A Worker Rights Conflict: The Effect of Domestic Worker Bill of Rights Adoption on Hispanic Female Employment within these “Protected” Industries

Abstract

This paper examines whether the adoption of a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights effectively changed the share of working age, Hispanic women in domestic industries. The implications of worker protection effects on a largely unprotected and disproportionate domestic worker base have been researched extensively since the start of 2010. However, because of the informal structure of work, undocumented contracts of many domestic workers, and the overall lack of quantitative depth for recorded worker data, these policies have been deemed inefficient. Building on existing research through recorded ACS and CPS worker records across 2003-2024, an event study DiD model for the staggered adoption of individual state Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (DWBR) legislations, and robustness analysis across magnitude, heterogeneity, and occupational allocation contextualizations, will further this research. Instead of looking at grand scale quantitative changes in outcomes like annual income, long term wealth, and wage gap decompositions; however, a more direct target of domestic occupation uptake by Hispanic women following these policies allowed for specific identification of the effectiveness of DWBRs and whether they influenced domestic labor share in the first place. In short, I found that the adoption of a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights across states implies a modest increase in the share of Hispanic women employed in domestic work, although these estimates lack precision.