Veena: From the UCLA Labor Center, this is Re:Work. I’m Veena Hampapur. Today on Re:Work we bring you two 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 Roxy and Jessi. And we’ll start with Roxy who works in California. I’m turning it over to Kruskaya.
Kruskaya: The first digital platform, or app, that offered paid domestic work was created in 2008 in Boston. It was initially called RunMyErrand and was renamed as TaskRabbit in 2010. It started as a platform to solve urgent needs, based on the idea “I will call my neighbour to help me.” And today, it functions as an online job market where service providers and service seekers meet. If a person posts a need called “a task,” TaskRabbit sends three bidders for that service based on its algorithm. Its business model and operations have been the basis for a hundred apps in the United States and around the world. These are virtual platforms that offer a number of services, including domestic work. To work with a cleaning app in the US, some require workers to be US citizens. Others ask for immigration status or a social security number. JanPro is one such app. It’s one of the largest cleaning and disinfection franchises in the country. JanPro is one of the apps Roxy works with.
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It has been 22 years since Roxy left Mexico City with a suitcase and crossed the border to the United States.
Roxy: My name is Roxy, I am 41-years-old, I came from Mexico when I was 18-years-old. We immigrated here after my husband had been abducted. He escaped and we had to flee, we had to come here.
Kruskaya: They migrated due to a fear of violence and of experiencing a similar situation again. They came to California and made Los Angeles their new home. Roxy has a 21-year-old daughter and 18-year-old twins. She is still fighting to adjust her immigration status.
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When workers are hired by apps, they are not recognized as company employees, but as contractors, self-employed, or sole proprietorship companies. On the Jan-Pro platform Roxy is considered to be a provider of cleaning activities who has her own business. She has a profile on the app where she promotes her business. To open the profile, she had to make a one-off payment.
Roxy: To start with Jan-Pro, you give 900 dollars, it’s like a down payment.But they keep it, they don’t give it back, it’s a, oh, I don’t know how they said it, the word, a deposit.
Kruskaya: Apart from the non-refundable deposit, Roxy tells us that at Jan-Pro you can invest money to get houses or offices to clean on a monthly or a “permanent” basis.
Roxy: From there you pay about 1,200, they give you a small office to clean regularly, but they are very dirty and take a lot of work to clean up. And they end up changing cleaning companies anyway because workers are unable to clean the spaces fully or because they don’t want to pay much for cleaning because when they pay through a platform they pay more than paying you directly for the work. It has advantages and disadvantages, but they do have a lot of work, they say you can go up to 50 thousand to bid for a better job with Jan pro, but who is going to risk that much money, and you don’t have that much money to do that either.
You can lose the steady work because sometimes the manager is changed. It happened to me, in an office where we were all set up. It’s always my sister who helps me clean, my sister-in-law, my other sister, my husband, me, my children, so it’s not much and I try to keep everything clean and tidy but sometimes when someone arrives, a manager who has an acquaintance or someone who doesn’t like you because you are Hispanic, so they change and then you lose the office and you lose the 1,200 dollars, the sum that you have invested, but a minimum of 1,200.
Kruskaya: Many of the offices Roxy competes for in Jan-Pro are large, sometimes multi-story sites. So, if Roxy wins that bid, she has to hire more people. In most cases, she subcontracts to people in the process of adjusting their immigration status or who are undocumented. This includes her family, her acquaintances, and people in her community. This is a widespread practice among migrant women workers. A practice of solidarity! However, because of Jan-Pro’s residency and citizenship requirements for workers, she is taking a risk hiring in this way.
Roxy: When you sign these contracts they say that you have to prove that what it says there is true and that if you need to hire people to help you, they have to be legally in this country, so you get into trouble if it’s not true. When they ask me for workers I have to put the name of the employee who is going to go, the telephone number, it’s no longer just my information, it’s that of the people I am sending to work in that office or place.
