
We have to value care and care work as true work. It’s the work that makes everything else possible in our economy. We often think about infrastructure as roads, bridges, and tunnels, but care is infrastructure, too, if we think about infrastructure as the arteries that make commerce and everything else in our economy possible. The problem is that we haven’t invested in care as infrastructure. We have to rethink our approach to care, how we value care, how we value the human beings and the relationships at the heart of care, and how a well-functioning society invests in care as infrastructure.
It’s also about creating a framework to support working people. It’s about investing in care jobs that have always been low-wage jobs, with no pathway out of poverty, jobs that have been deeply undervalued. It’s about making these good jobs that you can take pride in and support your family with. This is what we did for manufacturing jobs in the 1920s and 1930s. We organized, as a country and as working people, to transform those jobs. That is what we must do with care jobs.
Care workers, especially home-based workers who are dispersed, are seen as difficult to organize in unions. How have you worked around some of the organizing challenges in your work?
We do not believe that anyone is unorganizable. We believe that everyone should be a part of an organization that is connected to a community and a movement that represents their aspirations. We’ve tried to reach care workers through their congregations, their social networks, and even through their employers. This workforce is unique in that the families care workers work for are often not of a different class status. It’s a different kind of sector of the economy: it doesn’t lend itself to an oppositional framework. You can bring in everyone in a way that builds a broad, powerful force for change. Ultimately, everyone is just struggling to ensure that their families and homes are cared for as they work.
We’re taken by the forms of solidarity at work in Caring Across Generations—how it brings together care workers and receivers of care in a single organizational project. How would you describe Caring Across Generations’ mobilizing approach?
Everyone is touched by care. There’s the famous Rosalynn Carter quote: “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” We believe that’s a powerful framework for people to understand how interdependent we are and how important it is to value the relationships that make everything else possible in our lives—and to make those relationships visible. We built a coalition of consumer groups, groups that represent the elderly, groups that represent those with disabilities, groups that represent workers in the homecare industry, and family caregivers. We try to give voice to family caregivers in particular, because whether it is paid or unpaid, this work is valuable.
Why is love such a necessary concept in your organizing work?
To find solutions that work in the context of human needs and experience, I believe it’s important to root ourselves in how people, every day, experience life. The question of what we are doing or not doing for the people we love is at the heart of what drives so many of our decisions. Love is the most powerful force for change. We are driven by it in many ways, so I believe that we have to harness that force to get to solutions that resonate with people, that help people make meaning of what’s happening in their lives, and that ultimately help us to make lives better for people.
What, in your view, would a truly care-centred economy look like?
Everyone who is working and has family would have access to the support and resources they need to care for their family: their children, aging loved ones, loved ones with disabilities, etc. They would be able to afford high-quality care of their choice. And caregivers would have a voice at work—they would feel their contributions are recognized, fairly compensated, and really mattered.
Could you talk about your experience in using care as a rallying point to bring together disparate communities and organizations?
There are a lot of cultural traditions of care to draw upon. Our current Hawaii campaign, for example, is “Care for Kupuna.” Kupuna is the Hawaiian word for elder. Caring for kupuna is a big part of the culture in Hawaii—it’s a given. And a lot of immigrant communities and communities of colour have well-established cultures of living intergenerationally. Intergenerational care is a natural part of how many communities are organized. We’re able to tap into that. We’re also able to tap into the fact that a lot of non-immigrants are cared for by immigrants, and, for many, this is the most intimate interaction they could have. When the person caring for you comes from a vastly different place than you, it can build an empathy and connection that’s unique. We think this can be tapped to encourage transformative change.
The organizations that you’re active in are not limited to taking defensive positions: they forward alternative visions of care. What lessons does this emphasis on alternative possibilities offer to the labour movement more broadly?
You have to organize from a place of humanity, values, and human relationships. If you don’t have a vision for where you want to go, it’s impossible to have a powerful strategy. If you don’t have a proactive vision, you cede the face of the future to your opposition. So, until they figure out how to shift from a defensive posture, the future will always be defined by the few who profit from our economy.
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