The Childcare Workers Behind the Workers

Not long ago Kenya was taking the subway home from work when she heard what sounded like gunshots behind her. Heart pounding, she ducked under her seat. A native New Yorker, she isn’t easily rattled, but now she could see people running around her.

A few moments later her train pulled into the next station, and hordes of people fled the car, including her. The police were on the platform. None stopped her to ask what had happened. Kenya didn’t stick around to volunteer. After she gathered herself, she did what most of us would: She made a phone call. Not to her two sisters or her nephew, who live with her and another roommate in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Not to a friend. Instead, she reached out to two of the people she sees most—the parents of the child she cares for in Astoria, Queens.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this just happened to me. I’m so shaken up,’” she remembers. Kenya, 54, has worked for at least a half dozen couples and knows these two to be kind and decent. And indeed, both were understanding when she told them. Worried for her too. When they offered to cover an Uber for her to get to work that morning, she accepted. But she was back on the train just over 24 hours later, stomach churning. What choice did she have? There is no work-from-home option for the over 14,000 people in New York City who work as nannies. She has bills, rent, groceries to pay for. She can’t afford a mental health day.

At first, caregiving wasn’t a career Kenya felt called to. She started working at 16, picking up a series of jobs. She worked at a summer program for kids. She worked at McDonald’s. She went to department stores for a spell. She dabbled in after-school pickup. She worked as a bank teller. She landed on childcare without meaning to. In fact, she had once wanted to be a police officer. But she had an operation on her back in her 20s, resulting in a metal rod in her spine that barred her from service.

When she started caring for children, she hadn’t planned to stick it out. But she loved it. She would have liked to have kids of her own, but “it just wasn’t in the cards for me,” she says now. In that sense, it isn’t a surprise that she found this line of work.

The downsides are of course obvious: The work can be strenuous and tends not to be well paid. For some it is unprotected, and abuses can proliferate. Many childcare workers around the country don’t get guaranteed sick pay; almost none have employer-provided health insurance or paid family or medical leave. There is almost no such thing as a stable gig; kids grow up, and parents’ childcare needs can shift without warning.

Even with her years of experience, Kenya has to hustle. She struggles to save as she’d like to. But let’s state at least one upside here, for the record: “The babies are so joyful, really,” Kenya says, smiling. “I meet some nannies and I tell them, ‘I don’t think this is for you.’ You really have to have a natural love for children to be in this line of work, and you have to be patient because it’s not easy.”

It’s not easy. Not the work, not the conditions under which most low-income women do it. That was the case even before the pandemic upended the working arrangements of millions of New Yorkers who once required full-time childcare workers and now seem to want nannies to be on call at all hours, but be compensated for just a fraction of them. And it’s even more true now, as inflation and a tight housing market have sent the cost of living soaring.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” Kenya says. And while pundits obsess over ups and downs in the stock market, it’s the core economic numbers that affect her personal finances. She knows she’s not alone—that there are not just millions of low-income workers in a similar position, but scores of people who share her particular considerations. For decades the population of care workers—which includes nannies like Kenya as well as those who work in child, elder, or health care—has had numbers but not power. Nationwide the group’s ranks have swelled to almost 5 million people, and the gender divide is stark—perhaps because this kind of underpaid work in general is coded as feminine and also happens to be some of the most intimate labor possible. Around 85% of care workers overall are women; closer to 95% of child carers are. Still, the sector has been hard to organize, not least because of the isolated nature of the work, the high turnover rate, and the fact that some percentage of workers are undocumented and can therefore be hesitant to get involved.

But there’s reason to believe the status quo is starting to change. After decades of silence and invisibility, care workers are making themselves known. Powerful organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and smaller, local initiatives like Carroll Gardens Nanny Association (CGNA) in New York City—where Kenya educates newbie nannies on the art of negotiation—have laid the groundwork, elevating the needs and aspirations of care workers in the public consciousness and schooling care workers on their own influence in the process. And women themselves—those who work in this field and those who do not—have demonstrated that valuing care and making it accessible is urgent. Staggering majorities of American women rank the economy and health care as extremely important to their vote in this election, as shown by the results of the Glamour YouGov poll, where the two issues topped the list of those most important to all women.

