I'm Amanda Litman and this is Battleground, a podcast from the Recount and I Heart Radio.

Our guest this week is Igen Poo.

She's the co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance,

a labor advocacy group that works to elevate the rights of domestic workers in the United

States.

I wanted to talk to Igen because her work is directly related to the massive infrastructure

bill currently working its way through Congress.

We as a society have wildly overlooked, underpaid and undervalued care work, but the pandemic

has shown us that to undervalue something like this is devastating our society.

You think about the parents and especially the moms who dropped out of the workforce

because their kids weren't at school of how much the economy, of how much people's lives

were fucked over by the lack of affordable childcare.

Especially we think about folks with disabilities or people who need medical or other kinds

of support in the midst of their life and on the other end of life, affordable elder

care.

It's a huge functioning part of our society that lets everything else happen.

Igen and I get into the history of this, of why we've been undervaluing women's work,

why we've been undervaluing care work and how the overlap of women being undervalued

in our economy and care being undervalued in our economy, connect.

And in particular, the role that women of color play in the care infrastructure.

We are at a huge breaking point for reimagining what care looks like right now.

And I think Igen does a really good job of painting a vision for what America could be.

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