Veena: From the UCLA Labor Center, this is Re:Work. I’m Veena Hampapur. Today on Re:Work we’re bringing you two more stories from Código Doméstico that have been translated into English. Código Doméstico is a podcast produced by Kruskaya Hidalgo Cordero. It aims to expose working conditions for women hired as cleaners through apps in Central and South America as well as the US. At the heart of this show is deep listening and fostering collaborations to fight for the dignity of workers in the digital platform economy. Today’s episode features stories from Paola and Giselle. We’ll start with Paola in Colombia. I’m turning it over to Kruskaya.
Kruskaya: There are domestic services apps, also known as cleaning apps, operating in several Latin American countries. Among them is Colombia. In this country, Hogarú was the first of this kind. In 2013 it started operations through a website, and in 2015 it launched its digital platform. Unlike the other apps in the region, Hogarú hires its paid domestic workers directly and guarantees them social benefits and legal entitlements. In other words, this app hires domestic workers as employees and then assigns them the services requested by clients. According to Hogarú’s mission and vision, this app seeks to dignify and professionalize the cleaning service industry in the country. Paola, a paid domestic worker from Bogotá, started working for Hogarú in 2022.
Paola: Well I live here in Colombia. I have a 17-year-old daughter, a two–year-old grandson. I live with my mom and my dad, and well, I work and work and work.
Kruskaya: The FairWork report is a project that evaluates working conditions on digital platforms worldwide and ranks them according to how fair they are. It listed Hogarú as the highest rated app in Latin America. The app guarantees that its workers earn the local minimum wage. In Colombia, the minimum wage is 3,785 Colombian pesos an hour, approximately 0.91 US cents. However, even if the minimum wage is guaranteed, Paola tells us that the payment Hogarú gives them is not enough for a dignified life.
Paola: Well, the truth, the truth is that it is not enough. The other girls and I who are working there, we have said that we should be paid a bit more for being professionals, that is for doing domestic work, because in itself we are not paid enough for this work per day. We are not paid more than 30 thousand pesos a day there, and for us it’s just not enough.
Kruskaya: Paola says that even though she has a steady paycheck and job with the app, her work is very strenuous. She spends more than 12 to 15 hours a day away from home, travelling around the city to clean. According to the 2015 Bogotá Mobility Survey, paid domestic workers have the longest commute of all occupations. In the Colombian capital, domestic workers can take up to seven hours for their daily commute. With Hogarú, workers can be assigned to several shifts in different homes on the same day. They call this “split shifts.” Time spent commuting from home to home is not counted as working time and assignments do not take distances between houses into account.
Paola: When they give us split shifts, they send me an agenda where they tell me well, tomorrow you are going to 150th and 7th, and you start working at seven in the morning for four hours. Then I leave at 11 o’clock. And then the other shift is in the afternoon, you start at one o’clock, let’s say at 86th and 7th. So imagine, I’m at 150th-and-something on the first shift, and then I have to get from there to 86th Street, so I have to first look for directions, look for what will get me there, what bus to get, what routes, and so on. I waste time looking for directions and everything. I run one way, run the other way.
Kruskaya: As Paola runs around town from shift to shift, she knows that if she is late, Hogarú deducts from her pay. This seems unfair to her since workers sometimes must arrive late because they have to travel long distances: there could be traffic, they might not be familiar with the addresses, and there are exclusive residential neighborhoods, which are harder to get to because they are not served by public transport.
Paola: You have to be at work on time. If I arrive too late, then they deduct from my salary or the bonuses that they have given me. They take them away from me. They give us 11,000 pesos for those split shifts, but as I said, when you arrive late, they don’t give them to you because they say no, you didn’t comply with the schedule, so that split shift is not reflected in the payment.
Kruskaya: In addition to pay deductions for lateness, when workers request leave, Hogarú deducts their monthly salary. According to Paola, if she asks for one day’s leave, the app deducts two days’ pay.
