She cleans houses by day and fights for domestic workers’ rights by night
Julia De Leon knelt on the kitchen floor of a Bellaire house, scrubbing it clean with her hands because her employer demanded it.
She felt an ache in her abdomen each time she bent down. She made a crude mop out of some supplies she found in the house to make the job easier, but her employer took it away.
De Leon had two young daughters to raise on her own. The Bellaire homeowner paid $55 a day for seven hours of work. De Leon needed the job to make rent.
So she did as she was told, took what she was offered. She just needed to make enough for her daughters, to give them a chance at a better future. Everything she did, she did for them.
That was in the early 1990s. Today, she would not accept anything less than fair.
De Leon, 55, now splits her time between cleaning Houston apartments, houses and mansions and serving as the vice president of the Board of Directors for the Fe y Justicia Worker Center. She is also a local leader for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
She hands out safety supplies to day laborers on street corners. She travels to Washington, D.C., to speak before members of Congress. Earlier this year, she even attended a star-studded Oscars party in Los Angeles, which honored her and other national domestic worker leaders.
De Leon negotiates her pay and duties not just for herself but to help establish a new normal for the thousands of other women doing the same work across Houston every day.
When she started out cleaning houses and raising her bosses’ children in 1990, few if any domestic workers spoke of fair wages.
They shared insight on what deserved more pay: Hardwood floors take more time and effort to clean than carpeting. Step-in showers
with glass doors take the longest to clean. A typical River Oaks mansion requires at least two or three workers to maintain, yet the responsibility sometimes fell on one woman alone.
Yet few workers, including De Leon, knew how much to charge for their labor or how to ask for it.
She always offered rides to friends in whatever spare time she had between work and dropping her girls off at after-school and weekend events like Girl Scout meetings, church group activities and visual arts programs. One day in 2010, while taking her grandson to an early childhood development program, De Leon met a fellow Guatemalan immigrant who spoke about volunteering at a local worker center.
The woman needed a ride for an afternoon event at the center. De Leon gave her a lift. When she got there, curiosity made her stay behind to hear the guest speaker.
At the time, the name Ai-jen Poo didn’t register with De Leon. But the woman’s words resonated.
Poo spoke of the nonprofit she co-founded, the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She spoke about a domestic worker bill of rights in the state of New York. She talked about how domestic workers should negotiate for liveable wages, report harassment and speak up for themselves and others.
De Leon immediately wanted to know how to participate in that kind of advocacy work. She signed up for the Fe y Justicia Worker Center contact list. A few days later, she got a call asking her if she wanted to become a worker rights volunteer.
She’s been with Fe y Justicia ever since.
At a two-bedroom apartment in west Houston, the churning sound of the washing machine mixed with the rushing water from the kitchen sink as De Leon scrubbed a saucepan. It was a little after 9:30 a.m. in early March. She had already swept the floor, vacuumed the sofa and cooed at the whining pup looking up at her from its crate. Within the next three hours, she would also wipe down the kitchen appliances, fold and put away laundry, clean the two bathrooms and bedrooms. All for $70.
She cleans this unit every 15 days. Her normal rate would be $80. Yet she takes into account her employer’s budget and notes the family doesn’t ask her to move heavy furniture for the basic cleaning.
That kind of consideration isn’t always the case. “They want us to do everything,” she said of other employers past and present.
With close to 30 years of experience, she now has a checklist to calculate her prices: how clean do the homeowners keep the house; how often do they want her to clean it; what tasks, down to the minute detail, do they want her to do; will they allow her to work while they are on vacation if they become regulars.
For a small three-bedroom, twobath house cleaned once a week, she can charge $125. That goes up to $150 on a biweekly schedule and $175 monthly.
A four-bedroom, three-bath house cleaned once a year can average from $300 to $400 depending on how much stuff is inside. If employers want to pay by the hour, she charges a minimum of $25.
When she shares these rates with potential employers, they often ask why she charges so much and then tell her it’s just domestic work.
“We don’t have insurance,” she replies. “We don’t have paid vacation or sick days, and we expose ourselves to harsh chemicals.”
At the west Houston apartment, De Leon bent down to clean the bottom of the refrigerator door. Housekeepers, De Leon said, hurt their backs from all the bending, stretching and heavy lifting they do.
“But the arms are what tend to get hurt first and more often,” she added as she stretched her arm out to wipe a swath of the fridge door.
Over the years, De Leon picked up tips from other workers to make the job easier. To clean microwaves and avoid using chemical cleaners, she heats a wet cloth for 15 seconds before wiping down the appliance. She uses a paper towel to wipe grease off plates before adding soap to avoid clogging the drain. She wraps an old cotton T-shirt around a Swiffer mop to reach a high mirror and prevent leaving any streaks.
When she leaves a home as spotless as possible, she heads home to get started on her second job — as an activist.
For nine years, De Leon has helped coordinate the center’s legal aid workshops, brought new domestic workers into the nonprofit’s network, and participated in national worker rights campaigns. In December 2017, De Leon was elected to the Fe y Justicia Worker Center board of directors.
