What does “day work” mean?

Domestic labor hired by the day rather than lived in — the arrangement Black women fought for and were then squeezed by.

Entry · catalog no. 1235

day work

/ /ˈdeɪ ˌwɜːrk/ /DAY-wurk

noun · No single city — nationwide; the Bronx hiring corners became the emblem · 1930s

✓ Verified

Housework — cleaning, laundry, cooking, childcare — taken on by the day or the hour for a household you do not live in, paid in cash at the end of the shift.

“Mama did day work out in Riverdale, three houses a week, and she was home by six.”

By extension, the whole system of hiring that went with it: the corner, the agency, the phone call, the bargaining over the hourly rate.

“She got her day work off the corner at Simpson and Westchester, same as everybody else.”

Origin & Attribution

The term belongs to Black women who left live-in service behind. Under slavery and then under Jim Crow domestic service, a Black woman's labor came with her body attached — she slept in the employer's house and was on call around the clock. Through the Great Migration, women arriving in Northern cities refused that, insisting on going home at night to their own families, and day work is the name they gave the arrangement they built. The Depression turned that hard-won independence into a buyer's market: with wages collapsing, women stood on Bronx street corners waiting to be hired by the hour. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke documented it for The Crisis in November 1935 and called it what the women called it, the slave market. The exploitation was the new thing, not the term. Day work itself was a Black innovation that made domestic labor a job you clock out of.

1935

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke publish The Bronx Slave Market in The Crisis, naming the corner-hiring system and quoting the fifteen to thirty cent hourly rates

1950

Marvel Cooke returns undercover for a five-part series in the New York Compass, showing the market still running fifteen years later

1968

Dorothy Bolden founds the National Domestic Workers Union of America in Atlanta, organizing day workers into a durable union

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

No single city — nationwide; the Bronx hiring corners became the emblem · 1930s

Spoken by

Black women domestic workers and their families, North and South; later the organized domestic-worker movement

$DAYWORThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Fading

91 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

70/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1935

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

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Memphis, TN

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Citations & Sources

■

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, The Bronx Slave Market, The Crisis, vol. 42, no. 11, November 1935, NAACP

magazine

■

Marvel Cooke, I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market, five-part series, The New York Compass, January 1950

newspaper

■

Dorothy Lee Bolden Thompson collection, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta