COLUMN ONE : To Protect Those Who Must Serve : An influx of immigrants has inflated the pool of domestic servants, and many face exploitation. But, as one woman finds, educating them about their rights isn’t easy.

It is still dark a few minutes before 6 a.m. at Broadway and 1st Street in downtown Los Angeles. Women are lined up blank-faced at the bus stops, huddled against the chilled air and waiting for their transportation to Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades.

With patient deliberation, Libertad Rivera moves from woman to woman. Eyeing their shoes and the clothes they have packed in shoulder bags, she recognizes many as live-in maids returning to their jobs after the weekend.

She engages the women, one by one, in a conversation. It starts, really, as a monologue, and if Rivera is lucky, it will become an exchange. “What time do you start work?” she asks in Spanish. And what time do you finish each day? How much are you paid? In cash or by check? Do they pay you overtime?

Some women will listen. Most women are wary. They rush away as soon as their bus arrives. As the sky lightens from black to gray and the downtown sidewalks begin to fill with people, Rivera boards a bus bound for Beverly Hills. Along the congested route, she will continue her crusade to reach some of the most isolated and scattered workers in Los Angeles: maids and nannies.

Rivera is one of a handful of women launched by the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles on the unlikely mission of educating and, eventually, uniting domestic servants, the vast majority of whom are Latin American immigrants, many here illegally and many working for paltry wages.

As in New York, Chicago and other major cities across the country, a huge influx of immigrants into Los Angeles has inflated the enormous pool of women seeking domestic work in homes. Thousands of families have come to rely on the woman who is paid to sweep, dust and vacuum; cook meals; tend the baby.

While many maids and nannies have exemplary working arrangements with their employers, receive good pay and considerate treatment, there are endless exceptions.

The life of the maid has never been luxurious, and by its nature, the relationship of maid to boss teeters dangerously close to one of servitude. If the worker is an illegal immigrant, or newly arrived and unfamiliar, she is even more exposed to potential abuse and economic exploitation, say advocates and public interest attorneys.

Enter Rivera and her associates. Whether chatting up the riders on a Westside-bound bus, or handing out leaflets in the parks where the children of the wealthy play, Rivera and companions tell the maids and nannies about their rights, explain the particulars of the California minimum wage law, and invite them to join regular informational sessions.

It is not an easy sell. While there have been notable successes in organizing domestics--in San Francisco, for example, a co-op teaches housekeepers nontoxic ways to clean--efforts here and elsewhere have generally failed. Not only are maids a dispersed, fragmented and isolated group, most know they can be replaced at the drop of a dishrag.

“We get different reactions,” Rivera said. “Sometimes they think they are alone and have no rights.. . . . They’re afraid of many things. What if my boss finds out, they say.

“And,” she added, “some receive us with open arms. They say, thank God someone is taking an interest in us.”

Rivera’s work of semiweekly forays started late last year when the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights, which also offers legal advice, received $5,000 in grant money. On a good day, Rivera figures, she may make contact with 30 women.

There are the horror stories: the women who are sexually harassed by their employers, or, in extreme cases, raped. One tells of actually being encouraged by an employer to have sex with the employer’s husband.

But mostly the complaints are more mundane and basic: decent wages for a day’s work.

“I work for a lady,” one maid slowly told Rivera as she waited recently for a bus. “I give her medicine, change her bed. . . . I am fine, but, yes, there are many (maids) with troubles, who must accept whatever little money they are given.”

The objective of Rivera’s efforts is not to form a union, a task considered unrealistic. At best, Rivera and the others hope to establish a mutual-support network and eventually, perhaps, a kind of co-op. So far, however, even that seems an elusive goal.

After nearly three months of bus rides and park visits, the first group session was held last month at a church near Koreatown. The maids had been urged to attend to find out more about their rights.

No one showed up.

Disappointed, Rivera pledged to fight on. “ Asi pasa --That’s the way it goes,” she said afterward. “I do not get discouraged.. . . . We will see what happens next time.”

The obstacles in the maid campaign underscore the broader difficulties in organizing immigrant workers, union leaders and labor experts say.

