A Safety & Autonomy Framework for Domestic Workers
Developed by Brit Ashe — Just Brit, Thanks
The way I work is straightforward: I tell the truth early, I plan ahead, and I don’t confuse control with safety.
With kids, that means I use language that teaches decision-making without shame; “if you choose X, Y might happen; if it does, I’ve got you; then we choose the safer option”.
With adults and employers, it’s the same principle. I’m not interested in performance, vague promises, or “we’re like family” as a job description. I’m interested in conditions: clarity, accountability, and the things that keep people safe inside a private home where power is uneven and the stakes are real.
This framework documents the minimum conditions I have needed to do high-risk domestic labor safely. It’s not aspirational— as Miranda Priestly would say “…am I reaching for the stars here? Not really.”
It reflects lived experience across live-in, ROTA, travel, trial, and international placements, and it exists to name foreseeable harm before it becomes crisis. Domestic labor is intimate, privatized, and structurally unequal. Harm in this industry is not rare or accidental. It’s predictable.
Minimum Conditions for Safe Domestic Work
Family Vetting That Assesses Risk, Not Just Wealth
Agencies must vet families with the same rigor applied to caregivers, including employment stability, litigation stress, caregiver turnover, surveillance practices, and decision-making dynamics. Money does not equal structure.
Unstructured parents create unsafe jobs.
Mandatory Payroll, Tax Education, and Timely Pay
Caregivers and employers need plain-language education on W-2 classification, overtime, domestic worker tax law, travel pay, and international considerations.
Pay must be on time, automatic, and non-negotiable.
Late or inconsistent payment; requiring reminders, follow-ups, or requests, strips professional dignity and shifts power unfairly onto workers. Payroll timeliness is a safety and respect issue. Tax confusion shifts legal and financial risk onto workers.
Crisis Access That Is Safe to Use
There must be a protected way to ask for help during a placement without retaliation, reputation damage, or being labeled “difficult.”
If reaching out increases risk, support is performative.
Trial Periods & Travel Treated as High-Risk Labor
Flying a caregiver into a private home, especially internationally, without enforceable safeguards is exposure, not opportunity.
Agencies must:
limit trial length
require contracts before travel
guarantee paid return travel regardless of outcome
conduct confidential check-ins
treat extended trials and international roles as high-risk placements
Isolation multiplies harm.
Surrogacy, Newborn Additions, and Disclosure Requirements
In high-end domestic work, caregivers are sometimes hired without full disclosure of active or imminent surrogacy arrangements. Newborns may be introduced suddenly; mid-contract, during travel, or framed as a “surprise.”
This is foreseeable. It materially changes scope, sleep, risk, liability, and workload.
Minimum Protections
Mandatory disclosure of active or planned surrogacy before hiring
Newborn addition triggers contract renegotiation, pay adjustment, and consent
Clarification of newborn-specific support (night care, additional staff)
Travel and postpartum plans must be renegotiated, not assumed
Caregivers must be able to decline newborn roles without retaliation
Surrogacy is not a personal inconvenience. It is a scope change.
Confidential Pattern Tracking
Repeated family behavior must be documented across placements. Silence protects institutions, not workers or children.
Patterns matter more than isolated incidents.
Language & Legal Translation
Workers need plain-language explanations of rights, contracts, labor law, and options during crisis.
Confusion is a control mechanism. Language restores footing.
Limits on Cross-Agency Communication & Backchannels
Agencies must not discuss caregivers outside formal placement or consented reference processes.
Backchannel communication:
offers no due process
provides no opportunity for correction
relies on rumor and bias
disproportionately harms Black women and boundary-setting workers
Informal surveillance is not safety. It is reputation control.
Enforceable Contracts Before Arrival
No travel, relocation, trial, or live-in start without a finalized contract defining duties, hours, overtime, sleep expectations, surveillance, travel time, exit terms, and guaranteed return travel.
Ambiguity is leverage. Contracts must protect workers during conflict, not just at signing.
Independent Advocacy Outside the Placement Hierarchy
Caregivers need access to a neutral third party that is not paid by parents and not placing workers. Agencies are structurally limited once a fee has been paid. Advocacy must exist outside that conflict of interest.
Protection from Surveillance Abuse
All monitoring must be disclosed in advance. Surveillance cannot be used retroactively to rewrite events, justify termination, or manufacture cause.
Selective footage is power, not proof.
ROTA Roles Require Specific Protections
ROTA (rotational) roles are often marketed as one-week-on / one-week-off, but without enforcement they can become open-ended coverage. Rotation creep is predictable: “temporary” extensions, delayed relief, added travel, and pressure to stay because continuity is preferred.
When exhaustion is visible and coverage is still extended, this is not a misunderstanding. It is a labor risk.
Minimum ROTA Protections
Fixed rotation schedule in writing (e.g., 7-on / 7-off)
Written amendment + premium pay for any changes
Hard cap on consecutive on-days
Backup coverage required (not optional)
Clear on-duty vs. off-duty definitions, with no contact on off weeks unless its an emergency
Travel cannot automatically extend rotations
Schedule integrity treated as a safety issue, not a preference
ROTA without enforcement becomes overuse by design.
Safe Exit Without Punishment
Leaving an unsafe role should not cost housing, pay, reputation, or future employability.
Exit capacity is safety.
Respect for Professional Judgment
Caregivers must be able to exercise expertise without being pathologized. Disagreement is not incompetence. Compliance is not competence.
Cultural & Power Awareness
Black women are disproportionately scrutinized, surveilled, and excluded in domestic labor. This is structural, not interpersonal.
Industry norms such as requiring caregivers to submit photos alongside résumés materially increase the risk of racial bias at the earliest stage of hiring. Photographs enable families to screen candidates based on race, appearance, and perceived “fit” before skills, experience, or references are meaningfully considered.
This practice:
• bypasses equal consideration
normalizes appearance-based exclusion
• disproportionately impacts Black women and other caregivers of color
• and allows discrimination to occur quietly, without accountability or documentation
Requiring photos is not neutral. In an industry shaped by racialized expectations of care, it facilitates exclusion while maintaining plausible deniability. Ignoring this reality does not prevent bias, it enables it
Agency Accountability That Carries Consequences
Agencies currently operate with near-total insulation from outcomes. When harm occurs, caregivers absorb the cost; financial, legal, reputational, and physical.
Accountability is not sympathy or internal “learning.”
Accountability means consequence.
If an agency misrepresents a role, facilitates illegal pay, enables surveillance abuse, abandons a worker mid-placement, or engages in unauthorized information sharing, something must happen to the agency.
An industry without consequences will always externalize harm onto caregivers.