Kruskaya: Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a huge demand from the Global North for care workers from the Global South, mainly women. According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, 88% of domestic workers, caregivers, and nannies are women. Of these, 49% are Hispanic women. That is, one in two domestic workers in the US are Hispanic women. This trend is maintained in cleaning apps. However, despite their numbers this does not mean that Spanish-speaking paid domestic workers have solved the problem of language barriers. In fact, Roxy tells us that she faces several problems on a daily basis due to language. She is not alone in experiencing this and it triggers discrimination.
Roxy: Well, they see us as ignorant because of our accent, because we don’t speak English very well, but there are a lot of them who speak Spanish or want to communicate with us in Spanish. Sometimes they are like that and sometimes they don’t speak Spanish and they get frustrated because they think you don’t understand them or something, and I understand a little bit, but my sister who didn’t go to school here or anything doesn’t understand anything and she has more of a problem, so I tell her to take a photo if anything is wrong, and I send her a message right away and tell her what is going on and so on. I think that’s the biggest problem, communication.
Kruskaya: The presence and growth of digital platforms for care work and domestic services are the result of social, political and economic factors, as well as the emergence of new digital infrastructures seeking to profit from and manage domestic labor in all its forms. In comparison to other apps in Latin America, Roxy faces a much more high-tech platform economy in the United States. Where the idea of “be your own boss” is stretched to the point of “having your own business within the app” or “be your own sole proprietorship company.”
In the midst of this, Roxy dreams of having her own app, an app that helps paid domestic workers to get decent jobs, to support them in their immigration processes, to have labor contracts, social security, and also to have cleaning supplies that do not harm the health of workers or the environment. Amidst the proliferation of cleaning apps globally, paid domestic workers within these apps are daring to imagine other possible ways of working with these platforms. They dream and demand dignified lives and decent jobs in the platform economy.
Veena: Hi there, Veena again. Next we’ll hear Jessi’s story from Brazil.
Kruskaya: São Paulo is a city located in southeastern Brazil. It is one of the main financial centers in the region and is the city with the largest population in Latin America. Brazilians call it “the city that never stops.” São Paulo is also the richest city in Latin America with the most billionaires. However, this wealth stands in stark contrast to the thousands of people who find themselves living in extreme poverty. In Brazil, 14% of working women are engaged in paid household work, also known as domestic work. Many of them are working in the informal sector. 80% of domestic workers in Brazil are Black women.
Jessi is a Black woman who lives in Sao Paulo and does paid household work through an app called Mary Help. Jessi is 24-years-old and lives in a favela in the outskirts of São Paulo, in Freguesia do Ó, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city. Jessi lives with her mother and grandmother and is the breadwinner in her family. Mary Help started operations in 2011 and is one of the most used apps for hiring domestic work in Brazil. It is present in 16 of the country’s 27 states, including: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Goiânia, Salvador de Bahia, Rio Grande do Sul.
Jessi: I have been working in domestic service since I was 16-years-old, in fact I’ve been working since I was 10. I have been working with Mary Help since 2017. I am still on the platform, but I am unlikely to accept a day’s work through them, because my experience with them has shown me that in my case, at least, it’s not worth it for what they pay.
Kruskaya: The people who hire services through the Mary Help app pay by credit card. The service cost is calculated based on the number of hours worked. However, the payment that domestic workers receive is much lower than what clients paid the app. For example, Mary Help charges 152 reales, which is around 29 dollars, for a four-hour service, but pays its workers only 55 reales, that is about 10 dollars. In other words, the app takes a commission of 64% of the worker’s earnings. According to the Article 15 of the 190 Convention of the International Labor Organization (ILO), it is prohibited for employment or placement agencies to charge fees to paid domestic workers or to take a part of their incomes as commission. Jessi tells us that the pay rate is very low compared to the cost of living in Brazil.
Jessi: The company negotiates a separate price with the client, which they generally do not let the women workers know. They don’t let us have that connection with the client so as not to run the risk of the client hiring us separately. Because it would be advantageous both for the client, who would pay less, and for us. It’s not a fair price, all the more so nowadays. You can’t do anything with 91 reales nowadays; everything is very expensive, the cost of living is absurd. And 91 reales is sometimes not even enough to buy food for the day; we have to choose either to buy food for the day or to buy personal hygiene products, and that’s tough, isn’t it? In a 6-hour day through the platform you get paid 70 reales, now it’s 75 plus 16 reales for public transportation fares. It’s much more advantageous for me to work independently because I earn 200 reales in six hours.
