Housecleaning With Benefits

Lourdes Dobarganes cleans the apartment of a client in San Francisco. She is the kind of domestic worker Alia is trying to serve by allowing individual clients to chip in on benefits. (Photo by Carlos Avila Gonzalez, San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris) 

Mercedes Martinez scrubs other people’s kitchen sinks and mops their floors every day of the week. At night she comes home to care for one of her sons. The money she makes covers their bills, but not benefits. When she catches the flu, she doesn’t get paid. But one of her clients recently introduced her to Alia, a website that helps her collect paid time off from the people whose homes she cleans in Manhattan. This Thanksgiving marked the first that 55-year-old Martinez celebrated with her family. Soon after the holiday, she received a $120 Visa cash card in the mail from Alia to cover the day off. “It makes me feel at peace,” she says. “If I can’t work, it is a relief to know that Alia is there to help me.”

Alia is the first online benefits tool with which cleaners can accrue contributions from their clients to purchase benefits, including disability insurance, critical-illness insurance, accident insurance, life insurance, and even paid time off. The site officially launched in December 2018 as the first product released by Fair Care Labs, the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s (NDWA) innovation arm. Domestic workers are paid about $11 per hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), and only 5 percent of maids and 6 percent of nannies receive employer-provided health insurance. Nearly one-quarter of people who work in private homes live below the poverty line.

Fair Care Labs’ Founding Director Palak Shah and her team focused on housekeepers first because the group struggles to earn benefits from an ever-changing collection of employers. Housekeepers typically have about five clients, but with Alia a cleaner can start to earn some benefits even if not every client pays in. Over time, Shah and her team will adjust the product to suit the experiences of the 2.5 million nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers for the elderly in the United States, a workforce made up of 90 percent women and predominantly immigrants, according to EPI.

“There are a lot of solutions out there that solve a part of a benefits problem for some workers,” says Shah. “We want to build a comprehensive solution that’s solving all kinds of barriers, not just some of them, not just for a slice of people.”

Because few housekeepers the Alia team spoke with have bank accounts, paid time off payments come in the form of Visa cash cards—no questions asked. Alia doesn’t require any information on immigration status, either.

“It’s designed with such deep empathy for the population that it endeavors to serve,” says Libby Reder, a senior fellow for the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative. “If Alia is able to succeed, and we have reason to believe that it will, I think it shows a model for how you could provide benefits to any kind of worker.”

Customer service agents help set up client transactions and help workers figure out which types of insurance products are best for them. Employers contribute $5 per cleaning, a fee that “feels reasonable yet meaningful,” says Sam Witherbee, cofounder of Alia and NDWA Labs’ director of product strategy.

Still, there’s no way around the power imbalance in this employment setup, says Emmaia Gelman, who introduced her housekeeper to Alia. “Whatever we can do to create some autonomy for the person who is the employee is important.”

Alia’s beta system has primarily grown through client introductions. Employers like Gelman can send a text to their housekeeper with an introduction to the platform in English or Spanish, which then triggers Alia’s support team to follow up and guide the cleaner through the sign-up process. Some housekeepers have shown initial hesitation and skepticism, Witherbee admits. But after reading the website, receiving automated messages, and speaking with the bilingual support team, cleaners feel excited, he says. Martinez’s cleaning schedule has kept her from visiting her son and meeting her two-year-old granddaughter. “But now with Alia, I am already planning to go visit them.”

With research and development funding from Open Society Foundations and Google.org, NDWA and Alia are developing other ways to introduce this concept to those who are hiring cleaners so that the pressure doesn’t fall solely on workers’ shoulders. The organization is partnering with Thumbtack, a platform that connects customers to local service professionals, to introduce them to Alia’s portable benefits system.

Alia is more than just a tool to deliver benefits, Shah says. “It’s also a tool to change culture, to change norms, to expand our imagination as a country [that] regardless of how you work, who you work for, and where you work, you deserve the kind of economic benefits and opportunity that many others have had for a long time.”

Read more stories by Corey Binns.