When Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida in October 2018, June Barrett, a Black Jamaican home care worker, rushed to take care of their elderly patients in Miami. Barrett had worked as a care worker for two decades, and knew that the safety of their patients was in their hands: "The generator broke down, and we stayed up all night making sure our clients were safe."

Barrett is also a grassroots leader at We Dream in Black, a project of National Domestic Workers Alliance and the political home of Black domestic workers in the U.S., and the Miami Workers Center. "When hurricanes hit, we leave our homes and families behind and are asked to shelter in place with our clients" Barrett says. "Home care workers are often the first responders in a climate emergency, and yet we rarely get the recognition or resources we deserve for our labor and efforts. As we experienced this past year with COVID, it is care workers who hold up the economy in a crisis.”

Nearly 2.3 million home care workers provide lifesaving personal assistance and health care support to the elderly and people with disabilities. This indispensable and often invisible labor is powered overwhelmingly by immigrant women of color — Black, Latinx and Asian — who struggle to make a dignified living wage, some making as little as $7 per hour. As a result, almost one in five care workers live in poverty.

Alma Santana empathizes with the angst of millions of America’s workers. As a Mexican domestic worker living in California, Santana has experienced the multiple crises facing many workers in the U.S.: immigration and gender vulnerabilities; racism; and economic inequities. Santana is a member of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a Latina immigrant women-led grassroots group with a mission for personal transformation and building community power for gender and economic justice.

Read the full article about care workers by Rucha Chitnis at GreenBiz.