While low pay and abuses are still widespread in Colombia, Ms.

Roa leads serves as an advocacy group, but it does not have formal bargaining authority. The following year, the Labor Ministry issued rules that require employers to provide health insurance and other standard benefits to domestic workers. In 2012, Colombian lawmakers agreed to adhere to an International Labour Organization treaty that set international standards for domestic workers. Their efforts, which included a social media campaign called “Let’s Talk About Domestic Workers,” began getting press coverage and the attention of policy makers. Roa got leaders at a coalition of labor unions in Medellín to champion her cause.

“If we show the state what we go through, they’re going to realize it’s an enormous problem.” Roa recalls telling other domestic workers. “We are invisible it’s as though we don’t exist,” Ms. When a labor organization interviewed her as part of a research study, she wondered whether it might be possible to form a union. During her first months of unemployment, she heard plenty of harrowing tales from other maids. Roa didn’t set out to become an activist or a labor leader. Roa quit her last job as a maid in 2005, she has had remarkable success in getting the Colombian government and ordinary citizens to wrestle with that question and reconsider how domestic workers ought to be treated, as a matter of principle and under the law. “You say to yourself: ‘how is it possible that people could be so inhumane?’” Roa, who became a pioneering union leader in a country where maids have been powerless. “Remembering those things is hard,” said Ms. Roa, were at the bottom rung, typically assigned the most arduous tasks, and often kept out of sight when visitors arrived. The pay was a pittance: less than $150 per month. The shifts were long: 16-hour days, six days per week was standard. The rules for domestic workers were unwritten but clear to everyone back in 1996, when María Roa joined the throngs of Colombian women who fled violence in rural areas and set out to rebuild their lives in the relative safety of big cities.

Roland fantom patch editor mw2 hacks