The Help: What labor rights do domestic workers have

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I’m here with Katherine Eva Maich. She’s the author of the book, bringing Law, home, gender, race, and Household Labor Rights. Katherine, thanks so much for joining us.

Katherine Eva Maich:

Thanks so much for having me, Lee. It’s really an honor to be here today.

Lee Rawles:

So let’s ground our listeners first in the kind of work you do. What’s your background?

Katherine Eva Maich:

So I’m an assistant professor of sociology here at Texas a and m University. So my training is in sociology as well as women’s and gender studies with some background in labor and employment law during a master’s in labor studies that I did as well. And I was formerly a faculty member at Penn State in the School of Labor and Employment Relations. Very happy to be here as a sociologist at a and MI

Lee Rawles:

Immediately was intrigued by the topic of your book because especially in the Anglo-American legal system, we have this idea of law impacting the private and the public spheres differently, and certainly that’s part of what you’re looking at. Can you talk a little bit about how you first conceived of this impacting in a legal way, domestic workers, maids, nannies, anyone who comes into someone else’s home to perform what we think of as domestic work?

Katherine Eva Maich:

For a long time I’ve been interested in different kinds of service work, the kinds of work that we maybe take for granted or kind of often gets looked at informally and doesn’t have the kind of recognition or rights of other employees. And with domestic work, it’s so special, I think because it takes place in the home. It’s this very specific site of labor as you’re saying, thinking about the public and the private. We really see them bound up together within this kind of ways that law stays outside of the home. It really tries to kind of avoid legislating what happens inside of the space of the home. Home is a refuge home is for family life and personal connections, and we don’t really think about the law governing that space. And so I was really interested with this book and trying to ask this question about what happens when it does, what happens when a new kind of historic kind of precedent setting law does actually try to enter that space and govern it, and how does it change those dynamics and relationships inside of the home once it’s there?

Lee Rawles:

In my own family, two of my great grandmothers were domestic workers, housekeepers, maids, and two of them employed housekeepers and maids. So there’s kind of both strains running down through my family. So it felt very intimate reading some of these stories. And you do get into the awkwardness on both sides of the employee employer relationship where an employer might describe their domestic worker is, oh, she’s part of the family. Okay, but what does that mean when it comes to I need to be treated as an employee with employment rights and I work inside your home and I know you and I am in your private space in a way that no other employee would normally have access to their employer. It’s all very tangled. And you point out that although there’s been a lot of progress made in many areas of labor, this one still almost seems in its infancy.

Katherine Eva Maich:

Absolutely. And I think we really see this at play with the way that domestic workers are often thought of as part of the family. And we see the way that this trope kind of shapes how they’re treated and treated often unequally. And yet this still remains a kind of notion that families really rely upon when they’re thinking about who they can hire and the kind of skills that domestic worker, most likely a woman, often woman of color or an immigrant in the situation that of my interviews that she can kind of impart to those children in a nanny situation yet kind of on the other side. Then there’s a lack of real employment benefits, workers’ rights recognition that we might see in other jobs in other industries. And so it really becomes challenging again with that privacy of the home and the notion of family. But we see it a real disconnect and a real gap between who’s thought of as a category of worker and how that then often excludes the women who are doing this really important daily care work inside of the home.

Lee Rawles:

So in bringing law home, you are not only looking at the United States and the United States legal system, and I found this very refreshing. The two cities that you concentrate are New York City and Lima, Peru. And I would love to hear how Peru became one of your main sites of study and what your experience was in moving to Peru and living there and studying there and investigating there for this book.

Katherine Eva Maich:

So Lima is a fascinating place. It’s the site of the former Spanish crown. It has this rich history of different periods of migration from different countries. It has a huge influence coming in not just of Spanish settlers and from the colonial era, but also Japanese and Chinese migration, of course, the rich history there of the Inca civilization and many the Lima civilization as well living there and pre Inca times. And so this kind of interesting mixture of people who really make up this fascinating, lively, thriving city that has a funny and kind of fraught relationship to the rest of the country. So Lima’s often described as being much more European than the rest of Peru, right? It’s really different than the jungle or the coast or the highlands. And as such people coming from those other provinces throughout the country and migrating internally, which is kind of most common migration pattern in Peru since the times of internal armed conflict and the dictatorship as well as reaching into today, they’re really treated very differently because of that.

