Can Technology Give Domestic Workers A Voice and a Safety Net?

In 2008, Araujo discovered NDWA through the immigrants’ rights movement, and then founded Women Working Together USA, a domestic workers’ rights organization in Broward County, Florida, that joined the national movement by becoming an NDWA affiliate.

It was a moment of optimism. “We are volunteers but we were growing, and we were excited with what we were doing, especially advancing the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights,” she says. “I attended the NDWA conference in Las Vegas in February of last year. I finally felt like I had a solid structure.”

Then, Covid-19 struck. “My jobs began falling apart. After two or three months, I had no income at all and, because I was undocumented, no federal relief.”

Even before Covid-19, NDWA Labs, the innovation arm of NDWA formed five years ago, had focused in on the lack of a social safety net for domestic workers—no sick days or vacations, no health insurance. The NDWA Labs created Alia, a portable benefits platform making it easy for employers and clients to contribute regularly to the benefits for domestic workers. The contributions were voluntary with a suggested contribution of $5 per cleaning, but it was still progress.

“Our vision has always been to extend the safety net to domestic workers, who weren’t included in its design because they work outside the traditional nine-to-five structure, for multiple employers and with informal work agreements,” says Palak Shah, the Lab’s Founding Director. “The first iteration of Alia proved that it was possible to design a benefits platform for domestic workers—when the solution is designed by and for those workers.”

In the midst of the pandemic, The Rockefeller Foundation stepped up to help support NDWA as it sought to use technology to both quantify the impact of Covid-19 and provide rapid response cash funds to low-wage workers who typically live in the shadows.

“Domestic workers epitomize what it is to be essential,” says Otis Rolley, The Rockefeller Foundation’s Senior Vice President, U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative. “Every day, through their professionalism and experience, they prioritize the care of others before themselves. Covid-19 put a spotlight on the unacceptable choice facing domestic workers, a choice between their wellbeing and a paycheck. We wanted to help.”

Another challenge, she says, is an underground and disaggregated labor market. “Domestic work is mostly done and paid for in the shadows. In any city, you may have hundreds of thousands domestic workers, each with two or three or four employers, and over a million homes—no one knows. There is no water cooler, no HR department. Many are undocumented.”

NDWA Labs believes technology has a role to play in supporting this workforce, but Shah notes that technology is not inherently good, or even neutral. Depending on how it is used, it can enshrine and preserve existing power imbalances, or disrupt them.

“Much existing technological innovation seeks to optimize efficiency and profit, rather than optimizing for equity and dignity,” Shah says. “Part of the running hypothesis of the NDWA Labs is that technology can disrupt unequal power and be part of the solution—if we can crack it.”

By late March, more than 90 percent of workers were reporting lost jobs due to Covid-19. The median hourly wage for a domestic worker before the pandemic was below $11, and close to a quarter of domestic workers live in poverty. Once pandemic shutdowns began, more than half were unable to pay their rent or mortgage for six consecutive months. The vast majority did not apply for unemployment insurance, mostly because they did not believe they qualified.

This reinforced the Lab’s immediate certainty that the pandemic was going to be economically devastating for domestic workers, Shah said. “We announced a Coronavirus Care Fund with the goal of raising $4 million to distribute to 10,000 workers. Instead, we raised $30 million. Overnight we built a safety net, quite honestly.”

“And then we had to figure out how to distribute it. So our friends at Google.org sent us a small team and all of us together rapidly built software to distribute these dollars through Alia Cares.”

“These funds,” Araujo says, “helped me eat.”

But the drawback, she says, is that many face a steep learning curve. “At night when I get home, around 11 p.m., I am teaching them little by little, how to access online workshops. But we need more people doing this.”

After 18 years of working primarily as a cleaner, Araujo has not forgotten her roots in the arts. She created and hosts a radio show for domestic workers that includes dancing and singing along with information. “I consider art to be a way of living,” she says.

Her son Damian, 20, was recently hospitalized with a brain cancer diagnosis. But she nurtures hope—for his healing and for an improved life for her and the women NDWA supports. “It’s been beautiful to see domestic workers organize,” she says. “Together, we can accomplish things.”