Group calls for support of CA domestic workers bill

LOS ANGELES–Fil-Am organizations are urging the public to call their local state assembly member and ask them to support AB 241, the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

Filipino Migrant Center officials sent out a mass email to their supporters, asking them to support the bill, which would provide labor protections to household workers, caregivers and childcare providers working in private homes.

These include the right to overtime pay, meal and rest breaks, uninterrupted sleep for live-in workers and use of kitchen facilities, FMC officials said. The bill will be voted on the assembly floor this week before it moves to the senate labor committee.

“The Filipino Migrant Center works with Filipino caregivers to fight for fair wages, a safe and healthy work environment and dignity and respect and the right to organize,” officials wrote on the email.

There are around 200,000 domestic workers in the state, tens of thousands of whom are Filipinos. This is the third time the issue has been brought up to the state legislature, each time the bill reached the governor, only for the governor to veto it.

Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill, AB 889, because he believed a possible “drafting error” and that it could cost the state nearly $200 million in uncertainties.

Brown asked for the State Department of Industrial Relations to look into the matter further, before he would consider signing a similar bill again.

In 2006, a similar bill passed the state legislature before then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.