Despite having a law degree in her home country, when Lis moved to the US 15 years ago, the first job she was able to get was cleaning houses — domestic labor. She didn’t mind the work, but there were serious issues and seemingly no protections for a worker like her.
“I was denied going to the restroom — potty breaks. There was no sick time,” Lis said, tearing up as she spoke to RANGE. Back then, she stayed silent, fearing that she would be fired if she spoke up for herself.
After a year and a half cleaning houses, Lis — whose last name we’re not using to protect her employment — started nannying and loved it. “It’s a career where I found myself,” she said. “I went to law school in my country, but definitely I wouldn’t change that for what I do: a nanny. I love my career.”
Since switching to nannying, Lis has been lucky, finding steady employment with families who pay her a fair wage, allow her breaks and give her sick time. But under current state law, they don’t have to.
While most workers across Washington enjoy protections like guaranteed breaks, protected leave, worker’s compensation benefits and a minimum wage of $16.66 an hour, domestic laborers like nannies, house cleaners and gardeners are legally excluded from these protections. Most domestic laborers are considered independent contractors, and current labor law requires them to set their own rates.
Rather than empowering workers to advocate to be paid what they’re worth and to set up contracts that are fair to both workers and employers, labor law favors employers, who often hire domestic workers with no contracts, no guaranteed time off, no minimum wage and no protected breaks. This means more than 100,000 domestic laborers work in the shadows — many of whom are women, BIPOC and immigrants.
During the 2025 Washington state legislative session, domestic laborers from across the state rallied behind SB 5023, affectionately called the Domestic Laborers’ Bill of Rights, which sought to “provide labor market protections for domestic workers.”
The bill would have eliminated exceptions in existing labor laws to prevent the abuses like the ones Lis suffered when she was cleaning houses. But it failed to pass a final hurdle in the House, leaving workers across the state without protections for yet another year.
“Some people don’t understand that this is a serious job, a career for many of us that we choose. Sometimes people look at the nanny job like a hobby,” Lis said, ” But it’s really serious and very important because without us as nannies, my bosses who work in tech or in accounting, they have high profile jobs and without me they wouldn’t be able to go to their jobs every day.”
What the bill would have done
Lis is not alone in having faced poor working conditions throughout her career.
Elena E., a nanny over the age of 60 in Everett, said she was passed over for jobs and fired from other jobs because of her age. Claudia V., a nanny in Seattle, said she was fired with no warning or severance after telling the family she nannied for that she was pregnant. Neither of them could file discrimination claims because they were excluded from Washington’s labor laws.
Lucia B., a gardener and house cleaner in Yakima, said her employers frequently made comments about her identity as a masculine lesbian, forcing her to lift and carry objects that were too heavy for her to do safely because she “looked like a man.” When that resulted in a serious back injury, Lucia had to continue working, because as a domestic laborer, she had no right to worker’s compensation.
Liz F., an undocumented nanny in Bothell, decided not to return to a full-time nannying job when the family went on vacation. Angry that she wouldn’t be returning, the family she worked for demanded she return all the money she had already earned from three weeks of work, threatening to call immigration enforcement if she did not, Liz said. She didn’t see any other options; she returned the money, which put her in an extremely vulnerable economic position.
The Domestic Laborers’ Bill of Rights — sponsored in the House by Rep. Monica Stonier (D-49) and the Senate by Sen. Rebecca Saldaña (D-37) — would have been the law when they faced workplace issues, Elena, Claudia, Lucia and Liz could have had the right to file Labor and Industries (L&I) claims against their employers. Instead, they were left vulnerable.
The bill, which defines employers as “hiring entities,” would have:
- Imposed requirements on hiring entities to pay domestic laborers minimum wage, provide them meal and rest breaks, have a written contract with them and provide them two weeks notice before terminating their contracts.
- Prohibited hiring entities from retaliating against domestic workers for exercising their rights, participating in political speech, organizing or disclosing their immigration status.
- Made hiring entities subject to the Washington Law Against Discrimination
- Prohibited hiring entities from threatening to inform the government about a laborer’s immigration status
- Prohibited hiring entities from recording or monitoring domestic laborers’s private communications, while in the bathroom or changing clothes.
- Eliminated exceptions for domestic laborers from certain labor laws.
“The policy was not creating new law,” said Hannah Sabio-Howell, the communications director at Working Washington & Fair Work Center, who worked on the lobbying campaign for the bill. “It’s just including this historically excluded industry in existing labor law.”
Bill fails after unexpected slowdowns
The bill had progressive support, with nine co-sponsors on the Senate version of the bill and 17 co-sponsors on the House version, including Spokane representatives Timm Ormsby and Natasha Hill. By early March, the bill looked like a lock to pass, moving quickly through the Senate and reaching the final stage in the House. But on April 16, the bill failed to pass the House, in a shock to labor organizers and domestic workers.