Paola: Supposedly companies always deduct the day we ask for leave, but in this company they deduct two days. In other words, if I ask for leave tomorrow, well, they give me the leave tomorrow, but they deduct tomorrow and the day I go to work. Two days are deducted. It shouldn’t be like that. 60,000 pesos is two days taken away from you. That’s what doesn’t seem right to me.
Kruskaya: Paola lives in a popular working class district of the city. When she goes to the shifts Hogarú assigns her, she goes to luxurious places. She works in rich people’s homes. Inequity is noticeable when you arrive at the neighborhoods, and it increases when you enter those houses. Paola recounts one such experience.
Paola: You go in and say my goodness, these people live really well. There are houses that you are, wow. For example, yesterday I was in one, oof, but the kitchen was two, three times the size of, I mean, I said to the lady your kitchen is three quarters the size of my whole house. The kitchen was really immense. You go in and you get lost because there was an exit on one side and an entrance on the other. It was super, super big and really beautiful, lovely. And you feel like, oh my gosh, this is the first time I’ve been to a place where people have a lot of money.
Kruskaya: Social inequality is very much present in paid domestic work. And in Latin America, the material gap between those who hire domestic workers and those who offer this kind work is abysmal. In Colombia, only one in ten paid domestic workers have an employment contract. Hogarú has undoubtedly contributed to the formalization of domestic work — mainly that the app helps create jobs with formal labor contracts for domestic workers. It is an example of how digital platforms can guarantee labor rights. Paola mentions, however, that changes can be made in Hogarú to improve the situation of paid domestic workers. It is time to take into account the experiences of thousands of women workers to create fairer platforms. Recovering examples of socially responsible apps helps to illustrate how governments, the public and private sector can create better conditions. To ensure decent working conditions in the platform economy, women workers’ voices must be heard!
Veena: Hi there, Veena again. Next on Re:Work, we hear Giselle’s story from Mexico.
Kruskaya: In Mexico City, the second largest urban metropolis in Latin America, there are more than 200,000 paid domestic workers. In the whole country there are 2.5 million. Eighty-five percent are women. Workers search for work through employment agencies, word of mouth, advertisements, and apps. Giselle lives in the borough of Tlalpan in the south of Mexico City. She is among the paid domestic workers who are employed via a virtual platform: the Aliadas app, or “allies app” in English. A pilot test of the Aliadas digital platform took place in 2014, and in 2015, it officially launched its operations in Mexico City and extended its coverage to the metropolitan area.
Giselle: I have been working for a platform for three years. I work in domestic service. My work consists of cleaning houses, flats, and offices. I am a single mother. I have three daughters who depend on me.
Kruskaya: In the Aliadas app, paid domestic workers must choose the services they will offer in their profiles. Services include cleaning, ironing, washing, cooking, or/and pet care. Once the services have been selected, these appear on the profiles and are filtered by the algorithm when a person requests a service through the app.
Giselle: So if I prefer providing that service, it will appear in my profile and the client will hire me to do it. When you arrive, they say, “You are going to do the kitchen for me, but you’re also going to iron all this for me,” and I have to do that because my profile already says that I do it. And if I say no, it’s a problem because the application already says I will.
Kruskaya: Aliadas allows workers to choose the areas of the city where they want to work, as well as the distance they are willing to commute to work shifts. This selection of zones and distances is taken into account according to the proximity of the underground railway stations.
Giselle: Everything has to be based on the metro, the stations and how long it takes you to get from your home to where you are sent. I can decide whether or not to go, whether I want to cancel and so on, but it hurts my profile if I always cancel because you see the services that are cancelled, completed, and the average.
Kruskaya: Aliadas monitors the work being carried out in each house by means of a timer. The algorithm can thus manage the time taken for the service in case it is extended or is not fulfilled. Every time a domestic worker arrives at a house, she must start the timer when she starts work and stop it when she finishes.
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In the Aliadas app, clients can view the profiles of all paid domestic workers. The profile includes the woman’s photo, her age, and the comments that previous customers have left about her. Workers are rated by clients each time they finish cleaning a house. The rating ranges from a scale of 4.0 to 5.0, with 5 being the highest rating.
