For the more than 16,000 domestic workers across Philadelphia, the road to May 1, 2020 has been a long one made longer by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not stopping them from hitting the ground running.

May 1, is the day Philadelphia’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights goes into effect, an achievement that’s a year-and-a-half in the making.

The bill of rights is one of the strongest of its kind in the U.S. and provides domestic workers in the City of Brotherly Love discrimination and harassment protections, requires written employer-employee agreements, paid time off and creates a domestic worker task force in the city to make further recommendations to lawmakers among other provisions.

A big part of the next step for leaders in the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) is to make sure its members — who’ve grown significantly in number since the fight in Philly began — know the rights they’re getting.

To do that, the organization is hosting two separate training sessions for members on April 28 and April 30. Both are being held through Zoom in light of the coronavirus quarantine.

The session on April 28 will be held in English and the other two days later will be in Spanish.

To attend either training, attendees must RSVP through a form on the NDWA website.

After the Bill of Rights passed, organizers also successfully supported the passage of a bill that made the Department of Labor permanent to oversee the implementation of and support the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.

The timing is also vital because the effect of COVID-19 has had on many of the city’s domestic workers. Towards the beginning of Philadelphia’s shutdown, a virtual town hall attended by more than 400 featured many speakers who were domestic workers that shared their struggles.

Despite the current hardship, May 1 will be a ray of hope into the future.

This article is part of Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project among more than 20 news organizations, focused on economic mobility in Philadelphia. Read all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.