Context
One out of seven employed women in Latin America is a domestic worker. This occupation is almost universally associated with women’s work, and low access to opportunities and education help explain why 93% of all 18MM domestic workers in the region are female.
The first issue is the high level of informality: 80% have no labour contract, comparing with a 42% of informality rate in the total urban workforce in Latin America. This is especially worrying considering that domestic workers mainly depend on their employers’ goodwill to have minimum working conditions, since that there is not many laws or government enforcement to regulate this working relationship. That is why, most of those women often lack social security protection, face exhausting workdays and earn very low salaries.
The average domestic work wage is 59% below the average urban income wage in Latin America. Even with most workers being female, there is still a gender pay gap of 27%. One of the reasons that explains this gap is that men exercising this occupation tend to have the better paying roles, such as security guards, gardeners and drivers while women are the ones providing cleaning, cooking and caring services, which are mostly low paying.
Another important factor to consider when we are analysing the domestic work is the susceptibility to abuse. Because women are employed inside private homes, they can be invisible and isolated from the sector and other workers, making them an easy target for verbal, physical and sexual violence.
Even with the increase access of information and inclusion of so many vulnerable women working in those conditions, we still believe that there is a lot to be done to fastener this transformation. That is why our group decided to do something about it!
1https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_498779/lang–en/index.htm
3 https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/domestic-workers
SGDs #5 – Gender Equality
The topic of gender equality is being widely discussed and this need of transformation must be in various spheres: from the end to gender discrimination and violence, to access to reproductive and sexual healt, up to more representativeness in decision-making roles in government and companies. To achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls we believe working to secure better working conditions and increase life quality of women domestic workers in Latin America in one of the steps to achieve this goal.
The disproportional number of women working as domestic roles foster a gender discrimination that should end. Besides that, one of the important KPIs of this goal is to eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, and to be able to do this we need to connect, bring information and give voice and resources for those workers to speak up and have means to overcome this violence. Also, it is important to recognize and value the domestic work, raising data and information to help design better public services, infrastructure and social protection policies that will have a real impact those women’s life. Lastly, recognizing the gender pay gap in this occupation, the focus should be on adopting and strengthening policies and enforceable legislation to promote of gender equality and empowerment, especially for low income women that have no access to other opportunities other than the in-house work.
Proposal
WorkRight is a market platform with the objective to match the demand, middle/high-income households, with the supply, domestic workers, in an easy, secure and efficient way.
Through the platform model, we want to tackle several market inefficiencies that are sources of friction:
- Network. Today the match between demand and supply is done through the personal network. We can easily imagine, therefore, that the possibility for a family looking for domestic workers is today limited to the community in which they live in. The same is true for domestic workers looking for opportunities to work.
Through the platform, the demand and the supply will have access to a virtually limitless number of possible matches which should increase the size of this market exponentially with a positive effect for the standard of life of domestic workers and the country economy
- Trust. Today since most of the interaction between domestic workers and house owners happens within the community, it is the community itself that guarantees the credentials of the domestic workers. With the increase in the number of possible matches amongst people that are no more in the same community, it is important to be able to assure the level of trust needed for this type of service. The platform will replace the community as the guarantor; Background check of each person on the platform will be performed as well as a simplified motivation interview. Moreover, a rating system will give additional information to the house owner and the domestic workers concerning the professionalism of the other part.
- Price discovery. Since today the market for domestic workers is limited to the community depending on the specific state of the demand and offer prices for the same services could vary a lot. Also, we can imagine that in this bargain, the house owner is in a strong position, which allows him to exploit this advantage in the price negotiation. The platform, in this case, will work like the stock market, allowing efficient price discovery, and in the longer-term, depending on the development of the transaction, a fixed set of prices could be proposed.
- Labour force protection. Domestic workers today are amongst the less protected class of workers. Most of them do not have an official contract and remain in the informality. As a result, retirement schemes paid leaves, health insurance coverage, do not apply to them. The platform will take care of the legal aspects related to the job contract, centralizing the payment from the house owners with whom a pension fund, a health insurance coverage, and all the necessary protection schemes will be financed.
- Customer experience. A user-friendly mobile phone application will be the central point through which the ecosystem will be animated. The choice of using a mobile phone app is driven by the fact that today the penetration of smartphones is extremely high, allowing the domestic workers to have access to the platform without problems.
How it works
The Work Right platform will be built with a number of different services and functions in mind.
As such, it will provide a broad set of tools and reference libraries for employers, domestic workers and communities. Due to the limited penetration of computers in many of the target geographies, the website and interface will be designed primarily with mobile internet users in mind. As such, the product will be built as a mobile and web app accessible on any basic smartphone or computer. Focusing primarily on the community outreach at first, the platform will integrate more functions that can be monetized as the site builds momentum, and users increase.
- The primary feature of the platform will be a peer to peer forum discussion where workers, employers, and contacts can share experiences, advice and opinions around the informal domestic work market. Structured like a typical forum where threads can be tagged and labelled and comments can be left, the differentiating factor of this forum will be the target audience and the specific focus of discussion on domestic housework themes.
