In the wake of the Palisades fire, Theresa is one of many domestic workers in Los Angeles trying to make ends meet after abruptly losing her job. Though she didn’t personally live in the fire’s path, she has worked as a house cleaner in the Pacific Palisades for eight years. Theresa says she does not know if her employer’s home is still standing, as they have not responded to her since the fire broke out. Now, Theresa, who requested the use of a pseudonym, is awaiting payment for work completed before the blazes and struggling to figure out how to pay her bills and support her two children.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The air quality is also causing concern. Theresa’s nose has been bothering her and one of her children has asthma. Each night, she has to give her child a nebulizer treatment and has even had to take them to the emergency room.
“I understand that the focus is on people’s losses right now, but how are they thinking about workers like me?” she says, speaking in her native Spanish. “How are they [the government] thinking about the trauma that workers like me experienced that night when we had to leave the fires and try to get home to our children? How do we make sure something like this doesn’t happen again?”
Theresa is currently receiving guidance from Maegan Ortiz, the executive director of the non-profit Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA), who assisted with translation during our conversation. Theresa is one of the many domestic workers in need of help since several wildfires torched over 50,000 acres and have so far left 28 dead. Tens of thousands of people were placed under evacuation orders, and more than 16,000 structures—including homes and businesses—have been destroyed in the fires.
On Jan. 23, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a $2.5 billion bipartisan relief package to help Los Angeles recover and rebuild.
But Ortiz says that it could take years for individual workers to regain their financial footing. After the Woolsey fire destroyed over 1,600 structures in November 2018, it took two years for workers employed in the area to not require additional assistance for basic needs like food, rent, and healthcare, according to tracking by IDEPSCA. Ortiz says that the impact this time around could be far worse.
“That was one fire. Now we’re talking five [or more],” says Ortiz. “The time to recover for this workforce is going to be a lot longer.”
Theresa is among the domestic workers who have applied for grants for aid from IDEPSCA, which is an affiliate of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). Ai-jen Poo—president of the NDWA, which advocates for the over 2 million nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers in the United States—points out that Los Angeles has a large concentration of domestic workers. In moments like this, Poo says community support is of the utmost importance, especially since domestic labor is typically “invisible work,” and often done by more vulnerable communities—the workforce is “overwhelmingly” made up of women and immigrant populations.
A study by UCLA, published on Jan. 15, showed that 85% of individuals employed as household workers in Los Angeles are Latino. And, among these individuals, 47% are self-employed, making them ineligible for unemployment benefits or formal protections such as paid leave.
“You could walk into any neighborhood in L.A. and not know which homes are also workplaces,” Poo says. “There’s a very long history of treating domestic workers differently from other workers, excluding them from basic rights and protections that other workers take for granted in the workplace.”
For Anna Guerrero—who has spent decades working as a housekeeper for two homes in the Palisades—the reality of being without income and insurance has hit hard. Both of her employers lost their homes, and since she typically gets paid by the day, she’s been without work since the fires began. All of this is exacerbated by her efforts in caring for her elderly mother and tending to her husband, who is due to have surgery later in the year.
Her biggest need right now, she says, is regaining a steady source of income.
“At the end of the month, I still have to pay the rent and buy the food. Everything is expensive. Life is expensive,” she says. “I’m not receiving any [financial support] right now. I’m just trying to figure it out as I go. There’s a lot of people who lost their jobs, so it’s been really hard to find work.”
The predicament of Theresa and Anna is something Lucia Diaz, CEO of the Mar Vista Family Center in Culver City, is all too familiar with. She used to work as a housecleaner and nanny, and is currently supporting domestic workers at the center. Many of them have lost their jobs as the houses they worked at in the Palisades are no longer standing. Some of the workers who seek her help are undocumented, which she says provides another layer of problems, especially considering President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration.
“There’s a lot of fear in people. It’s not easy to ask for a job, to apply for government assistance [when you are undocumented],” Diaz says. “With the fires and all this political change, it’s like two disasters happening at the same time.”
There are also concerns about the health of workers who remained near the impacted areas, since wildfire smoke contains many pollutants and can lead to short and long term health problems when inhaled.
Recently, California passed an expansion to California’s Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) to include domestic employees who work through agencies—which according to the UCLA Labor Center is 84% of homecare attendants. These protections don’t come into effect until later in 2025, though, so Poo says much of their current work is dedicated to advocating for the health and safety needs of domestic workers.
Ortiz recalls anecdotes from domestic laborers during the aftermath of the Woolsey fire—workers being hired to put out fires, employers evacuating but leaving their household workers behind to care for pets, workers left behind to clean toxic ash. And with domestic laborers currently not covered under Cal-OSHA protections, Poo and Ortiz see their work of educating and advocating for household workers as more important than ever.
“This is a workforce with no safety net and no savings. People work paycheck to paycheck, and so [it’s about] being able to afford food, water, clothing, and then getting access to information about health and safety and in the language they speak,” Poo says.
Amid the blazes, NDWA and IDEPSCA have been providing information to workers about toxicity in the wake of the fires, PPE, temporary shelter, and transportation for evacuees. Ortiz says that IDEPSCA’s office has become a “distribution center” of everything from masks and water to diapers and hot meals. NDWA has set up a Domestic Worker Relief Fund for those workers affected by the fires. Poo says that emergency financial assistance funds such as this is the most immediate way people can help those that need aid.
But many of the displaced laborers IDEPSCA and NDWA work with have been difficult to track down—some have evacuated out of Los Angeles with their clients, some remain in the city.
They’re only now in the “forensic” stage of understanding how people have been impacted, Poo says, and the battle has just begun. Ortiz is especially thinking of her undocumented community members who have been displaced and may not be eligible for FEMA assistance. “We’re going to have to keep an eye out for keeping people housed,” she says, fearing that some may be scared to ask for help, and in their desperation, may be taken advantage of.
“Something we saw after Woolsey was a lot of people taking advantage of the undocumented workforce and underpaying them, if paying them at all,” Ortiz says. “So that’s something we’re very concerned about, especially given the sort of anti-immigrant rhetoric that the federal government is promoting.”
Still, Ortiz says that even if the outcomes from these fires are more devastating, the response from the community has been more heartwarming than she’s seen in the past.
Organizations in areas that were not impacted by the fires—like Westchester and Culver City—have been opening up food banks and floating donations to aid impacted workers, says Jesus Orozco, a community organizer who works for the city of LA. Orozco volunteers at the Mar Vista Family Center, which he points out was founded by Palisades residents in the 70s and continues to receive financial support from families in the area.
But now, as many face down the cost of rebuilding, he worries that the organization might see a drop in support that allows them to provide critical services—from food banks to after-school programming. “The YMCA, the Boys & Girls Clubs, all of them depend on philanthropists that live in these areas,” he says. “Their primary focus is gonna be on rebuilding.”
For Orozco, remembering the community is key. “We’re all feeling grief,” he says. “No matter what socio-economic background we’re from, we’re all connected here.”
Leave a comment
