A Clean Home is Worth a Living Wage
By Ai-jen Poo and Palak Shah
On the heels of Labor Day, domestic workers will have cause to celebrate. The workforce that cleans our homes as a profession will see an important advance toward a more just future: the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) created a framework to understand what constitutes a livable wage. Our members who work as cleaners determined that $25 an hour is the living wage floor for independent cleaners and $15 per hour is the living wage floor for employees of companies who receive other benefits.
Today, Airbnb is announcing that it will encourage hosts on its platform to support those standards. We welcome Airbnb’s Living Wage Pledge as an important step forward for tens of thousands of people who are all too often ignored in the 21st century economy.
Cleaners are the backbone of the home sharing industry, creating the inviting spaces that generate business. Their work is crucial in helping guests feel at home, on behalf of hosts, yet they have often remained unseen and unacknowledged. More broadly, in our culture and in our laws, the people who clean America’s homes are a largely invisible workforce, excluded from some of the most basic protections working people take for granted. The fact that this labor has been historically devalued or dismissed doesn’t alter its vital importance as foundational labor that allows other work to take place, but it does mean that far too many domestic workers face fundamentally unfair conditions.
By introducing living wage standards for cleaners, set by cleaners themselves, Airbnb is sending a message that they see and value this workforce, making the invisible, visible in their community and beyond. Airbnb’s move holds the promise that America will begin to recognize domestic work, in our culture and in our economy, for its true value.
In addition to fair pay, NDWA standards call for clear expectations between hosts and cleaners, improved health and safety standards, and access for cleaners to a professional association. Cleaners like Matilde Vásquez see the promise in promoting a national living wage. “My quality of life would be much better. I’m always working hard, but it never seems to be enough to make ends meet. Earning a wage of $25 an hour means I could continue my studies and pay for healthcare. Having a clear living wage standard would also help the many cleaners who are afraid to ask for what we deserve because we don’t want to lose our jobs. I’m hopeful that the pledge will help many more cleaners get a fair wage.”
Every cleaner whose host follows the new standards will see concrete improvements in their daily lives and family’s standard of living. We dare not underestimate the importance of improving real lives, right now.
For many hosts, the ideas and philosophy behind Airbnb’s decision will be entirely new, and will serve to both guide their interactions with cleaners and educate them further about the goals and aspirations of the nation’s domestic workers. This lays down an important marker for future definitions of what a fair wage is in our industry and provides a framework for further action.
We know as well as anyone about the challenges of enforcing anything in the domestic work industry, whether it’s a law or a pledge, because we have been working at it for more than a decade. When the workplace is a private home, and there is no list of which homes are actual workplaces, it’s difficult to know where to begin. The workers don’t congregate on a factory floor or go to work together in a big building. They work for families, many of whom want to do the right thing but don’t know how. If you have 100,000 workers, you have 100,000 different employment arrangements. That is why setting and promoting fair standards is critical. It must eventually become part of the culture surrounding this work.
As with any social justice work, there’s no magic bullet. Change requires a tireless combination of strategies. In our case, we pursue a multiplicity of paths: grassroots organizing, leadership development, legislative advocacy, coalition building, and employer outreach all play a role, as does the essential act of improving workers’ lives in the here and now, even as we envision future gains in a rapidly changing and often disaggregated labor market.
Overall, we aim to make domestic workers’ jobs good jobs, to set new norms, and to affect a fundamental cultural shift toward greater equity and justice. As we continue to work in uncharted territory, our members expect us to innovate and experiment in our efforts to receive fair pay while helping to tangibly improve the lives of working families. In that spirit, NDWA will continue to work with Airbnb to develop good ideas with tangible impact.
In any change process, the first step is always to take a first step. Airbnb, one of the largest tech companies in the world, supports an enormous volume of cleaning work through its platform, and is actively promoting our living wage standards to pay cleaners fairly. We believe that step by step, our culture will change to recognize the value of domestic work, and compensate workers accordingly. The millions of people who do this work every day deserve nothing less.
Ai-jen Poo is Director of National Domestic Workers Alliance. Palak Shah is Social Innovations Director of National Domestic Workers Alliance.