Users will be able to create profiles and register as a worker/employer/etc. before entering freely into the forum, do comment, read, and learn about opportunities. Due to a potential lack of computer access, the website and forum threads will be designed as simple webchat interfaces to provide ease of access by all users through a mobile app.
- Q&A information depository. A section of the website will be dedicated to become a depository of key information useful to domestic workers in the region seeking to increase awareness, understanding and security of women opting to be domestic workers. Information provided in this library will include videos, documents and podcast/audio recordings of interviews and speakers dealing with topics such as:
- Basic rights of domestic workers eg. labour laws, minimum wage, max hours worked per day etc. tenancy laws,
- Risk warnings to drive awareness of potential dangers of domestic work eg. Harassment, over-work, isolation from family, abuse etc.
- Life implications for workers, worker’s families, and employers when entering a live-in domestic work contract.
- Representation services. The platform will provide online services providing basic legal representation and backing to existing domestic workers as well as an advisory service for women considering long-term domestic work opportunities. The intent of providing such services is to protect the safety and rights of women that are so often mistreated, abused, and exploited due to a lack of understanding of the risks involved. These services will be delivered to domestic workers and their families through a combination of:
- Online chat functions with dedicated legal representatives
- 1-2-1 sessions that can be requested and booked in over the phone/video conference
- Educational sessions with community leaders in a “teach the teacher” model
Once established, WorkRight will be able to provide full legal representation in courts on behalf of dis-advantage domestic workers. This service will be monetized from compensation packages paid by infringing “employers” found guilty.
- Job-board marketplace (monetized) service. WorkRight will generate money through the creation of a job-board for domestic work where prospective employers can be matched with potential domestic workers. This marketplace will help to match supply and demand through a formalized, secure, and trusted platform, ensuring the safety and fairness of employment. Revenue streams will include:
- Placement fee + retainer from personalized employers
- Fee charged to employers finding matches through the service
- Advertising revenue on the job-board website
To guarantee and build trust in the market-place, WorkRight will conduct background checks and vetting process for all domestic workers.
Needless to say, the success of the business requires a lot of groundwork to build the market thickness of the network ensuring that there are sufficient domestic workers engaged on the platform (supply-side) and sufficient employers on the platform providing demand for domestic workers. As such, WorkRight will need to invest up front in strong community outreach teams to ensure a strong relationships and engagement with local rural communities (where most young women who become domestic workers come from). The influence and importance of community leaders, household leaders and religious figures cannot be under-estimated. Education and buy-in from them will allow access to the domestic workers and help build trust between the platform and them.
On the demand side, the importance of basic women’s rights, the transparency and trust that the platform offers and the reduced pain in identifying and hiring a domestic worker all pose strong reasons to believe. Whilst the final cost of hiring a domestic worker may be higher than the current informal market (due to higher basic salaries, protections for workers and declared employment contracts that incur taxes), the increased costs will be minimal and provide security and transparency for both involved parties. Furthermore, the assistance of local and state governments will be enlisted and lobbied so that incentives can be put in place to ensure the informal economy of domestic work can be brought into the open. These measures may include but will not be limited to: increased spot checks on illegal domestic workers, tax breaks for employers/domestic workers using official channels, protections such as healthcare, education and subsidies for domestic workers choosing to declare themselves etc.
Additional Considerations:
Many of the home workers in developing countries are internal migrants, who come from rural areas or are indigenous, with usually low levels of education and sometimes are illiterate, creating a challenge to get them on the platform. Also, some of them don’t have a bank account, which can be a risk for the implementation of the platform. Therefore, it is extremely important to find local partners that can help us not only empower and connect those women, but also provide them with basic means – such as the bank account.
Another important partnership is with the legal services in each country. Legislation may vary a lot within Latin America and there are several NGOs that provide this free legal guidance for underprivileged. We need to bring this network together to increase their power and to help more people in need.
Also, we foresee the backlash from the employers. Often, they see the homeworkers as being their possession so they may decide to perpetuate the status quo. We will need to find ways to educate those employers, because a change of behaviour from this side of the work relationship is also necessary for the success of our business.
Next steps:
Two countries suitable to launch the platform are Mexico and Brazil, with 2.4 and 7.2 million domestic workers each, according to estimates as of 2019. Particularly, densely populated urban areas should be considered at first in order to reach out to as many potential users as possible.
To experiment the viability of this project, before developing an app, we can partner with other institutions that are already doing this work and understand how the products we are offering are perceived by the target. One example is Centro de Apoyo y Capacitación para Empleadas del Hogar (CACEH), a Mexican NGO that aims at training women and informs them of their labour rights. With them, we can understand the challenges, measure the effectiveness of our solution and start building the trust network. After that, we develop the technology with more information about the user and the service, and with that we can deploy in all countries of Latin America.
Chris Holcroft, Viviane Lazard Sobral, Claudio Montebello, Francisco Sanchez Chaves