One-quarter of domestic workers are paid below the minimum wage, according to a national survey — with the average annual pay for all being just above $17,000. Few workers receive overtime. In Manhattan, health care and personal care are among the lowest paid occupations; only food preparers and servers do worse. (If you take care of machinery instead of human beings you earn twice as much.) Moreover, most domestic workers lack the basic job protections that Americans in other professions take for granted: contracts, sick leave, vacation days, matched contributions to Social Security, retirement benefits.

Today, however, Juarez knows her rights well (and, yes, in Massachusetts she is entitled to overtime pay). In fact, she and colleagues like Angela Foster — a veteran nanny who discovered the domestic workers movement two years ago at a workshop during National Nanny Recognition Week (mark it: the fourth week in September) — now regularly conduct training sessions to teach others about their rights.

They work as member leaders with an organization called Matahari: Eye of the Day, (matahari, in Malay, means sun). The group is part of the Massachusetts Coalition for Domestic Workers, which successfully lobbied for passage of a domestic workers’ bill of rights. Juarez had grown so emboldened that she successfully lobbied her own city, Lynn, Mass., to adopt a resolution in support of that bill of rights. “For me this experience has been marvelous,” she added. “I’m helping others to know about the law, and to lose their fear.”

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