And we see a lot of real racial discrimination happening as people are marked from the geography from which they hail. So it’s a fascinating place and I actually really loved living there and was very surprised that so many domestic workers, household workers as well as just eos themselves, people born and raised in Lima were really willing to talk to me about my questions about the law, my questions about practices around household labor. And I was really shocked at sort of the warm welcome that I received there. But it became a really important research site, I think especially in comparison to New York because a lot of times in sociology and other disciplines, I don’t think we give enough attention to the global south. And to bring global south into conversation with the global north in this comparative manner, I think is a really important kind of way to show how these rich histories of migration and these different changes that these countries have gone through, how they’ve even shaped themselves, the industry of domestic work, and how that’s evolved since times of slavery and coloniality.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Katherine make about bringing law home. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host Lee Rawles, and I’m here with Katherine May. So Katherine, for listeners who are trying to conceptualize this idea of the home as a place where law matters, can you give an example or two of how it may be different for a domestic worker, domestic employee to exercise their rights or how they may need to rely on the law or find barriers to access to the law?

Katherine Eva Maich:

Sure. It’s a great question. In my research in Lima for instance, it’s very, very common for household workers to live in. So sleeping and then having their bed, technically their bed inside the home. And so in this way, they’re positioned as constantly available constantly on the clock. And this is really useful for families with young children who maybe are relying on that household worker to get up in the night and comfort their infant and get them back to sleep and then be up in the morning making breakfast for the children and parents on their way to work and then also doing laundry and cleaning. But there’s a way where, and I talk about this in the book quite a lot time-wise, the temporal nature of this industry and this work, it’s very difficult to put a cap on it. And so in the US it’s much more common for workers to have a certain number of homes, maybe they clean twice a week or twice a month for instance, or they’re working as a nanny for these certain hours.

But when you’re positioned inside of the home, there’s a lack of power. You’re not able to just simply walk out the door and if you’re hungry, grab a snack at the kiosk down the street or get a soda or a coffee. But your bodily rights, your corporeal needs as household Embroker worker are all kind of part and parcel encompassed by the home itself. And so in this way with the household workers I spoke to in Lima, especially those who had spent many years living in their employer’s homes, there’s a deep dependency on the good treatment of those employers and their benevolence in certain ways. And many workers wouldn’t experience that, right? So for instance, with food, they would be given maybe leftovers or scraps of food or in fact be yelled at if they tried to eat some leftover protein like a chicken dish or something because they’re thought of as inferior, right?

They’re thought of as deserving of less. So often workers would eat in a separate area, eat with maybe a bent fork or a broken cup, and these kinds of small symbolic examples, but that really serve to kind of solidify or codify this notion of deserving of less, right? Sleeping in a small room usually with no window, they’re called service rooms throughout Lima. And an interesting point on that note I think is that these are not just spaces that we see in the most wealthy areas and the most well to do prestigious homes and neighborhoods, but in fact, even middle class apartments throughout the city are still built with this service room connected to them often just adjacent to the kitchen. And so that’s kind of spatial quality is something that I was really interested as well and thinking about how inequality can live out that way through who’s deserving of space within these homes. So I think those examples of thinking about the dependency that one would have on just human needs of drinking and eating and sleeping and feeling safe as well. There’s a real issue that continues in Latin America and other parts of the world as well as in the US around sexual assault in the home as well, and workers not really having any means through which to speak up or to challenge or seek help and seek protection in those situations as well.

Lee Rawles:

And the access to those kinds of means is something I did keep thinking about when I was reading the book in many other kinds of workplaces, especially in the United States, the government has ways that it interacts with you as an employee or inspects workplaces or it’s almost like public school versus homeschooling. There are people keeping track much more when you are in that public space than when you have entered this private space.

Katherine Eva Maich:

Absolutely, yeah. This is something that I’ve actually just been more and more interested in since conducting this research. And so we have the osha Occupational Safety and Health Act and administration here in the us, and it’s long been considered underfunded. There isn’t a really a proper ratio of inspectors to workplaces. I think the current ratio is less than 2000 inspectors to workplaces, which you can imagine the classification of those adds up to more than 8 million. So there’s hardly any sense actually being able to have compliance there. This technically would amount to each workplace in the US being inspected once every 186 years. So taking that into consideration, then we move on to the private home. And as you’re saying, Lee, of course those homes are not even on the list. They’re not legally recognized as workplaces and therefore workers face an issue about this lack of protections when stepping inside the workplace. And I think it’s something that we don’t really consider that much, but it’s incredibly important to recognize the way that the home as a space itself is governed really differently, is looked at really differently and excluded, purposefully excluded from all these other ways that we have to try to recognize and bring a public eye to workplaces as social settings.

