New in gig work: portable benefits for domestic jobs
At 53, Lourdes Dobarganes has been doing house cleaning and inhome care for 15 years. If she doesn’t work, she doesn’t get paid.
So she’s excited about a new plan called Alia for her clients to chip in to provide some basic benefits, such as paid time off.
“When we get sick, we don’t have any protection,” she said in Spanish through a translator.
Like Dobarganes, most domestic workers lack the social safety net of benefits such as minimum wage, overtime, sick pay and vacation pay. That’s why NDWA Labs, the innovation arm of National Domestic Workers Alliance, has created Alia, which the New York nonprofit calls “the first portable-benefits platform in the country.”
“We’re offering benefits in a way no one else is, trying to expand a lot of norms across the entire economy for certain kinds of work,” said Palak Shah, the alliance’s social innovations director.
Alia is starting as a solution for house cleaners, in part because they’re one of the hardest groups to help. They’re isolated and almost
invisible, working in private homes. Most work varying hours for many different clients. They make low wages, often paid in cash under the table. They’re excluded from federal laws that would protect them from discrimination, give them the right to organize, and provide family and medical leave protections.
But Alia could expand to serve other groups — and could even serve as a model for benefits for the new crop of gig workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers. Studies say gig workers now account for about 30 percent of the labor force.
“Our aspiration is that this could provide the technological infrastructure to solve benefits problems for lots and lots of unprotected workers,” Shah said.
Alia is a harbinger of upcoming workplace changes as the economy tilts more toward gig jobs, said Natalie Foster, senior fellow at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative.
“Alia is proving that portable benefits are possible, are important to workers and that people will use them,” she said. “My hope is that it changes the lives of workers today and informs policies about what’s possible tomorrow.”
Ultimately, she said, the country needs federal laws to ensure that everyone, “whether selfemployed, gig worker or employee, has access to benefits and protections that are affordable, prorated and universal.”
But, meanwhile, products like Alia are a valuable interim step, she said. Another model: New York’s 19-year-old Black Car Fund, a workers’ compensation plan for the state’s drivers for taxi, limo or ride-hailing services. It recently worked with the Independent Drivers Guild, which represents appbased drivers in New York City, to add vision and telemedicine benefits. Costs are covered by a 2.5 percent rider surcharge.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in September that the company is considering providing health care and other benefits for its drivers. Uber now offers sick leave and new-parent leave to some European drivers. Three years ago, the heads of several gig companies, including Lyft, Handy, Instacart, Care.com and Etsy, joined with academics, union leaders and policy experts in a letter calling for portable benefits for people who don’t have traditional employment.
“These are companies that have taken great risks and created markets that didn’t exist before,” Foster said of the venture-backed gig companies. “I feel confident that they can also help pilot new ways of protecting workers if they put their minds to it.”
Alia, which is available as a website at myalia. org, allows multiple employers to sign up to contribute money each time they get their house cleaned. It suggests $5 per cleaning. The money is structured as purchases of “Alia Credits.” The cleaner can redeem those credits on a prepaid Visa card for paid time off. Cleaners in California and New York also can apply the money to insurance products covering accidents, disability, critical illness or death. Insurance products in other states are coming soon. Other types of benefits could be added in the future, Shah said.
The arrangement does not violate regulations such as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which governs private pension plans, since Alia does not employ its users. The money does not have to be reported as wages, but the Alia website notes that recipients “are responsible for any taxes you may owe based on the Credits you receive.”
Clients’ participation is voluntary. Alia provides cleaners with literature explaining the positive aspects of contributing.
“We’ve learned that clients of domestic workers want to do the right thing, but it’s never been easy or simple,” Shah said. “People are happy to do it because they’ve been struggling themselves with the realization that when this person doesn’t come to work she doesn’t get any money.” Oakland resident Kimi Lee, who participated in an Alia beta test, said that’s how she felt.
“I was super excited when I heard about portable benefits,” she said. Lee, a nonprofit director, chipped in for her house cleaner’s benefits and reached out to friends who use the same house cleaner to let them know about Alia.
“There’s so much in the informal economy that’s taken for granted,” she said. “The idea that there’s a model for these informal, piecemeal jobs to help the workers is important.”
The alliance has been testing Alia for some time with an undisclosed number of workers. About three-quarters of the testers took advantage of taking a paid day off.
For now, the alliance is covering all Alia’s costs thanks to philanthropic contributions, and it’s matching all new employer contributions made this year.
As of 2012, there were about 2 million in-home workers in the U.S., including cleaners, nannies, childcare providers who work in their own homes and direct-care aides, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. It’s a hard population to track because the working relationships are so informal, but it said cleaners account for about 328,000 of the total.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid