e is for exploitation - Earlier this year, I hired a house cleaner. I wouldnt have done so normally, but my place was a mess, I was busy at work, and I saw an offer on Facebook that looked too good to be true — a San Francisco start-up called Homejoy was offering home cleanings in the Bay Area for $19. (Not $19 per room or $19 per hour. Just $19.) So I booked an appointment through Homejoys website, and a day later, a young man showed up at my door. As the cleaner laid out his tools, we made small talk, and I asked him where he lived. Well, right now Im staying in a shelter in Oakland, he said. I paused, unsure if Id heard him right. A shelter? Was my house cleaner — the one Id hired through a company that has raised $40 million in venture-capital funding from well-respected firms like Google Ventures, the one who was about to perform arduous manual labor in my house using potentially hazardous cleaning chemicals — homeless? He was, as it turned out. And as I told this story to friends in the Bay Area, I heard something even more surprising: Several of their Homejoy cleaners had been homeless, too. To explain why its possible for a cash-flush tech start-up to have homeless workers, it helps to know that the man I hired through Homejoy wasnt a Homejoy employee at all. Thats because Homejoy doesnt employ any cleaners — like many of its peer start-ups, it uses an army of contract workers to do its customers bidding. To hear Homejoy tell it, its simply the digital middleman that allows people seeking home-cleaning services to find people willing to do it. The worker dusting off a bookshelf might look like he works for Homejoy, when hes really the sole employee of John Smith, LLC. As the Washington Post wrote, Homejoy is just organizing the masses of people who already offer their cleaning services independently.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 18:31:39 +0000
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