Lee Rawles:

And if you think about it, as you said, especially in the United States, you may have domestic workers in your home maybe once every two weeks rather than you are essentially their employer and their landlord. They live in your house.

Katherine Eva Maich:

So

Lee Rawles:

How would that work if we had some sort of inspection? So with that seeming like an impossibility, there are advocates for domestic workers, what do they see as possibilities for providing some of these protections for domestic workers when there cannot be basically a surveillance nation?

Katherine Eva Maich:

Absolutely. Well, what’s interesting too about that point, Lee, just as a side note, is that a lot of the surveillance of domestic workers really happens outside of the home. And that’s sort done on strollers with signs that say, how’s my nanny doing? Trying to check, giving a phone number that

Lee Rawles:

No, when trucks say, how’s my driving

Katherine Eva Maich:

Precisely? Is she on her phone or is she paying attention to my son or daughter at the park? And this other kind of way that we think about surveillance, are they living up to their standards of their jobs and doing a good job with that at the same time, then we have this kind of utter disparity of zero surveillance in the home as in a way of protection. So thinking about this question of inspection, the home I think is really interesting. This is where I think all of the domestic worker organizing really matters. And what I saw in my research is just how crucial these organizations are. So they may be organized around kind of a shared cultural background, racial ethnic connection, similar same home country or language as in New York City where the domestic worker movement is very divided. It’s very united in a sense, but very divided at the kind of micro level among country and language and culture or in Lima where we don’t have as much of that issue around language.

Women may speak I ua, they may speak other languages besides Spanish, but usually Spanish can kind of still be a unifying language for those women. What they have. There are more of these community organizations that really advocate for domestic workers’ rights, but also provide just a safe space and a shelter. And the organization that I worked at in Lima and was lucky enough to work at called La CAA de Panta, they really provide not just a shelter, but also community connections. They give lessons and workshops on cooking, on learning how to make these great traditional Peruvian recipes so that workers can entice their employers with the wonderful dishes they can make for their family. And then we also ran law workshops. I do a lot of really great educational workshops as well. And so these places are really important for community building and also just spreading awareness about the law because even in Peru where I did one of my big sites, there have been a lot of changes.

There was a stronger law that was just passed recently, actually right during the pandemic. And with this law, however, even though it’s technically stronger on the books, when law Deur becomes law defacto, we always ask those questions even though it’s a lot stronger, there’s still a real lack of employer compliance and there’s still a general lack of awareness on the part of workers. And so these sites, whether they’re actual brick and mortar community centers or worker centers, or if they’re unions or more cultural group organizing, this really matters for building solidarity. And I think back to that question of inspection, I think it’s more about helping other fellow workers understand their rights and be able to recognize when something’s going wrong and have a means through which to speak up, and the kind of safety in numbers and the legal advocacy that can come from those organizations as well.

Lee Rawles:

And many of the abuses seem like they could be dealt with if domestic workers had true movement of employment. But often this isn’t really the case in actuality. I mean, we know from having spoken to people who are very concerned about human trafficking, that we have this idea of sex-based human trafficking being the majority, and it absolutely is not. If you are an immigrant worker and your employer has your passport in their house safe and you don’t have access to it, can you easily leave or are you trapped? So I do wonder if some of the anti-human trafficking momentum in the United States could be used successfully to address some of the real dangers that domestic workers face, especially if they are immigrants.

Katherine Eva Maich:

I think that’s an excellent point. So one of the groups that I have been lucky enough to work with and fortunate enough to do some research for and some advocacy work for is called the International Domestic Worker Federation. And this is a fascinating group. It’s the largest global union federation of, I think it’s 97% women led and domestic workers, household workers from around the world. And this group has done a lot of work around that, at least 12 million domestic workers that are crossing borders, crossing time zones, leaving families behind to cook for other people’s families and clean and care for them as well. And as you’re saying, Lee, we know that a lot of those workers unfortunately, do end up in situations of trafficking or situations where they’re made to relinquish papers or work in situations of near servitude. And of course, this doesn’t have to take place in such a kind of globalized way. I also talked to several women in Lima who had had threats made against them if they were to leave the home and doors locked whenever they would leave the house and they’d be locked into their rooms and not have ways out and wouldn’t be paid for years sometimes. And in a city of roughly 10 million people, when you don’t have family nearby and lack of resources, it is really incredibly dangerous and challenging situation that many of these women find themselves in.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take another quick break to hear from our advertisers when we’re back. We have not yet really addressed the gender part of this, and I want to get into it. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here discussing bringing law, home, gender, race, and household labor rights. So we certainly have mentioned that the majority of domestic workers are women, and historically this also has been. So how do you think gender has impacted this area of work of domestic work? You write about it a lot in the book, and I know that this could be another two hour discussion easily, but just for people who are interested in that aspect of the issue, you do absolutely get into it. What would you say are some of the highlights that you want listeners to know about from your research?

Katherine Eva Maich:

Yeah, thank you. Judith Rollins, years ago wrote this incredible book called Between Women, really noting the fact that the domestic worker industry is one of the few industries that we have that is most often sort of women on both ends of the contract if the contract exists. So it’s often a woman subject who is doing the work herself, being hired by kind of mom or mother of the household, or female head of the household, and often in that situation, and it’s a really unique industry because of that, right? We don’t have that many longtime kind of historical industries, global industries that are organized in such a way and because of the kind of essentialized understandings of women that are often placed upon them about their nature of a carrying, cleaning, nurturing nature, and being made to do this work, that has really shaped, I believe how the industry has been, how these women have been legally and socially distanced from being recognized as a worker in such a way that in employment relations or industrial relations, we still tend to have this kind of masculinized notion of a blue collar worker when we talk about workers instead of really recognizing the millions of women whose work is supporting everyone else to go to work and to do their own jobs right around the world.

So I think gender has been absolutely crucial to not only how the industry has evolved, but to how it has continually, continually been excluded from recognition through law and through worker protections and these tasks in the home, the social reproductive tasks, the cooking, the cleaning, the carrying. We continually see rather than broader conversations around how to allocate those duties between everyone who lives in the home, between men and women or the couple or whoever is there, we see kind of a displacement onto the shoulders of other women who are often in a lower income category or a more unequal category In many ways. This is kind of where the intersectional nature, I think domestic work really comes in as well, right? It’s not just gender, but gender interacting with race and class as well.

Lee Rawles:

Very much so. Again, just to speak about my personal history, family background, I think about one of my grandmothers who had nine children and her husband was a surgeon, and she had a degree in chemistry, but of course not many opportunities to use that chemistry degree at the time. She had a long-term housekeeper who I grew up calling my grandma. M my grandmother was a white woman. Grandma M was a black woman. They came from different classes, and I’m sure that was very fraught in many ways. They cared for each other. But at the end of the day, if my grandmother had wanted to fire her and leave grandma M on the street, she could have the power existed on one side. So whatever affection that the family, the children, the grandchildren had for her, she still did not have power in that system to put her on an equal standing within the household. So I certainly had thought about that while reading the book. Absolutely. When they are part of your family, but they’re not part of your family. Absolutely. And they don’t have the same access to family resources or leniency when it comes to you can act badly and your family still has to let you in the door. It’s very fraught because again, it’s happening in this private space

Katherine Eva Maich:

And that power imbalance is just always inherent. It’s just inherent to this employment relationship. But it’s, I think, often obscured or overlooked. And as you said, the affection matters. That’s real, right? Many of the workers I spoke to, just their faces lit up with joy as they talked about the children that they had helped raise and how close they were to those families. But it was often used in the past tense. Maybe they stopped getting the school pictures sent to them once they no longer were in their lives, or others told stories of the challenges when, as you said, if your grandmother had wanted to simply fire her domestic worker, others would tell stories of how all of a sudden there was a shift in the family with the new birth or another relative coming in to stay for a while, and they just were no longer needed.