Immigrants often are vulnerable to abuse because they are the “most hungry”--willing to work for low wages and put up with poor conditions out of desperation, said David Sickler, West Coast director of the AFL-CIO and a leading organizer of immigrant labor. A 1990 study by the U.S. Census Bureau determined that Latinos are more likely than any other ethnic group to live in poverty and be employed in low-wage occupations.

The fear of losing the keenly needed job, and, for illegal immigrants, the fear of deportation have traditionally been deterrents to unionizing or other attempts to make labor demands.

These problems may be compounded for women in domestic service, Sickler and others said.

Maids, for the most part, work within an informal economy, and consequently have no health insurance, disability compensation or other benefits. They often find work through word of mouth and speak little or no English. They form a transitory work force and live with the belief that they can be replaced easily, leaving them reluctant to challenge the system.

“Any woman wanting work, especially during hard economic times, would be loath to call attention to an abusive employer,” said Rebecca Morales, a visiting fellow at UC San Diego who has done extensive research on immigrant women in Los Angeles.

“What happens is she gets a bad reputation, she loses her network and the contacts, and she loses employment. Since they may be working off the books, or slightly off the books, they don’t want to call attention.”

The informal, almost underground nature of domestic service exposes women to the whims of unscrupulous employers. At the same time, on the positive side, it offers a sheltered work environment to women who do not have the legitimate work papers required in factories and businesses. Housecleaning also provides an employment opportunity for unskilled women, and maids who develop several clients can do a good business. For some live-in maids, their jobs give them better food and a better place to live than they would otherwise expect.

But for those who encounter mistreatment or who are cheated out of their pay, there is scant recourse, and the prospects for any kind of united action are dim. The burden of heavy workloads and drawn-out schedules often leave women with little time and energy to take interest in forming mutual-support groups or attending information meetings.

Many maids have to take two or three buses to travel from their small apartments in Boyle Heights, Pico-Union or South-Central, to their employers’ homes in the Valley or on the Westside. A workday commonly stretches to 15 hours or so.

On top of that, these women--increasingly the sole wage earners for their families--often have their own children and household to care for after a long day of cleaning other people’s homes.

Rivera, 28, came to Los Angeles four years ago from Tepic, capital of the mountainous Mexican state of Nayarit, where she was a housewife and secretarial student. She refuses to say exactly how she arrived in the United States or what her legal status is, but does say that she worked as a maid for about a year. Rivera has two children, Bernardo, 7, and a girl, Titil, 5. They can often be seen accompanying their crusading mother on days when there is no school.

On one recent pre-dawn morning at a downtown bus stop, Rivera plopped the two sleepy children on the sidewalk. Each wore three shirts for the cold. As their mother worked the crowd, the youngsters were busy with crayons, filling in pictures of Big Bird and Ernie in their “Sesame Street” coloring books.

In white tennis shoes and her head full of bus schedules, Rivera works with a fervor born of her many years as a proselytizing evangelical in Mexico.

“Some women think they’re doing fine,” she said in a break between recruiting maids. “It is only by talking to them that they begin to realize” they might not be doing so well.

With her partner, Rosa Campos, Rivera distributes little yellow booklets for use by the maids to keep track of the number of hours they work. Rivera and Campos also hand out flyers and a telephone number for the Labor Defense Network hot line, a referral service operated by the Legal Aid Foundation.

In a playground on the edge of Hancock Park, where children play on swings and slides under the watch of hired caretakers, Rivera and Campos undertake a scouting mission on a sunny January afternoon. They have heard this is a fertile field for their cause and have come to check it out.

Rivera approaches a woman who later gives her name as Sandra. She is seated in a sandbox.

Sandra, in the United States less than a year from her native El Salvador, says she rises at 5:30 each morning to take two buses to her employer’s home. She works from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and earns $85 on the weeks she works three days, $125 on the weeks she works five days. Lunch is included.

Her chores include cleaning house and taking her employer’s 3-year-old to the park twice a week. In a second job at another home, she works two eight-hour days for $80--a rate better than minimum wage.

“It is what one has to do; you have to eat,” Sandra, 25, said. “You hear from afar (in El Salvador) that here you can better yourself. At home you work and you work, without prospering. It is a difficult life.”

Sandra left her four children in El Salvador, in the care of her mother, and lives south of downtown with her husband, who works in a glass factory.

“My employer treats me well and is friendly with me,” she adds.

