MUA has a long history of organizing for change.  Over the past sixteen years, MUA members have been at the forefront of local, state, and national campaigns for economic and social justice.  Utilizing popular theater, MUA has educated and mobilized the community on critical issues.  Members have organized street theater perfomances, protests, doorknocking campaigns, and petition drives to ensure that Latina immigrant women’s voices and demands are heard.  Through these organizing campaigns, MUA won provisions for immigrant survivors of violence in the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), defeated statewide measures that would have ended prenatal care for immigrant women, articulated the need for improved language access in Alameda County hospitals, stopped budget cuts to public health programs such as MediCal, and passed local ordinances ending the collaboration between the San Francisco police department and ICE/INS.  MUA continues to struggle daily for immigrant women’s rights, dignity and leadership.

In the winter of 2003, MUA decided to shift towards more strategic community organizing and dedicate increased resources for longer-term campaigns conceived, designed, and led by the MUA membership.  This shift was a result of the thinking and visioning done during MUA’s strategic planning process and articulated through MUA’s Theory of Change.  After many hours of research, analysis and discussions, MUA members decided to focus our first long-term strategic campaign on Immigrant Women’s Workers Rights: Inside and Outside the Home.  As women, we work within our homes, cooking, cleaning, washing and raising our children.  Most of us also work or have worked in private homes taking care of children, cleaning, and caring for the sick and elderly.  The work we do in our homes is not valued or recognized by society and neither is the work we do in other people’s homes.  Household workers not only lack key rights, such as health care access, but are excluded from many labor laws in California.  Through the Household Workers’ Campaign, MUA is educating and mobilizing immigrant workers to fight for respect, justice and dignity.

“Through my work on MUA’s Respect Women’s Work Campaign, I have learned that the work that we do as women should be recognized.  I don’t feel like my work as a mother and wife or as a domestic worker in other people’s homes is valued.  Sometimes I feel like I am seen as just another piece of furniture in the house.  But this injustice motivates me to struggle so that our voices are heard, our work is recognized, and our rights are respected.  The work has to begin with us as women.  We have to respect ourselves and our work first and then demand that respect from everyone else.” 
— Luz Sampedro, MUA’s Campaign Coordinating Committee

• History of the Campaign
• Campaign Victories
• Resources for Household Workers
• Key Coalitions
• MUA’s Theory of Change (PDF)