“I was at work and the kids I nanny were napping. So many of the nannies that have kids the same age, were texting and watching [the House hearing] and trying to wait for the good news, but it didn’t happen,” Lis said. “It’s unbelievable that still so many years after my experience as a cleaner, I meet people, women, who are also in the same situation that I was back then. And it’s like nothing has changed.”
Republicans who argued against the bill in the Senate said it would create “bureaucratic red tape,” and an undue burden for hiring domestic laborers. The last time it was discussed in the House, on April 7, the only testimony against the bill was from Rep. Joe Schmick (R-9) who cited confusion with definitions in the bill, though he did not elaborate on what those confusions were.
Sabio-Howell thought the bill failed because of Republicans throwing in oppositional amendments — amendments that water down a bill or undermine a bill’s intent that require debate and discussion. That slowed the process down, and the bill didn’t get a vote before the deadline.
Estefana, a domestic laborer from King County who campaigned to get the bill passed, felt like it came down to a misunderstanding or devaluing of the work domestic laborers do.
“The hardest thing that I saw through this process was making legislators and political identities understand why this was important,” Estefana said. “ At some point, we all need a nanny. We all need a caregiver. We all need a domestic worker, or a house cleaner.”
We reached out to the bill’s sponsors, Saldaña and Stonier, to ask if they had any insight on why the bill didn’t pass, but neither responded to requests for comment. We will update this story if they do.
Following the footsteps
A bill like this isn’t unprecedented: 12 other states have passed similar legislation, including Oregon and California. It’s not untested in Washington either — in 2019, the city of Seattle passed a nearly identical bill on the countywide level, fought for by the same coalition of workers’ rights organizations backing the state Domestic Laborers’ Bill of Rights.
“ I think it’s incredibly helpful to look at what happens when workers who’ve historically been excluded from things like the right to minimum wage, the right to sick time, the right to a fair contract and protections from discriminations finally have those things, like workers in most every other industry,” Sabio-Howell said. “We’ve seen it be incredibly successful in Seattle.”
Dawn Utzik has worked in childcare for 18 years, nannying for 15 of those years.
“When I got into nannying, a big portion of [my pay] was under the table,” Utzik said. “I was literally paid $10 an hour.”
When she moved to King County, she started to get paid more, and had a W2 form so she could report her income, “but I was still not working with a contract,” she said. For a while, Utzik had a stable position with a family she felt respected her, but eventually, it ended when the child she was nannying went back to school. She bounced around for a bit, then went through an agency to find a new job, which ended up being her first contracted position: during that period, the Seattle Domestic Laborers’ Bill of Rights had gone into effect requiring hiring entities to maintain an in-writing contract with workers.
This was crucial for Utzik: the family she started working for initially wasn’t giving her breaks from childcare, or paying her for the breaks she couldn’t take as the sole caregiver for a child, but since Utzik knew her rights under the new county law, she provided the family with a copy of the King County law.
After that, “ I was given an additional two hours per paycheck, which is a good chunk of money,” Utzik said. “ I worked for them for two and a half years. And it was only because of the bill of rights that I was able to get that.”
Now, Utzik is involved in organizing for the statewide Bill of Rights, to ensure that domestic laborers outside of King County can enjoy the same protections she has.
“One of the really powerful and beautiful things about that coalition of workers was that they looked around and saw that this is something that workers across the state deserve too,” Sabio-Howell said, pointing to workers like Utzik and Estefana, who also works in King County.
They didn’t stop pushing once their rights were guaranteed, instead, continuing to squeeze in bill testimony and media interviews on their breaks or while the children they nannied napped.
What’s next?
That dedication has workers already gearing up to fight even harder for this bill in the next legislative session, Sabio-Howell said.
“Ultimately, this state policy came so painfully close but did not clear its final hurdle [the House floor vote] because lawmakers did not prioritize the urgency of defending this majority-immigrant, majority-women industry, even at a time when these are the workers on the frontlines of hostile federal policymaking,” Sabio-Howell said. “This coalition of workers will be back next year because correcting this injustice can’t wait.
The key to success next year, domestic laborers think, is to ensure that lawmakers and people across the state take the time to really understand their work and why these protections are essential.
“ I think that they think that a nanny is just sitting around the house just observing their child,” Utzik said. “ Our real job is we’re octopuses. You need to be a chef because you’re making lunches. You need to be a teacher because you have to have teachable moments where you’re facilitating learning. You need to be playful and get on the ground and play with them. You need to be a librarian and provide books and you need to be a performer because you’re singing and dramatic-acting in play. There’s so many different aspects to this job that people are unaware of.”
“Domestic workers are essential. We want everybody to know about this law to help us, and to learn a little bit about what it means to be a domestic worker: why it’s important for us to have the same rights as anyone who works in fabric, in the hospital, in any other line of work,” Estefana said. “We work 40 hours, we work overtime and we have to have the right to PTO, the right to have a contract. The right to raise our voices. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”
