On a busy street in Elmwood Park, a suburb outside Chicago, Magdalena Mrowca dragged her heavy vacuum and loaded it into the trunk of her car. 

Mrowca has been cleaning homes for a living since the 1990s. And as of January 2022, a Chicago ordinance has mandated that the people she works for provide her a written contract, in her preferred language, with her wage and schedule. 

That contract for the city’s domestic workers — nannies, house cleaners and care workers — might also include things like who brings supplies or even the scope of the work. For example, if a nanny is hired for child care, can they also be asked to do the laundry? The idea is to protect workers from wage theft and being taken advantage of by their bosses. 

But last year, when Mrowca brought this up to someone she’d been cleaning for for years, it did not go as she’d hoped. 

“Basically I said that there is a requirement in Chicago that we should have a contract agreement to protect both sides,” Mrowca said. “And they didn’t say anything, but in a few days they just let me go.”

Mrowca said the family told her their college-age daughter was home and would take over cleaning duties. A coincidence, maybe, but she had been working there for so long, she thinks she was let go because of her request.

After that, Mrowca did not ask any of her other Chicago clients for a contract. 

“It’s just not worth it to me. If I present it approaching people for contract and I lose the job, we will not have money to support [ourselves],” she said. “This is constant headache and stress — unnecessary.” 

A workers rights group called Arise Chicago has hundreds of members who do domestic work in the city. But the group said very few have been able to secure written contracts.

A big part of that problem is a lack of awareness about the law and the $500 to $1,000 fine for noncompliance. 

Ania Jakubek is an organizer with the group. 

“People just don’t know about it, that this is mandated,” she said. “There needs to be more education and outreach.”

But once they learn about the law, Jakubek said, some employers just don’t think it’s necessary. 

“They’re very nice people often. They just don’t feel the need,” she said. 

There are more than 2 million domestic workers in the United States, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Laws similar to Chicago’s are on the books in San Francisco and Philadelphia. 

Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, said workers in this field face one core challenge: “The really severe power imbalance that exists when you have a workplace where you have one worker and a culture of work that is informal,” she said. “When we refer to domestic work, we often call it help, as opposed to the legitimate profession that it is for literally millions of workers.”

Poo said she wishes more employers would “see having a contract as an opportunity — an opportunity to strengthen the relationship they have with this person who is coming into their home, oftentimes caring for the most important parts of their lives.” 

She added that contracts are not a silver bullet, but they provide one more tool for vital members of the labor force who are often overlooked.