Does the person who cleans your home have benefits? They should. It’s easy with Alia.

Do you know if the person who cleans your home has benefits? If she is sick, can she take a day off to recover without worrying about losing a day’s pay?

If she is an independent cleaner – i.e., she works for herself and not for a cleaning company – chances are, she can’t. Chances are, she doesn’t have access to any of the benefits that most workers do, like paid time off, accident or disability insurance, or any of the other benefits most of us are used to. Independent cleaners – along with other domestic workers including nannies and caregivers – historically haven’t had access to benefits, along with other workers’ rights and protections that have become standard for other occupations.

That’s why in December, at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we launched Alia, so you can make sure that the person who cleans your home has the benefits she needs.

It’s easy.

At the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we’ve been working for the respect and dignity that domestic workers deserve for 10 years, and we’re inviting you to join our movement.

You can now contribute to the benefits of the person who clean your home, along with all of their other clients. We suggest $5 per cleaning as a good amount. The person who cleans your home can use the contributions from all of her clients to manage her own benefits, like paid time off, or insurance products like life, disability, accident or critical illness insurances.

It’s easy to get started:

1. Sign up for an Alia account and choose how much you’d like to contribute.
2. We’ll help you invite the person who cleans your home to join Alia (you only need their cell phone number.)
3. When they join, we’ll contact them personally to explain how Alia benefits work and help them invite their other clients, too.

Domestic workers are the invisible – yet critical – workforce who support the rest of the economy. They quite literally do the work that makes all other work possible: They are the nannies who love our children, the housekeepers who create order out of the chaos of our homes, and the caregivers who care for our elderly and disabled loved ones. They take care of the work we leave behind in our homes so that we can go and work outside the homes.

They care for us. They deserve to be taken care of, too.

Just over a month ago, I gave a TED talk at TEDWomen and did my best to sum up my last 10 years of work fighting for the domestic worker movement.

We’re all looking for ways to do the right thing, whether it’s large or small, to make a difference in the world. That’s why you choose CREDO. And that’s why we created Alia. Because all work is dignified and deserves respect.
Please join us in taking care of those who take care of us, and join Alia today.

Ai-jen Poo is the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the leading voice for dignity and fairness for domestic workers in the United States. NDWA is an ally and grant recipient of CREDO. Since 2015, CREDO members have voted to donate nearly $100,000 to NDWA.