Giselle: The client can view our profile, which has a photo, data, and our age. There is my face and there are the faces of all the women workers. They don’t allow us to have any other type of photo. We have to be visible as we are. They rate us, comments and ratings. It works a bit like Uber, DiDi, more or less.
Kruskaya: Paid domestic workers through Aliadas are not allowed to rate clients or leave feedback. Sometimes they come up against unfair ratings and cannot explain why the bad rating occurred or clarify the situation, or contest what the client has said.
Giselle: No, we can’t say “listen up customer” because the customer is given the benefit of the doubt. There are times when the client and the worker disagree because sometimes they don’t have the basic products to be able to clean, and if it doesn’t look the way the client wants it to, they say we didn’t clean it. But the client should also realize that I didn’t have what I needed to make it look good. If they don’t have a rag, at least a broom, a dustpan. They must realize what is needed to make the job look good. Some clients do, but others have worn out brooms, for example, let’s suppose that’s the main item for cleaning. So sometimes the clients don’t have that perspective and that’s when they rate us badly or say that we don’t pay attention to details.
Kruskaya: As well as problems with ratings, which workers don’t have the opportunity to contest, explain, or even qualify, there are risks they face on a daily basis. Domestic work can be a dangerous activity. Entering the homes of unknown people can lead to sexual harassment, sexual violence, and discrimination. Giselle faced sexual harassment while working with Aliadas.
Giselle: Yes, it happened to me once with a male client and I didn’t report it because I knew how to handle it. I was able to control it, and I didn’t let myself be harassed. I always put a stop to it, and I always said, “No, I’ve come here to work, excuse me but I didn’t come here to do anything else.” He hinted, he gave me compliments, and I told him I was going to work. He offered me money. I never went back to that client. I did inform the app and after I left they blocked access so that he could no longer find me on the platform and I could no longer go to his home anymore.
Kruskaya: Giselle has no contact with her fellow workers to alert them to cases like these.
Giselle: We don’t communicate with each other. I don’t know if other colleagues have been through the same thing.
Kruskaya: Giselle stresses that there are features of the Aliadas platform that benefit her. These include the option to choose the area of the city where she will work and her working hours. However, even if work times are flexible, if a worker cancels a shift, this affects her ranking negatively. In other words, there is no true flexibility. Giselle also tells us that the way clients are rated is often subjective, due to the prejudice or lack of knowledge. Aliadas does not generate equal opportunities for clients and workers for the evaluation. This app does not create an employment contract with paid domestic workers, nor does it offer them social security. In a country where 99 percent of paid domestic workers do not have a written contract, 80 percent do not have access to holidays or employment benefits, and only four percent have access to health services, digital cleaning platforms such as Aliadas should favor the formalization of work with labor contracts for those women, improving their living conditions, dignify their work, and not perpetuate the inequality and precariousness of the labor market. To create decent living and working conditions on digital platforms, it is essential to listen to the voices of women app workers!
Veena: This episode is part two of our Codigo Doméstico series. If you missed Roxy and Jessi’s stories in part one, you can listen at reworkradio.org or your favorite podcasting platform. Many thanks to Kruskaya for bringing these stories to Re:Work. And a special thanks to Paola, Giselle, Roxy, and Jessi for sharing their stories. The original version of Codigo Doméstico was produced in 2022, in Spanish and Portuguese, by Kruskaya Hidalgo Cordero as part of the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. It was co-produced by Ana Cisneros with illustrations by Melissa Mejia. You can find the original podcast episodes and related research at codigodomestico.com. Or see our show notes for the Spotify link. This episode of Re:Work was produced by Kruskaya Hidalgo Cordero, Veena Hampapur, and Saba Waheed. Mixing was done by Aaron Dalton. Paola was voiced in English by Lucero Herrera, and Giselle was voiced by Yolanda Arroyo. Til next time, rethink rework.