Domestic workers vulnerable to exploitation

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Vilma Serralta worked 14 hours a day for four years as the live-in housekeeper at an Atherton couple's estate, cleaning their six-bathroom home, preparing their food and tending to their young daughter. She took occasional five-minute breaks and got Saturday and part of Sunday off every other week.

She was paid $1,000 to $1,300 a month, she said, and had no idea of her rights to minimum wages and overtime until she was fired in September 2006 for leaving chicken bones in the garbage overnight. She went job-hunting at San Mateo County Family Services, where she explained how she had been treated and was promptly referred to a lawyer.

Her complaint was not uncommon. Though live-in domestic workers in California are entitled to the state's minimum wage of $8 an hour, and to overtime after nine hours in a workday or five days in a week, advocates say their rights are often hard to enforce.

Domestics "are typically some of our most vulnerable workers," said one of Serralta's lawyers, Christopher Ho of the Employment Law Center at San Francisco's Legal Aid Society. "They work in households where they're isolated, with very few witnesses and no access to other employees."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/14/BA551A4PB0.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea

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