Fighting for My Rights Is What Gets Me Through and It Will Change Lives for All of Us By Lala

I have been a domestic worker for more than ten years, beginning my journey in June 2008. Over nearly two decades, I have learned something that not every worker gets to discover. I have learned that knowing my rights and fighting for them is not a distraction from my work. It is, on my hardest days, the very thing that helps me the most.

When the exhaustion sets in, when the hours feel long and the recognition feels thin, it is not passive hope that steadies me. It is action. Fighting for my rights is my answer to difficulty. It is a declaration that I will not simply endure. I will advocate. And that advocacy, sustained over years, has made me both stronger as an individual and more connected to the community of domestic workers who understand exactly what I carry.

My sources of strength are wide and deep. My family, my faith, my fellow domestic workers, my knowledge of my rights, my hope for a better future, and VODW itself. I name VODW explicitly as one of the things that keeps me going, and that is significant. It speaks to what an organisation can mean to someone who has been navigating a difficult system for a very long time. Not just information, but belonging.

What I want the world to know is direct and clear:

I deserve respect and dignity. I want employers to hear it. I want governments to act on it. I want young people to grow up understanding it. Three words, three groups, the same message delivered with the certainty that comes from more than fifteen years of showing up.

I rate my hope at the maximum. I believe, completely, that things will get better. I have fought too long to stop believing that. And I consider all four of the rights VODW campaigns for to be either very important or life-changing to the daily lives of domestic workers.

The rights I believe must come back are the full set: the right to change employer without restrictions, the right to renew the ODW Visa, the right to stay and settle, and the right to apply for British Citizenship. The loss I identify as most damaging is the inability to renew the visa. I rate the urgency of restoring pre-2012 rights at the very highest level.

Each of these campaigns speaks to a different layer of the same need. The right to change employer without restrictions is about safety. The right to renew the ODW Visa is about continuity. The right to settlement is about permanence. The path to citizenship is about full belonging. Together, they make up the architecture of a life that is not just functional but truly free.

I spend three hours each week worrying about my job and visa situation. Even now, after more than fifteen years, that uncertainty persists. It does not have to. The laws that once protected workers like me existed. They can exist again.

If these rights were restored, I know it would bring freedom and life changes. That phrase holds more than optimism. It holds a vision of what a life fully protected by law could look like, and I am one of the voices making sure that vision does not stay a dream.

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