And so they were told Monday morning, that’s it. And the kind of emotional sudden shift that would cause for that household worker, let alone all of the logistical complications about her income and where she maybe had either been living or spending most of her time, and then how she would find a new job and start over again. And so the informality that really surrounds this work continues, I think, to fight against everything that laws are trying to do. And of course, we know laws are not perfect, right? We know laws can also be repressive. They can be a tool of oppression, right? At the same time, they can give recognition and prioritize and recognize workers or include them after such a long, long, complex history of exclusion. And that’s really what I think my book is really trying to look at what it means once when you come from this history of exclusion, but then you finally have a law that grants you rights and recognizes you as someone of value whose work matters, and you should be brought into those protections and that coverage.

Lee Rawles:

And that brings us to another reason why you chose Lima and New York City, both of these cities, and I did not realize they essentially had about equal population that’s the size of Lima. If people were thinking it was a smaller city, it is not. Is both of these cities enacted legislation aimed at domestic workers? And you point out that they took different approaches, and I would love to hear more. Can you start with New York City? What happened in New York City with the laws that impacted this domestic labor space?

Katherine Eva Maich:

Sure. So with the US case, New York is the first state that enacted, that passed this really historic domestic worker Bill of Rights. And what’s kind of ironic now is that 11 other states have since passed even better Bills of rights as well as two cities. So it’s exciting to see the kind of precedent setting that’s happening with these laws. But with New York, what took place is a long pattern of organizing, taking buses up to Albany, trying to protest, share stories, share narratives, and raise awareness about the need for protections for these workers. And what’s interesting is that the history of exclusion in the US goes back to the NLRA, it goes back to early New deal legislation as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which now domestic workers are covered under, they have more of these protections, but they’re still often excluded at the federal level because of size, because of the number of employers, because of the location of the home most primarily.

And so the organizing that happened there really was interesting as well, because employers had a hand in it. There was a really impressive group called Jews for Racial and Economic Justice that they would hand out stickers, for instance, that would say, my home is a just workplace. And they would really encourage ethical payment and treatment on the behalf of fairly well off employers in the New York area, thinking about Brooklyn and Manhattan. And this was a movement that caught on in many ways, but it was really only thanks to those workers, lobbying, organizing, raising awareness for years. And it was so exciting when in 2010, this law was finally passed and really a game changer for the US context as well, given that this was the first sort of attempt to bring domestic workers into coverage. And what’s interesting about the law too is that it’s actually quite a bit weaker than the Lee Mano law. And maybe you noted this in the book as well.

Lee Rawles:

I did. And also the fact that in New York, essentially the law that they wrote that said domestic workers rights, it was all about what the employers should do. And in Lima, I found it fascinating. They talk about the rights and responsibilities of domestic workers, which feels a little empowering for the domestic workers to, you’re not just someone to whom things are done, you two have agency.

Katherine Eva Maich:

Yes, yes. And I think that’s why I was so fascinated by the Manu law. So there were 18 tenants to this law that was passed in 2003, and this was the first countrywide national law that we saw passed. Now, there had been previous regional citywide types of legislation, but nothing as strong, nothing as unified. And a lot of the organizing for this that came around in 2003 was again, a result of decades of organizing from both women’s movements, workers’ movements issues there in Lima, of course, with domestic workers not really being considered part of a labor movement, a more masculine traditional employment group of workers in that sense. But a lot of that was really challenging, of course, during the Fujimori era where much of the organizing really had to go underground. But under Alejandro Toledo, who was the first indigenous democratically elected president of Peru, this was finally passed in 2003.

And again, really precedent setting. And as you said, the notion of rights and responsibilities, it was something that we would talk about in our law workshop every Sunday. And one of my favorite moments in the workshop, usually with a new group each Sunday of household workers, some were looking for employment, some were just new to Lima, some just came with a friend, just kind of trying to find community. We would say to them, this law is for you. This law was made with you in mind. And we would read the title of it and it would say, household workers law, and just what a special kind of notion, right? This idea that the law of course can be discriminatory, but it can also, as Sally Engle Mary would talk about, it can engender a new consciousness, a new set of understandings of people and relationships.

And I think Laura Beth Nielsen talks about this too, when she writes about the work of rights or the work that rights do and says, people looking at these ideas about employment laws, we can’t just be scholarly about it. We can, but we also have to look at the social settings, the places in which these laws are at work in order to better understand under what conditions certain rights can work differently for certain people. And the structural vulnerability of working inside of the privacy of the home is such a highly specific social setting. And I think it’s really interesting to try to take apart what happens with the law governing that space.

