I’ve spent nearly 15 years caring for other people’s children. I’ve loved the work, taken the responsibility seriously, and brought my professionalism into every household I’ve entered.

I’ve also navigated racism and explicit antisemitism in private homes where I was expected to remain professional. In those moments, speaking up wasn’t a simple matter of finding the right words. My livelihood, working relationship, and ability to leave safely were part of the calculation.

Sometimes, silence is how a worker gets through a situation she has little power to change. That doesn’t make the situation acceptable.

Domestic workers need more than advice to choose carefully or trust their instincts. They need meaningful standards for safety, autonomy, and accountability, including when a placement goes wrong.

I’m sharing Placement Is Not Protection: Why Domestic Workers Need Standards, Not Another Request for Understanding, an essay about what professionalism can and cannot protect, and what responsibility agencies have after making a placement.

Placement is not protection. Affection is not accountability. Professionalism cannot be a one-way street.

#DomesticWork #NannyIndustry #WorkerSafety

On land, labor, inheritance, and the things that survive.

I went to the cotton fields in Newbern, Alabama, to see where my great-grandmother had worked as a sharecropper.

I found a seashell.

I brought it home for my altar.

Somewhere between the cemetery, the old cotton gin, my family’s land, and that shell in the dirt, I found myself thinking about inheritance: what survives, what gets lost, whose labor gets remembered, and what we owe the people who came before us.

My great-grandmother was a sharecropper. My family still has land. I’m still learning the history of both, and what those two facts mean together.

I’m also thinking about the women who worked the land, maintained households, raised other people’s children, and sustained families through systems that depended on their labor while too often treating their safety and autonomy as optional.

That history is part of why I’m developing the Safety & Autonomy Standards™, a framework for safer, more accountable private-home employment.

Because the conditions under which people work are not inevitable. They're created, maintained, and changed. And domestic workers deserve more than advice to 'be careful'. They deserve meaningful protections before something goes wrong.

What do we owe the women whose labor made our lives possible, and what should the women who come after us be able to expect?

That question followed me from the cotton fields into my work, and I don’t think I can separate the two anymore.

I called the essay The Black Belt Is Atlantis. It’s about land, labor, inheritance, the women whose stories we’re still trying to recover, and what we choose to leave behind.

I’ve been quiet about ‘The Montréal thing’ for quite some time. Not because there wasn’t a story, but because sometimes surviving something takes longer than telling it does, and I needed time to come back to myself and look at what I actually had. Now I have the recordings, the photographs, the emails, the transcripts, identifiable components of coerced labor and human trafficking- as per the Canadian Human Trafficking hotline, and a whole lot of questions for the people and institutions involved. So, Montréal, lets have a chat.

A house manager once told me, “You do what you have to do.”

So I did.

I documented the work. I documented the exhaustion. I documented the conditions. I documented what I was seeing. I kept the records you required me to keep.

At the time, I thought I was documenting the children’s lives.

I didn’t realize I was also documenting the conditions under which I was expected to care for them.

This is the story of one placement, two babies I loved, and a workplace where the person responsible for seeing everything was apparently the person no one thought needed to be seen.

You told me to do what I had to do, Cathy.
So here we are.

Photo © Brit Ashe, 2009. All rights reserved