Maids in the Union: Domestic Workers and the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU) in 1930s New York City

This paper looks at the intersection of the newly minted Domestic Workers Union (DWU) and the massively successful organizing drive of the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU) in Depression-era New York City. The DWU was one of the first domestic workers unions to join a major international, and its decision to join BSEIU was informed by the broadening of building service craft unionism in the 1930s to include elevator operators, furnace operators, janitors, and other marginal workers who did not traditionally wield the power (often collapsed into notions of “skill”) of superintendents and boiler engineers.

The rapid organization of the New York building service workers depended especially on elevator operators, who could suspend a building’s functionality by refusing to transport people, products, and supplies from floor to floor. In the factories of the garment district, where the building service campaign began, African American elevator operators brought their own politics of organizing into the union. In addition to organizing against racism and exploitation at work, they sought to apply union power against the segregation, unemployment, and eviction their families and neighbors faced at home. It was in this broader vision of unionism—connecting building worker and building tenant—that domestic workers came into focus as union subjects.

This paper analyzes the politics of domestic worker organizing in the context of the 1930s crisis of social reproduction. It examines how building service union strategy troubled racist and gendered ideologies of domestic work even as it reinforced those ideologies in new ways. Centering household workers in the broader building service campaign, it traces the possibilities of domestic worker organizing before the National Labor Relations Act excluded household workers from collective bargaining rights, and asks how the foreclosure of those possibilities limited the unionism of service workers who labored outside of private homes.