‘If I don’t go to work, I don’t get paid’: Pandemic still hitting California housekeepers

It was mid-March when Maria Hernandez, a house cleaner in San Francisco, received a slew of text messages from her clients canceling her weekly services.

The notifications came a day before Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statewide stay-at-home order to stem the spread of COVID-19, and nearly a week after the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 a pandemic.

Without clients and no savings, the undocumented single mother of three depends on local food banks to eat. She has received some financial assistance from nonprofits like the National Alliance for Domestic Workers and accessed the Mission Asset Fund crisis assistance for unauthorized immigrants.

Hernandez is among the thousands of domestic workers – including housekeepers, nannies and health aides – in California affected by the pandemic’s economic recession.

California considers domestic workers “essential workers” for purposes of the pandemic. Yet housekeepers and others are treated as “invisible” – not prominent in the public conversation about jobs to protect, said Rocio Avila, senior employment law counsel & state policy director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

“Folks are just trying to stay afloat, and it’s been a very dire time for cleaners and domestic workers,” Avila said.

Unemployed domestic workers

By late March, more than 90% of domestic workers in the U.S. had lost jobs due to the pandemic, according to a study by the organization. It found that less than a third of domestic workers received the stimulus check worth $1,200 under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.

In California, 86% of housekeepers are Hispanic, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute report. About 61.5% of them are foreign-born noncitizens. The median hourly wage of a house cleaner is $10.78 in California.

Unemployment among immigrants and women in California has dropped since March but still remains “extremely high,” according to a report by the California Budget & Policy Center. At its peak this year, the unemployment rate among immigrants reached 25%, higher than the 21% rate for non-immigrants.

Clients cut housekeeping

Fabiola Perez knows how to reinvent herself.

Perez, who is from Mexico, said she was laid off in 2011 from her work in sales at a radio station.

Undocumented at the time and tired of low wages, the experience left Perez with the desire to open her own house cleaning business in Sacramento, now known as Top Klean Services Inc.

Nine years later, the business found success cleaning residential homes and some commercial offices, and serves as her household’s primary income. The health crisis tested the 52-year-old CEO as statewide closures took hold.

Within a month, she lost 85% of her business.

On a typical week, her company would clean 25 to 30 homes. Now she was left with four to five homes a week.

Some of her most loyal clients told her they couldn’t risk becoming infected with the virus and put a pause on their scheduled services.

“People were scared,” she said in Spanish. “People didn’t know how to react to the pandemic.”

Because work was scarce in Sacramento County, Perez took jobs cleaning homes in Solano County and as far as Lake Tahoe and San Francisco.

Perez said her luck changed in April, after she gave a real estate agent her business card. Now, her business is cleaning homes for the real estate company. For Perez, it was a “blessing.”

In May, Perez, who is now a legal U.S. resident, received approval for a Paycheck Protection Program loan that also helped keep her business afloat and pay household bills. Having been a former undocumented worker herself, Perez acknowledges the hardships other undocumented, self-employed house cleaners face.

Today, Perez said she’s recuperated about 80% of her business and provides work to three house cleaners. They wear masks and gloves when they clean homes and use stronger products to sanitize.

“The pandemic requires cleaning,” she said.

Falling behind on rent

It’s been more than eight months, and Hernandez said her clients haven’t asked her to return.

When she asked when she could go back to work, one client said: “Not until January or February.” Without a vaccine, however, she worries COVID-19 precautions will not ease in the next three months.

“I don’t really know if I’m going back or not,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “I still don’t have that answer.”

Since childhood, the Mexico native has worked cleaning houses. She said her friends, who also clean homes for a living, lost their majority of clients in March, too.

Currently, the main bread-winner of the household is her 24-year-old daughter, who works part-time at a restaurant. The family has not been able to keep up with its monthly rent payments.

“It’s affected my family and my community,” Hernandez said. “It’s been very difficult for house cleaners.”

Avila said some have turned to borrowing money from relatives or friends to stay afloat and pay essential bills.

Since moving to the U.S. from El Salvador five years ago, Erika Chavez, has worked cleaning homes in San Francisco.

Like Hernandez, the 33-year-old’s clients asked her to stop coming to their homes in March.

“Lo siento, Erika,” one client told her over the phone in March. “I’m sorry.” When she asked when she would go back, they couldn’t tell her. She took a job working as a janitor.

Now she’s worried about contracting the virus that infected her 15-year-old daughter and killed her 59-year-old father in El Salvador.

“If I don’t go to work,” she said in Spanish, “I don’t get paid.”

With no savings in the bank, Chavez and her husband, who lost work as a handyman, are struggling to make ends meet. She doesn’t know how she’ll be able to pay bills in the next four to six months.

Chavez and Hernandez both wish there was more relief and workplace protections provided for house cleaners.

Approving Democratic Sen. Maria Elena Durazo’s Senate Bill 1257 could have made a positive impact on household domestic workers in California by providing them labor protections under the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, according to Avila, but Newsom vetoed the bill in September.

“Places where people live cannot be treated in the exact same manner as a traditional workplace or worksite from a regulatory perspective,” Newsom said in his veto message.

“We’re on the front lines, and there aren’t labor laws to protect us,” Hernandez said. “The government should take action and protect domestic workers.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of Rocio Avila.

This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘If I don’t go to work, I don’t get paid’: Pandemic still hitting California housekeepers."