By Stephen Buckley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 31, 2000; Page A19

MARINGA, Brazil—Iracy Batista de Barros, 60, has worked as a maid since she was 16. She has had employers who refused to pay her the minimum wage, who forced her to work six days a week, 12 hours a day, who would not allow her to take holidays off. She once went three years without a vacation.

Two years ago, she ran out of patience. Her boss wanted to fire her without notice instead of giving her a month's warning as Brazilian law requires. She said no. And, in an act that would have been almost unheard of a decade ago, she sued him--and won. The boss settled out of court for $700, roughly a year's salary for Barros.

"All my life, I was afraid, afraid of being fired and being out of work," Barros said. "But then, after you take it and you take it, you say to yourself, it's time to look for your rights."

Barros's stoic tone belied the revolutionary nature of her words in Latin America's largest country, where historically domestics have been at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Bosses oppressed them, the law ignored them, and they were powerless to take action.

Maids here were not surprised to hear about the recent case in Prince George's County in which a Brazilian couple who had brought their domestic with them were accused of, among other things, not paying her a salary, locking the refrigerator to prevent her from taking food, and burning and beating her.

Here in Brazil, the days have passed when such treatment would go unnoticed. A growing domestic workers' movement has spread across the country, leading to the creation of unions with thousands of members, the passage of numerous laws to protect their rights, and any number of cases in which domestics have sued their bosses for mistreatment.

The newfound boldness of Brazil's domestics reflects a subtle but powerful shift in the social customs of this nation of 167 million. In a country where the poor have been famously deferential to the middle and upper classes, Brazilians are starting to revolt against long-held social rules to fight for their rights, even if it means challenging members of the economic elite.

"You are talking about a country where, until the past few years, it was taboo even for the poor to mug rich people," said Joseph A. Page, a Georgetown University professor who has written extensively about Brazilian culture and social traditions. "For maids, the people at the bottom of the pyramid, to now be saying that they have rights--the right not to be physically abused, the right to be paid--that kind of thing in Brazil is relatively new."

At the heart of the movement has been Benedita da Silva, a former maid who rose to become a national congresswoman and senator, and who now serves as deputy governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Da Silva recalls 14-hour days during which she would haul her employers' clothes to her shack in a hillside Rio slum and repeatedly fetch buckets of water to wash them. She remembers standing for hours pressing those clothes, her body wilting from the heat and weight of a coal-filled iron. She never got holidays off. She never received a salary.

Since the 1980s, da Silva has led the battle to win domestics the right to receive unemployment insurance, maternity leave, paid holidays and a host of other benefits long afforded other working Brazilians.

"People are looking for ways to solve the problem of the inequalities, the unfairness of this society," da Silva said. "It's not just maids. It's women, blacks, people in the slums. . . . The people who have been excluded are all trying to organize themselves."

It is in places such as Maringa, a prosperous, tranquil city of 200,000 in the southern state of Parana, where maids have been among the most active. They began to organize in 1988, and the government officially recognized a maids' union here two years ago.

Valdemiro Alves da Fonseca, a lawyer who has worked closely with the union, said that four or five maids walk into his office each day seeking recourse against unfair or, in many cases, cruel bosses.

Fonseca said that last year, one maid sued her employer after she broke her leg and he illegally refused to pay her while she was unable to work. She won $1,200 in an out-of-court settlement.

In another case last year, a domestic's boss slammed her about the head and face and called her "a piece of trash." After she stumbled into Fonseca's office weeping, the lawyer accompanied her to a police station to file charges against her assailant. She ended up dropping them, Fonseca said, because her employer threatened her.

Fonseca, 52, said many of his cases involve maids complaining that their employers refuse to pay them the minimum monthly wage of about $75, or will not deposit money into their social security accounts. In many instances, the boss removes the money from the domestics' salary and then does not put it toward the maids' social security. "So the domestics get robbed twice," the lawyer said.

Such disdain for the rights of domestics dates back decades to a time when they worked primarily for wealthy rural Brazilians. Their days, both then and now, often include an array of duties: washing and ironing clothes, dusting and sweeping sometimes enormous houses, doing dishes, cooking meals, cleaning windows, feeding pets, repairing clothes, babysitting and even mowing lawns.

Typically maids lived in the homes of the employers, who treated them like "family." But that often meant that employers felt it was enough to pay their domestics with "presents," such as second-hand clothing one month, or some food the next. They also generally refused to provide employment benefits.

Barros, now the vice president of the Maringa maids union, said she has suffered nearly every imaginable indignity during her 44-year career.

She said she turned to domestic work because her education had stopped at the first grade and she had few job options. Until recent years, she usually started work at 7:30 a.m. and toiled until 8 p.m. She said that of the seven bosses she has had in her career, three refused to allow her to take paid vacations. She said that three years ago she began to work for a boss who paid her the minimum wage, the first time she had made that much money.

Barros, who lives in one Maringa's poorest neighborhoods with her 17-year-old son, said that none of her bosses ever paid into her social security fund, which has made getting old a fearful prospect. "At some point, no one is going to give me work," she said. "And now I have no retirement money, even after all these years of working."

Barros said that in 1998 she came to work one day and her boss, a dentist, told her she no longer had a job. He wanted her to leave that day. He said he could no longer afford to pay her, and he refused to offer her severance.

Barros threatened to sue him. Not only had he refused to give her a month's notice; he also had been paying her $60 a month, well below minimum wage. Apparently realizing that Barros was serious, the dentist met with her and Fonseca, and they agreed that Barros would receive about a year's pay. She was ecstatic.

She has moved on to a new job in which she works eight hours a day. She gets paid vacations, and she makes the minimum wage. "I used to feel helpless because domestics in Brazil never had any value," she said, sitting in Fonseca's office. "Things are getting better. It's almost a miracle."