Kruskaya: Incidentally, this payment has not been updated since Jessi started working with the app in 2017.
Jessi: The thing I was really upset about was the payment. I think it’s absurd to maintain the same rate nowadays, as things are more expensive. I’ve tried talking to them about it, just to ask them what’s going on here.
Kruskaya: What are the working conditions with this app? Mary Help workers do not have an employment contract, maternity leave, paid days off, or social security. In other words, they do not have a formal employment relationship with guarantees and rights. If they don’t work one day, they don’t get paid, they live from day to day. The app does not allow them to choose the areas of the city where they want to go to work, so they often have to travel long distances to get to their jobs.
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The app requires workers to purchase a uniform consisting of an apron, shoes, and a cap with the Mary Help logo. The cost of this uniform is deducted from the weekly pay that workers receive, depending on the hours they have worked. Whenever they go on duty, they must wear the uniform. Jessi says that this is a form of free publicity for the company.
Jessi: The company offers you a uniform, special non-slip shoes, and an apron and a cap. However, it is the worker who pays. The worker is forced to use, she needs to use, the uniform because the company won’t let the professional work happen without being identified by the name of the platform. They want us to advertise for them. We don’t even have our name on our apron. It’s not our name, it’s the company contact, it’s just the logo and their name.
Kruskaya: The app can block or close the profiles of paid domestic workers without explaining the reasons for blocking them. Sometimes they can be blocked for weeks at a time. Mary Help temporarily or permanently takes away their source of work in a totally arbitrary manner.
Jessi: I have already spent a week blocked from working on the app. I did not receive any kind of work. It was like a penance, a punishment. When I was blocked for a week, which I couldn’t believe, I questioned them, because I was a very sought-after worker in the company. They told me that it was a slow week, but I had been in contact with other workers, and they told me the exact opposite. So I think this is exactly the way they shamelessly punish the worker, so as not to run any kind of risk. They don’t make it clear, they just tell you that you don’t have any work. And if you only have that platform as a means to employment, you don’t work.
Kruskaya: In most of the houses where Jessi goes to work, she is filmed by clients. They do not tell her that they are filming her and don’t have her permission to do so.
Jessi: Honestly, these days when we work, we don’t even know that we are being filmed, so usually when the person makes an accusation, she has recordings to prove that the professional is in the wrong. Without video recordings the clients don’t generally report it. As workers, we have experience in recognizing if we are being recorded, identifying where the hidden cameras are, you know? There are some that are really visibly displayed on the ceiling, but well, we usually have no warning.
Kruskaya: This recording practice is now also used by workers to protect themselves. For example, when they go to a dirty place, or when they have a bad feeling about the work situation, they record or take pictures of how the space is before they start cleaning. They do this in case clients complain to the app that they haven’t left the place clean enough or that they didn’t turn up for work.
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Care work sold in digital platforms has been a largely neglected field of study, trade union agenda, and area of state regulation. It seems as if the women who work in these apps don’t exist, that no one cares about them. But Jessi matters! All domestic workers matter! Knowing Jessi’s experiences working at Mary Help, her demands and the changes she identifies as urgent are of utmost importance to improve the living conditions of women workers. Jessi is demanding higher pay rates, social security, and the option of choosing the areas of the city where she will work. Jessi’s struggle is not just about improving her individual conditions, it is a struggle for a dignified life for paid domestic workers in apps.
Veena: Next time on Re:Work, we’ll bring you two more stories from Código Doméstico. You will hear from Paola who works in Colombia and Giselle who’s in Mexico. Many thanks to Kruskaya for bringing these stories to Re:Work.
The original version of Código 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 by Aaron Dalton. Roxy was voiced in English by Yolanda Arroyo, and Jessi was voiced by Susie Valerio. Til next time, rethink rework.