On April 18, with agreement from her employer, De Leon left work early to meet with Marianela Acuña Arreaza, executive director of Fe y Justicia. She wanted to go over a presentation Arreaza was to give to the nonprofit’s members that night.
“Where’s the chart explaining the responsibilities of the board?” asked De Leon, who in February was named the board’s vice president.
Within her board tenure De Leon has secured grants for the nonprofit, participated in a National Domestic Workers Alliance pilot of worker councils, and even attended the April 24 She The People presidential candidate forum at Texas Southern University as an advocate for domestic worker rights.
“She’s one of our most active domestic worker leaders across the country,” said Mariana Virturro, deputy director of the national alliance.
De Leon has seen a local shift in the past few years among domestic workers. More women are negotiating from the get-go and more are aware of what rights they do and don’t have.
These workers — nannies, home care aides, house cleaners — have historically been left out of labor protections, said Saba Waheed, research director at the UCLA Labor Center in California.
National labor laws that came about in the 1930s and 1940s excluded domestic workers because most of those workers at the time were African-American women doing what society called “women’s work,” Waheed said.
Domestic workers are still without national protections to form unions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t oversee household tasks, and national protections against harassment and discrimination don’t apply to self-employed workers who work alone. None of these workers, Waheed notes, is getting any benefits.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated there were about 19,000 maids and housekeepers in the Houston metro area in May 2017. That number, however, only accounts for workers reporting to an agency. If all the self-employed domestic workers were counted, the number would likely total more than 40,000, De Leon said.
Recognizing the lack of national protections for these thousands of women, De Leon was excited when Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., last year announced a National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.
The bill, based on eight existing state bills and one municipal bill, creates flexible schedules, paid time off, and broader harassment and discrimination protections that would especially come in handy in right-to-work states like Texas, De Leon noted. The bill is expected to be introduced in the next few months.
As she waits for news out of Washington, D.C., De Leon is doing her part with local and national groups to change the narrative of domestic work.
It’s not just women’s work, De Leon said. It’s honest work for honest pay that drives the economy.
De Leon notes with pride that she cleaned the homes of NASA administrators, lawyers, doctors, scientists, politicians and even an international businessman with ties to the White House under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
‘“I’m not making their pay,” De Leon said, “but I’m helping make it more possible for them to do their job because they come home tired and I cleaned their house or watched their kids.”
Growing up, Sharon De Leon, 25, said she and her older sister, Darlen, didn’t get to spend much time with their mother. Julia De Leon was always working. But she always made sure the girls were enrolled in some activity.
These days, Sharon is inspired by her mother’s work and activism. She’s studying to become a social worker to help children the way her mother has helped domestic workers.
She’s met other women who learned about their rights from her mom. She’s heard about her mother speaking before members of Congress, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. She’s seen her mother’s confidence grow in real time.
“She was so shy before,” Sharon said.
She noted that after everything she’s done, De Leon doesn’t seek recognition.
Yet earlier this year, she told her daughter she got invited to a Feb. 24 “gathering of domestic workers in Los Angeles.” Maybe a celebrity or two would even be there. De Leon forgot to mention that the Academy Awards were involved.
When De Leon first heard about the movie “Roma,” she didn’t think much of it, or why the National Domestic Workers Alliance wanted to do a promotional campaign for it.
She knew the basics: that it was directed by Mexican Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuarón, that it told the story of an indigenous domestic worker in 1970s Mexico City, and that it starred an indigenous woman named Yalitza Aparicio.
She first watched it with Arreaza, the Fe y Justicia executive director. It was after that viewing that De Leon, an indigenous Guatemalan domestic worker, realized its significance.
“It’s made our jobs more visible,” De Leon said. “It’s a platform for us.
As the film got Oscar nominations, De Leon grew excited about the film’s public reach.
It came as a surprise, however, when the National Domestic Workers Alliance invited her to a red carpet Oscars watch party in Los Angeles at the exclusive women’s workspace, the Jane Club. The party was part of the alliance’s “Roma” promotion and a chance to shine a spotlight on women like De Leon.
She and the other invited domestic workers were offered red carpetready gowns to wear for the event.
De Leon declined the gown, choosing instead to wear her late mother’s Guatemalan folkloric dress.
“I was not only representing myself,” De Leon said, “I was representing my culture and other cultures that were not able to be there.”
She has her own sets of traditional garments she brought with her to the United States years ago from her rural village in the Totonicapán Department of Guatemala. But she felt that was the right night to showcase her mother’s original “guipil,” or blouse dress top, with its handwoven red and white flowers, on a bright maroon and yellow backdrop.
“It’s like a jewel to me, one I take care of,” De Leon said.
Back in Houston, Sharon De Leon watched in awe as her mother scrolled through online photo galleries of the party.
There was Cuarón in a tux, fresh off winning the Best Director Academy Award for “Roma.” There was Dolores Huerta, civil rights activist and co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, in a black dress and black blazer with a red trim. There were domestic workers in floor-length sparkling gowns, swooping velvet skirts, and off-the-shoulder ruffles posing for the cameras on the red carpet.
And there, holding hands with actress Eva Longoria, mingling with Hollywood stars, was Julia De Leon in her mother’s dress.