Life is different today for the 59-year old “home worker,” as she prefers to call herself. After taking classes on self-esteem and workers’ rights, Martinez was placed in a new job through a local women’s group that works with the women who clean other women’s homes. She says she’s ecstatic about the difference. “Now that I know my rights, no one’s going to humiliate me again,” she says. “I’m not asking for much, just to be treated with a little respect. Yet there are lots of employers out there who yell at you and push you, who treat you as if you were nothing. Now I know I don’t have to take that anymore.”

Martinez’ life has changed because she got help from the Atabal Collective, a Mexico City-based organization supported by the Women’s Division of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries.

The Atabal Collective–its name comes from an indigenous drum used in peacemaking ceremonies–formed 15 years ago when some feminists concerned about the plight of domestic workers attempted to form a union among the women. According to Irene Ortiz, a social worker and one of Atabal’s founders, the task was made impossible by Mexican labor law, which requires that a union have a minimum number of workers in the same physical space. Domestic workers are spread out.

“It’s an invisible sector, hidden behind the walls of houses,” Ortiz says. “It’s difficult to get them together in one place. They work all day, and have only one day off a week. If they skip a day of work to come to a meeting they don’t get paid. Many work in neighborhoods far from where they live, and spend a lot of time riding buses.”

Low self-esteem is common among the women and also forms a barrier to organizing, says Ortiz. “I’ve often heard them say that they don’t deserve better treatment or pay. A major task we face is convincing the women that they are individuals of worth.”

Unable to organize traditional unions among the women, Atabal formed a job clearinghouse, matching requests from employers with women workers looking for jobs.

The system makes demands on both participants. Prospective employers make a commitment to pay at least 120 pesos a day (about $13, almost three times the minimum wage), and honor legal requirements such as limiting the work day to eight hours and paying vacations. Employers pay Atabal $21 for matching them with a worker.

Home workers pay nothing for the service, but Atabal requires them to first participate in an introductory workshop on their rights and obligations as workers. “It’s a time together where we try to change some of the mentality connected with this job,” says Atabal staff member Amparo Albores.

Once a woman is hired in a new job, she returns to Atabal every other Sunday for a six-month comprehensive course on labor rights and self-esteem. “This experience helps them attach value to themselves as women and to their work,” says Albores. Following graduation from this course, the women are invited to join “The Hope Group,” a weekly gathering of domestic workers that includes opportunities for literacy training and specialized courses on sexuality and other themes.

According to Ortiz, the demographics of the sector are slowly changing. Fifteen years ago, she says, most domestic workers were uneducated young women, including many indigenous, who had recently migrated from the countryside. With Mexico’s economic crisis, today more and more domestic workers are older urban women, often with high school or secretarial training, who’ve been laid off from other jobs and want to work as domestics in order to help their families survive the hard times.

What hasn’t changed, she reports, is the sense of frustration common among domestic workers who seek official redress when they have a grievance with an employer. “Although we’ve developed good relations with the government’s labor ministry, in most government offices people aren’t interested in responding to complaints,” Ortiz says. “Because the sense of a legal culture is very low, people don’t know their rights. And if they do, they don’t expect justice. Given the corruption that came from having the same ruling party for so many decades, there’s lots of impunity, so people don’t even bother complaining. They know that if they do try to make a complaint, there’s a terrible bureaucracy awaiting them. They’ll spend a lot of time waiting, and never get anywhere.”

Ortiz says workers commonly complain about wages, hours, and unjust firings. Often women are fired and paid a few hundred pesos, and they accept it because they don’t know better or because they understand that they stand little chance of obtaining what is rightfully theirs if they make a legal demand against the employer. A common trick among employers who want to fire a maid is to accuse her of stealing something–they can then fire her without paying severance benefits. “Because there are no witnesses, and it’s the boss’s word against the worker’s word, she loses the unequal battle. It’s a very common form of cheating the woman out of what’s rightfully hers,” Ortiz says.

Sexual abuse of domestic workers is also a common problem. Women workers are sometimes fired after they are made pregnant by their employer. Albores says it’s a theme they discuss at length during Atabal’s workshops. “It’s a product of the unequal power equation in the traditional relationship between employers and workers,” she says. “The women are afraid to speak up, and when there’s a conflict the boss has the money to make sure nothing happens in any legal process.”

The feminist movement in Mexico supported to work of Atabal in its early days, but Albores says that support has declined in recent years. “The feminists all have domestic workers in their homes, and yet they don’t want them involved with the Collective. They’re afraid their workers will change and will speak up and demand that their rights are respected.”

As part of its work to make visible the invisible, Atabal has carried out a variety of public activities to help Mexican society revalue the work done by the country’s more than two million home workers. It’s part of a larger campaign by Atabal and other women’s groups to have society recognize the importance and value of household work done by all women. For the last six years, as part of a “Democracy begins at home” campaign, the group has sponsored a yearly housework strike–a day in which Mexican women refuse to do household chores. That means their male partners do the dishes, wash the clothes, and feed the children.

Getting most Mexican men to even heat up a tortilla sends shivers up and down ancient cultural fault lines. Yet organizers says it’s an essential step to take if Mexican women are ever going to be liberated from their crushing doble jornada–the double workload of earning money outside the home and then coming home to work another shift as the sole cook and cleaner.