Liberty Cleaners
Liberty Cleaners is a collective of strong women that came together in 2018 to transform the cleaning industry into one that provides better wages, safer working conditions, formalizes the employer-worker relationship, while creating more transparency and basic employment standards for this type of work.
The overall aim is to turn domestic cleaning into a profession of well-paid jobs. WJP does this through:
Leadership development
Workforce development including OSHA and cleaning training as well as job connection services
Workers’ rights education including on wage theft
Organizing workers to collectively negotiate with employers
With respect to workforce development, WJP is focused on professionalizing the industry by innovating work readiness preparation programs, including through a pre-apprenticeship program developed with SUNY Empire that covers:
How to conduct cleaning jobs in a professional setting
How to incorporate technology to make the job more professional, to better connect with employers, and to more easily find employment
How to make the job safer, using more environmentally healthy products while recommending those projects to employers
For this reason, since its inception, Liberty Cleaners has always sought innovative means to garner more power for workers in the domestic cleaning industry, including to collectively raise wages and set basic health and safety standards through direct engagement and signed agreements with employers. By collectively organizing, Liberty Cleaners has established a $22-$25 an hour pay rate, more than 40% above minimum wage.
Liberty Cleaner workers have also negotiated a lunch break, standards for a safe workplace with health and safety equipment, and guaranteed compensation for tasks that go beyond the scope of work in their signed employer agreement.
Negotiating these contracts collectively not only raises labor standards and minimum pay rates. It also changes how the domestic cleaning industry is perceived and thus how domestic workers are treated. By treating domestic cleaning as a modernized profession, Liberty Cleaners has compelled employers to treat it as such and to engage with these essential workers as professionals with guaranteed protections, rights, and power.
Our Achievements:
As is the case with all our divisions and programs, collective organizing in Liberty Cleaners was central to the goal of industry transformation. Despite being essential workers, domestic cleaners are not protected under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) or the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), meaning these workers cannot unionize and are instead hired and treated as independent contractors. And even though New York is the first state in the country to extend basic labor protections to domestic workers through the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, there is still a long way to go to ensure they enjoy the same protections and unionization rights as other workers.
House or Office Cleaning
Call: 718-600-2166
Email: dwc@workersjustice.org
House & office cleaning hours:
10-6pm