Lee Rawles:

Can you give us an example of what one of the domestic workers responsibilities would be?

Katherine Eva Maich:

Sure. That’s a great question. So with the Limen law, for instance, there are termination provisions. So this is non-existent in the us, but for domestic workers working in Lima, if they would like, unless there’s a situation they call it of grave abuse or assault or something really extreme, if it’s just a kind of moving on, changing homes, all of that, both the domestic worker or the employer can give 15 days notice of termination. And with that, they have a bit more freedom to move. They have the protection of if they don’t get those 15 days of time, they’ll get the payment for those two weeks. And they’ll also be able to have different kinds of access to holidays. So holiday provisions was really huge in the law. I think domestic workers I would talk to would often not feel like it was theirs to celebrate.

It was some kind of luxury, but in fact, they would get overtime for working on these holidays or they could trade in their holiday for a different day off. So just really interesting ideas around how to recognize the specificity of these jobs that the family needs, that worker in a more consistent way, but coming up upon a holiday and how do we kind of navigate that on both sides? They would also have the right to, it’s called gra, so it’s a half month’s pay in both July and December of the year. So kind of around proving Independence Day in July. And then the Christmas holidays at the end of the year, and this has actually been changed with the newer law, this was increased to 30 days. So this is a full month’s pay two times a year. So in a sense, having that extra amount of money, that extra bonus being built in, gives some real recognition of the kind of loyalty to the employer and the longevity of their service that they’ve been providing in a way that the New York law is completely absent on.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and what it immediately makes me think of too is if you have this additional money, then it’s more likely you’d be able to go home and see your own family. I mean, one of the problems if you, you’re a domestic worker making more or less subsistence wages or sending back most of your money, that doesn’t leave a lot for things like trips. Absolutely. Hopefully that lets them maintain their family ties as well.

Katherine Eva Maich:

Absolutely. It’s a great point too, because again, with many of these workers migrating in from the provinces, it’s often quite challenging to return home. It’s several buses. It could be a day and a half of travel traveling at night is advised against. There’s a lot of challenges that women face when trying to figure out these ways of staying connected with family. And this is another one of the challenges that they face if they only have Sunday off, if they hopefully have at least one day a week off as they’re supposed to, right? It’s often not enough time. And so that ability to have that extra income in their pocket or to have the gift of that time and able to kind of maintain those family ties is really important.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we have come to the end of our conversation, but I want you to think about is there something that Modern Law Library listeners can or should take away from our conversation when it comes to, okay, what can we do to improve things about domestic work in the legal sphere? If there are lawyers listening, if there are just people who want to be advocating for their legislators, what can listeners be doing?

Katherine Eva Maich:

I think our listener, the listeners of this podcast can bring this up in conversation, can think about their everyday lives and interactions, think about their own home life, their neighbors, their friends. If they’re doing maybe a nanny share, consider talking to that other couple or that other family about what if we implemented this bonus around the holidays or around July, or trying to kind of recognize the needs of their workers and implement in their own way, even though it’s informal, their own way to improve or give these benefits to the workers and that value that they deserve. And I think this overall recognition of not just seeing the law as something that’s formal legal institutions and in the books that they’re reading from and studying in these cases, but thinking about it in these everyday lives and experiences of people, and especially those in the most vulnerable social positions, and maybe using their position of power in order to try to advocate and try to recognize what those people are going through. And I think the final note I would say was just to think about labor law isn’t in a vacuum, right? It’s often interacting with immigration law and other challenges that vulnerable populations are facing, especially in today’s context. And so being able to recognize those kinds of intersections and to try to do advocacy around those issues is really important as well.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you so much to Katherine Ma for joining us to discuss bringing law, home, gender, race, and household labor rights. If anyone wants to get in touch with you to discuss these issues more or find out more about your current work, how can they do that?

Katherine Eva Maich:

Please email [email protected]. K-M-A-I-C-H. Look me up at the sociology department at Texas a and m. I would love to continue these conversations and really appreciate the opportunity today here, Lee, thank you so much,

Lee Rawles:

And thank you, Katherine, and thank you listeners for tuning in for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. We also have a Goodreads page look up Modern Law Library for further discussions about our books and ways that you can recommend what we should be talking about next.