Rivera hands Sandra the booklet and flyers, which she takes timidly. Rivera tells Sandra to attend the informational meeting--the charla --and tells her which buses to catch.

“I hope to God you will come,” Rivera says after talking with Sandra for nearly half an hour. “It will help you a lot. It will give you a different perspective.”

Sandra nods. But she will not attend the meeting.

Participants in the maid campaign say it is too early to gauge any reaction from employers. Judging from past experiences, they say, many are likely to resist the program or see it as unnecessary.

To make a point, the immigrant-rights coalition has printed its flyers in English, as well as Spanish, so that employers can read about a maid’s eligibility for minimum wage.

“We are not going into this with the idea that the employer is the enemy,” said Nancy Cervantes, an attorney with Public Counsel who is helping to organize the maid campaign. “Many (employers) do not know their obligations. Others know their obligations and evade them. They know there are many people with many needs.”

Under California law, only domestics who do nothing but baby-sit are considered ineligible for minimum wage. Overtime should be paid if a maid works more than 40 hours in a week or nine hours in a day. Under regulations handed down by the state Department of Industrial Relations, employers may not deduct from a maid’s pay more than $7 a day for meals or $20 weekly for a room to sleep in. If the employer requires the maid to wear a uniform, the employer must purchase it and pay for its laundering.

According to 1980 census data, nearly 27,000 people worked in private homes in Los Angeles County performing cleaning and other tasks. The 1990 data is not yet available, but most experts believe the numbers are greatly underreported, since many domestics work under informal agreements.

Most of the complaints that Rivera and Campos hear come from maids who say their employers refused to pay them for time worked, required “inappropriate” work from them (such as washing a pet dog) or would not allow them days off. Some complain they stayed with an employer who promised, falsely, to obtain legalization documents for them.

The women who have the most difficulties, according to Rivera, are the live-in maids, the encerradas , literally, “the enclosed.”

One live-in told Rivera that she was paid $100 a week to clean, cook, wash and iron for eight adults and two children, chores that normally took her 12 hours a day. Another said she earned $10 a day to clean two homes owned by the same family, with a total of seven bathrooms, plus care for an infant.

Julia Wrigley, a sociologist who interviewed more than 50 domestics in Los Angeles for a book on child-care workers, said the live-in is usually the woman with fewest resources and most dependent on her employer.

“If they work for a bad employer, they can have a very negative situation,” Wrigley said. She recalled one nanny whose employer would not let her take the children to a park for fear that the woman would compare notes with other nannies.

“Employers basically want someone to do the job and not cause trouble,” Wrigley said. “They don’t always recognize these are other human beings (who) have ideas about” how to perform the job.

There have been a few success stories in the efforts to unite maids. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Housecleaners Co-op publishes a monthly newsletter and holds workshops to teach maids how to replace harsh chemical cleansers with natural substances. In Long Beach four years ago, maids, some of whom were earning less than $3 an hour, formed a co-op cleaning service that did a brisk business until last year, when the recession began to erode their client base.

But generally, immigrant women working as domestics have been dismissed or ignored both by organized labor and other reform-minded movements, left to languish as one of the most disenfranchised groups in the United States, said Jose de Paz, executive director of the California Immigrant Workers Assn.

“There’s not exactly a long line of people knocking on their doors to organize domestic workers,” De Paz said. “We have to become a hell of a lot more creative to reach these communities. The old ways don’t work.”

Rivera’s goals are more basic, at least for now. “The first thing,” she said, “is to make people aware.”

Domestic Workers’ Rights

Some basic rights for maids, as described by attorneys for Public Counsel and the Legal Aid Foundation citing California labor law and regulations established by the state Department of Industrial Relations:

* Unless the employee is exclusively a child-care worker, she or he is entitled to the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour and overtime pay for work exceeding nine hours a day or five days in a week.

* The employer cannot charge the domestic worker more than $20 a week for a bedroom or approximately $7 a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There must be a written contract in which both parties agree to the deductions for food and shelter.

* If the employer requires the worker to wear a uniform, the employer must buy it and pay for its cleaning.

* If the worker accidentally breaks something, the employer cannot deduct the cost of repairing it from the worker’s wages.

* Domestic workers seeking additional information may call the Labor Defense Network at (213) 389-3581.