Of course, shared concerns do not necessarily mean shared votes. According to Glamour’s YouGov survey, women with household incomes between $30,000 and $80,000 annually are split 50-50 in their support for Democrats and Republicans. That same population trusts Republicans more on the economy and Democrats more on health care, which helps explain the strategies that both parties have taken up in this election. Donald Trump has hammered Kamala Harris’s approach to the economy and has worked to tie her vision to voter dissatisfaction with the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Harris has made health care—and the care economy generally—a pillar of her pitch to voters. When she became the de facto Democratic presidential nominee over the summer, she namechecked care work twice within her first week of campaigning. In a pair of speeches, she vowed to expand access to paid leave, housing assistance, childcare, and elder care.

That attention has thrilled organizers and advocates, with Ai-jen Poo, president of the NDWA, calling Harris one of the “biggest champions on the care agenda” in an interview with The Washington Post. But it has also put care workers at the center of social and cultural debates that conservatives are advancing—about women and work, about children and whose job it is to look after them, about the role of immigrants in American life. Republicans in the Senate blocked an expanded child tax credit, which would have helped millions of low-income families. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has said he wants to raise the child tax credit to $5,000, but he skipped out on the recent Senate vote. Still, regardless of the politics, too often lost in the chess moves and political strategizing are the voices of care workers themselves.

To be fair, schedules do not tend to be amenable to much off-the-cuff musing. Delores, who has been caring for children in one form or another for the best part of four decades, is almost never available to speak to me before 8 p.m. Her waking hours are spent preparing for work, commuting to work, working, and returning home. Making the trek from her apartment in Brooklyn to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she spends more than 10 hours in transit each week. When she’s on the job, she’s often on her hands and knees. Her employer is pregnant, which means Delores will soon be caring for two children instead of one. One is easier, of course, but two doesn’t faze her. Three times, she’s cared for twins.

Delores, 60, grew up in Jamaica. She emigrated in her 20s, finding work on the Cayman Islands and then later in Florida. She visited New York not intending to find a new place to live, but she fell hard. “It was exciting, with all the shopping and the stores. I’m like, ‘I like this,’” she remembers. “Everybody’s moving at a faster pace, not laid back and all of that. I just gravitated to it and I loved it, and I was like, ‘Well I’m going to make this home.’” She has been here ever since.

Delores is no longer married, but she was when she first moved to the States. At the time she was ping-ponging back and forth between her husband, who lived here, and her children, who were still in Jamaica. It’s a setup familiar to countless immigrants and poignant for nannies in particular, who spend their time caring for other people’s children in order to provide for their own. “I had someone capable taking care of them,” Delores says. It helped that her two kids were then old enough to talk to her on the phone and communicate. “But yes,” she adds, after a pause. “It was hard.”

She made it a point to talk to them every single day, and to do her “parental part,” as she puts it. She gave advice, she counseled them, she was clear about her expectations for them. She watched them grow up, albeit from a distance. Now one lives not too far from her in New York. The other is in England.

It was a friend in New York who introduced her to care work. When she lived in the Cayman Islands, she worked with children with special needs, so she had some experience. She loved it. “It gives me so much joy working with the kids, watching their development,” she says. “I love the kids, and the kids love me. I think I’m just a kid person.”

Still, her first jobs were disorienting. She’d never worked in a stranger’s house before. She had no idea what to expect or what she could ask for. Twice she took live-in gigs but started to feel claustrophobic. In the beginning she took what was offered to her. Before long she learned what she could demand. She became “someone who stands up for herself,” she explains. “And if there’s something I think is out of bounds, I will speak up.”

She spent 14 years on one job, far longer than most of white-collar America now spends at any single gig. She still talks to the children. “We’re almost like family,” she says. So much so that they still exchange cards at Christmas and Hanukkah, and she receives another on Mother’s Day.

The work gives her purpose. The kids charm her. She feels fulfilled. But that kind of satisfaction doesn’t translate into better wages. Delores has lived in the same apartment since 1998, decorating it to her exact specifications. Last year her landlord raised her rent. She has watched her electric bill go up. At the laundromat she gets charged double what she used to for a plastic bag. “It doubled!” she repeats, for emphasis.

In the city Delores fell in love with decades ago, just 5% of apartments are now affordable for someone making the average salary, according to a recent report—which in New York means earning just under $89,000 a year (compared with just over $59,000 nationwide). Most nannies earn much much less. Yet without them, the most powerful parents in New York could not function.

Money is Kenya’s greatest worry. Since the pandemic she has struggled to find a full-time, permanent job. She knows other nannies share her frustration. “That’s the situation I’m in. I’m constantly looking for work,” she says. “It’s exhausting.” She has wrangled a few jobs, but either they don’t offer the hours she needs or they’re explicitly temporary. When we speak, she’s preparing for the end of her current post, which was never meant to last past September. She has about eight weeks to find something new and an undesirable back-up plan if she cannot. The stress gnaws at her, and she can’t stand the panicked, desperate feeling that comes with the ticking of the clock. She’s too responsible for this.

Recently she interviewed for a job for 40 hours a week. It might have tempted her, but then her prospective boss told her she could offer just $600 per week, or $15 an hour—just over $31,000 a year, in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Kenya has more than two decades of experience. She now charges $25 an hour, minimum, both because of her own expertise and because she knows she can’t afford to make much less. At CGNA she teaches a class on negotiations and tells her students to know their limits. Kenya reminds them, “If you want $25, say $30, because they’re going to do that back-and-forth with you.” She took her own advice. She didn’t take the job.

But of course, she knows as well as the pedigreed economists do that she’s just one poorly timed crisis from financial disaster. She’s come uncomfortably close. Not long ago Kenya had to ask for a cash advance. She winces when she talks about it now. “It’s not pleasant,” she says. “But I was in a bind. So I was like, ‘I’m sorry, but I have this bill that I need to pay, and I was just wondering if you can advance a hundred dollars of my next week’s pay.’” Her bosses didn’t hesitate. They gave her the money. She handled the bill. “But it’s still not—,” she pauses to take a breath. “It’s even hard to talk about right now.”

As she navigates that kind of grind, Kenya has not been eager to spend her limited free time listening to politicians make promises she has never known them to keep. She is not an avid consumer of political news, although she does watch Good Morning America and likes to watch TikTok videos, which will sometimes slide current events into her algorithm, while she sips Dunkin coffee before work. She has a sister who lives in the nearby neighborhood of Prospect Heights, and she’ll often ask her who she’s planning to vote for. For all the work Kenya does with CGNA, national politics is not something she pays a lot of attention to. What do the politicians she sees on TV know of her existence?

And yet this presidential election is a “no-brainer,” as she puts it. She has watched Donald Trump bluster and lie. She followed his criminal trial and took note of his convictions. She didn’t need to know much more about his opponent to know she would cast a vote for the Democrat in November. She looked at her options; she chose the one she felt she could live with. She has learned to take a closer look at local races. “It’s the little elections that are the important ones,” she says. “When it’s time to vote for your council members and stuff like that, those little ones are just as important as the presidential ones.” Those are the candidates who know what her neighborhood is like. When she heard gunshots, perhaps some of them heard them too.

How much longer can Kenya do this? The scramble, the drop-offs, the commute? She doesn’t know the answer. The profession “takes a toll on your body,” she says. “My knees are horrible because there’s a lot of bending. Sometimes, I’m down on the floor and I think, How am I getting up from here? But these are things you don’t want to show in front of your families because they need to be secure that you can do your job.” She steadies herself. She stands.

