We Rise: A Workforce Development Strategy for the Domestic Worker Industry
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What is the We Rise Nanny Training?
Background
Working as house cleaners, nannies, and home care providers, domestic workers provide essential services to millions of New Yorkers. However, their work remains undervalued, wages continue to be extremely low with no benefits, and difficult working conditions like exposure to sexual harassment and dangerous conditions, while serving as front-line caregivers during the pandemic. The New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights remains a challenge to apply inside a private home work environment, due to limited reporting and enforceable violations. In response to these difficult conditions, domestic worker organizations and their allies developed We Rise: Nanny Training of Trainers, a multi-pronged strategy for increasing employment opportunities, job quality, and satisfaction across the industry for thousands of domestic workers.
Purpose
For domestic workers, workforce development is a necessary strategy for job redesign, ensuring the value of their work is recognized by employers across this vital industry and in turn, enabling them to negotiate for higher wages and collectively raise standards in the industry. We Rise: Nanny Training of Trainers (ToT), a workforce empowerment program, seeks to elevate workers rights, enhance the quality of services nannies are able to provide to families, and in turn raise the value that employers place on this important sector and the workforce.
The effectiveness of a workforce development strategy in an informal economy depends on the ability to reach a significant percentage of the workforce. We Rise has trained over 50 nanny leaders from various domestic-work organizations (worker-centers, worker-owned cooperatives, etc) as peer educators. These peer educators train in essential workforce development programs and serve as issues experts in topics such as child pediatrics, effective communication with families, and child development to industry standard raising initiatives through negotiation, workers rights, & health and safety and sexual harassment trainings.
They deliver trainings to hundreds of domestic workers across the city and state through a five week nanny training certificate program, virtual COVID-19 back to work training modules, and peer led psychosocial spaces to support workers during the pandemic. Using this approach, the We Rise cadre trains in 4 languages having awarded more than 405 certificates in the last 2.5 years, and reached an additional 550 workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Approach
As part of the private, informal economy, the institutional partnership and Cornell certificate of participation in the We Rise program, provide an essential role, in providing viable skills for training and career development, as well as to demonstrate the value of work to employers. Cornell’s 75 year history in labor relations and education provides both a high standard of workforce development education for domestic workers and a recognized and valued certificate among employers. In a study of our graduates, the Cornell Certificate has been known to increase job quality by 65%. Cornell’s NYC based Worker Institute partnered with the New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs -Paid Care Division, to design, and train nanny peer facilitators to implement a nanny work profile survey and provide data analysis as co-principal investigators at four borough convenings.
We Rise’s strategy to reach this informal workforce also collaborates with employers towards raising standards and serves as a replicable model across the state and other industries.The strategy to reach a majority of this ‘hard to reach’ workforce includes: bringing together a coalition of organizations serving the community to reach their bases and outreach within their neighborhoods, offering trainings in local languages/for varying literacy levels, supporting a board of domestic workers as designers and decision makers of the program, and ensuring the program meets workers where they’re at (including flexible training times, popular education techniques. This strategy also includes partnerships with employers, working on incubating standards raising practices integral to workforce development. Additionally, by partnering with employers, We Rise works toward matching the right worker to the right employer, initiatives in local neighborhoods with high concentration of both employers and domestic workers, willing to engage in collectively developing the workforce and raising standards in the industry.
The coalition is rapidly growing and through evaluation with support of Cornell, We Rise has developed a replicable model of peer educator led workforce development that has garnered interest among domestic worker organizations in other states, as well as other industries in the informal economy, such as restaurant workers. The evaluation uses a highly participatory process with peer and instructor feedback to assess and develop the skills and knowledge of the trainees. Additionally, pre-post content based analysis are conducted at each training and baseline and outcome data 6 months post training reveals the impacts of the program on participants employability and empowerment.
Achievements
Awarded workforce development certificates to 405 nannies and domestic workers across New York City and state
Serviced 550 nannies and domestic workers with safety training and psychosocial support during the height of the pandemic
Created a multi-sectoral approach to workforce development in the informal economy, combining domestic workers, employers, academia, state agencies, and worker based organizations
Developed a model of peer based workforce development that can be replicated across regions and industries