House Cleaning industry and the Handy App
My name is Wyatt Chambers and I am the proud owner of Aloha Maids referral Agency in Southern California. Aloha Maids is a business I started in 2012 with the intention of giving house cleaners an opportunity to receive fair pay for domestic labor. By fair pay, I actually mean a fair percentage since we have always referred contractors. I
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It is well known that with Aloha Maids Referral Agency that all jobs are negotiable, and there is a human office professional readily available 12 hours a day offering phone, email, and text support.
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Currently I am a board member of CCDRA and we are Lobbying in Sacramento to make changes to AB-5 in hopes that it will have more commonalities with the existing civil code 1812.5095. I do not make much money with the referral agency, but I can proudly say that the workers seem highly supportive of this business model.
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About 10 years ago, when I started Aloha Maids Referral Agency, I noticed a company called âHome Joyâ aggressively advertising online nationwide through Google ads. Home Joy received $40 million dollars from Google Ventures and was the most visible cleaning company at the time and they were the first to offer online booking with an app that conveniently allowed customers to book on-demand cleaning service.
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Home Joyâs ads were offering extremely provocative discounts to customers. Some offers for example were as low as $19 for 2 hours of cleaning service. This amount is especially curious to me since it does not even meet minimum wage requirements for an employee, and is certainly unacceptable for an independent worker. Home Joy has already closed itâs doors, and in place Handy seems to be marching down the same doomed path.
Similar to Home Joy, the Handy App, is a conduit or an unbiased 3rd party matchmaker. The app can be conveniently downloaded onto your phone from Google Play Store or from Itunes. Customers can then use the Handy App to conveniently get quotes, and shop for a service provider that can then provide on-demand service. Service providers fulfill a range of task related services from Covid cleanings, to furniture assembly.
Handy App Pro allows the service providers to create a profile. A providers profile then attracts more or less jobs depending upon the reviews and or ranking. The Service providers ranking can be affected or controlled by 2 main factors, by how active the service provider is and the perceived quality of work. In contrast, workers that are truly independent contractors and are unable to accept every job will be buried at the bottom of the list.
Upon registration with Aloha Maids, I have received live statements from cleaners who have used the Handy Pro App. I have been told that most often jobs are underbid, and there is no support line that workers can call in order to recommend that they increase pricing or negotiate pay. They claim that Handy will deduct pay if the worker were to refuse a job, or arrives late to a job. There are also other situations where workers have said that Handy will deduct pay and the workers have absolutely no control of when and how much pay can be deducted. I can not attest whether or not if this is true, but if it is true, this could be interpreted as wage theft.
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In truth, the Handy App is the epitome of everything that I dislike about the cleaning industry from the businessâ lack of compliance, to the greed and systematic oppression that it places on itâs workforce. Anton Zietsman, Homejoyâs former West Coast operations manager, summarizes it best when he explains, âWe were trapped between being accountable to our customers and not being able to take much responsibility for quality of service.â This should serve as an important learning for future platform businesses aiming to disrupt an industry, like Handy.