In the meantime, both of her roommates have full-time work. One is also a nanny but lucked into a regular gig. Her nephew, who is in his 20s, works as a school aide. She hates feeling like she’s the one dragging them down. She is grateful to her sister, the one who lives in Atlanta but owns the apartment in Brownsville that Kenya and her two roommates live in, for charging them less than she could. All three would like to find a bigger place, but the market is impossible. She thinks about leaving New York “all the time,” she tells me. But where would she go? At night she pushes that kind of thinking aside and sets her alarm for 6:30 a.m.

After work Delores watches World News Tonight on ABC and also gets the occasional breaking news alert on her phone. She’s not a news junkie, but she does like to be informed. She knows the priorities of the NDWA, which she volunteers for, and she sees that Democrats tend to talk about those issues more than Republicans do, but it’s not as though either of the two major parties thrills her. “We are left out of everything that they do,” she says. “We are never included. And so because of that, we haven’t been able to stand up for all of our rights and what belongs to us.

“Some people are so big into politics and so big on one party, nothing will change them,” Delores continues. “I’m not like that. I look on both sides and I want to see what both sides are doing, what their policies are, what they’re running on, and what they have for the people.”

In the runup to the first presidential debate, she tells me she has “mixed feelings” about the election. She’s a registered Democrat but isn’t sure if she wants to vote at all. She likes the plans Democrats have put forward for care workers. But as a Christian, she prefers the Republican stance on abortion. “Everyone has their different thing,” she says. “So I am thinking.”

For the most part, what she has been thinking is that she doesn’t like her choices. She will not vote for Donald Trump. She is after all an immigrant and remembers what it was like to arrive here without much. After becoming a citizen she cast her first ballot for Barack Obama. The question when we first speak in June 2024 is whether she cares to get herself to the polls to vote for Joe Biden. She isn’t sure she wants to commit. “One thing that I would like,” she says, “is if we had younger people running.”

Three weeks later she gets her wish.

For hours and in multiple conversations, Delores has explained her resolve and her skepticism, her values, her convictions, her disappointment in the slow pace of progress. She has made clear that it’s she who looks out for her best interests, not the smooth talkers in Washington, DC, who want her vote without having to hear her out. So I expect to hear more of the same when I call her after Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic candidate for president. One elite politician, swapped for another.

Except when she answers the phone, she doesn’t sound jaded at all. In fact, she sounds elated. “I am buzzing with excitement,” she says. She knows that no policies have shifted and no new commitments have been made. Harris is even more explicit in her pro-choice rhetoric than Joe Biden was. Delores waves all that off. “It’s a new voice!” she trills, using a new voice herself. “It’s a more powerful voice. Fresh blood is on the platform!”

After months on the sidelines, Delores is now planning to knock on doors to get out the vote for Harris. Hell, she donated to the campaign and urged her friends to vote. When she commutes, when she comes home, she lets herself revel in what feels like a communal sense of optimism. The rent is still too high. Her bills add up. The laundromat continues to charge 50 cents for a plastic bag. And even so, she feels a new, undeniable optimism. She feels hope.

“We are struggling,” she says. “We need a president that is there for us, that cares for us and all those who are struggling. We need a president who is for the people.” She believes Harris can be that person. Delores hopes she will remember, if she wins, the kind of people who powered her bid.

It moves her to see a Black woman on the top of the ticket. She has lived in America for decades, and she knows the opportunities it has provided. But pride is a newer sensation. It turns out to be the ultimate motivation for a woman who has devoted her life to the kind of work that few acknowledge and even fewer champion. Of course, she knows that no candidate is a silver bullet or the answer to a problem that has been festering for as long as women in this country have worked outside the home.

Still, for an unseen population, representation isn’t an empty buzzword. It means something. “It’s giving other women a chance to become great,” Delores says, marveling. “It means that nobody is limited.”

Photography by Ashley Markle