April 3, 2006VOL. 44, NO. 7Oakland, CA

WAGES trains women for
eco-friendly cleaning co-op

By Sharon Abercrombie
Staff writer

Claudia Zamora is one of the many professional house cleaners who used to suffer with headaches, allergies and “feeling really tired, really bad all around.”

Her health took a holistic turn for the better three years ago when she and a group of other women started their own cleaning cooperative, Natural Home Cleaning.

Now the Oakland woman is “really happy” with her work.

Natural Home Cleaning teams use baking soda, vinegar, and other environmentally friendly, biodegradable nontoxic cleaning products. Instead of paper towels and disposable wipes and mops, the women work with durable tools -- old cotton T-shirts, putty knives, razor blades and screw drivers for whisking away stubborn household grime. They also use vacuum cleaners equipped with HEPA filters.

Natural Home Cleaning is the newest and one of three Bay Area eco-friendly housecleaning cooperatives operating in Oakland, Redwood City, and Morgan Hill/San Jose.

To make it happen, Zamora and her friends linked up with WAGES (Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security), a local non-profit organization that helps set up housecleaning and other types of worker-owned cooperatives.

WAGES provides these co-ops with education, leadership training, management support, conflict resolution, constructive communication, financial literacy, computer training and tax assistance. For example, co-op members learn to read and interpret financial statements during their five- to 10-hour a week classes, which extend over several months. They study without fretting about child-care because WAGES staff provides this service as well.

WAGES provides the educational base, but each cooperative is its own boss, setting its own wage scales, job descriptions and schedules.

Each member pays a small membership fee to join the cooperative -- $400 over time. And each cooperative takes out a small business loan – typically $15,000-$25,000 -- from Lenders for Community Development, a consortium of community development banks in San Jose. WAGES encourages cooperatives to raise funds from garage and food sales to decrease the size of their start-up loans.

WAGES supports itself through foundation grants and individual contributions.

Three women community activists started WAGES 10 years ago to help low-income immigrant women move out of minimum-wage jobs into better positions with financial stability, explained Hilary Abell, executive director.

The first year, WAGES trained three groups of women – (two in Spanish and one in English) in cooperative business planning. In 1997, the groups started a party supply and non-toxic professional housekeeping business.

By the next year, however, they realized that the service side of their business was more viable than the retail one, so in 2000 they created Emma’s Eco-Clean in Redwood City. In 2001 a second cooperative, Eco-Care Professional Housecleaning, opened in Morgan Hill. It has since expanded into the greater San Jose area.

In 2003, Natural Home cleaning professionals started their business, opening an office across the hall from WAGES in a large brick complex on Oakland’s International Boulevard.

Clients pay $25 an hour to each house cleaner. Half of that pays for transport costs, health care insurance and other benefits, administrative costs, supplies and vacuums, said Abell.

Graciela Berkovich, general manager of Natural Home Cleaning and a member of St Barnabas Parish in Alameda, grew up around toxic chemicals because her mother cleaned houses in Los Angeles for 30 years. In contrast to those cleaning agents, the products used by the cooperative “are great,” she said. “Our business has a lot of integrity because it protects women’s health.”

Berkovich schedules cleaning jobs, trains newcomers to the co-op and provides phone support for Spanish-speaking staff who might need assistance in communicating with their English-speaking clients.
Berkovich is busy. Her office has 130 regular clients in the East Bay, scattered between Richmond and San Leandro. Last year, the total number of both regular and one-time customers was 900.

On the work side, Natural Home has 16 cleaners. The cooperative would like to increase its staff by another dozen in order to keep pace with the increasingly high volume of customer demand.

Haven Bourque, vice president of Straus Communications, an environmental public relations firm in San Francisco, was Natural Home Cleaning’s first client. She has since become a regular customer, explaining that she “feels great” about being part of a movement that empowers Latina women to own and operate their own business.

“I think their philosophy of using natural cleaning materials is entirely appropriate for a co-op that is concerned about health – the health of our communities and the health of the natural environment.”

Being a green company has not hurt sales either. Hilary Abell said that collectively, in 2005, Natural Home Cleaning and its two sisters in Redwood City and San Jose generated $1 million. Abell added that several local mid-wives are now recommending Natural Home Cleaning services to their pregnant clients, to help keep moms and their babies healthier.

Last fall, the three cooperatives helped WAGES celebrate its 10th anniversary with a party at an Oakland church. The guest speaker was Julia Butterfly Hill, the young environmentalist who lived for two years in the branches of an old-growth redwood tree to protect it from loggers’ saws in the late 1990s.

That night, Hill called WAGES “a phenomenal organization. You can’t have human dignity without planetary health and you can’t have planetary health without human dignity. They go hand in hand.”
Hill, who grew up in a Catholic family before her dad became a Protestant preacher, complimented the organization for being an example of one of the solutions that “our world is begging for” — providing a dignified right livelihood for immigrant women while simultaneously protecting the health of the planet.

Adrian Dominican Sister Corrine Florek was among the anniversary party guests. Sister Florek serves as board chair of WAGES. She also is coordinator of Justice Organizers, Leadership and Treasurers (JOLT), a coalition of faith-based organizations that promote economic justice through investments, education and action.

She praised WAGES for its expertise in empowering women and being part of environmental healing. Although the three cooperatives are still small, that works for now. “I believe in the mustard seed,” she said.

For further information about Natural Home Cleaning, call (510) 532-6645. Check out the WAGES website at www.wagescooperatives.org/eco-house.html.

Ana Maria Alvarez, a native of Honduras, shows some of the non-toxic cleaning products she uses as a member of Natural Home Cleaning. She moved to the U.S. with her two children shortly after her eldest daughter died of cancer at age 10.

Graciela Berkovich, a member of St. Barnabas Parish in Alameda, is the general manager of Natural Home Cleaning.

Elida Pedraza (left) and Claudia Zamora learn to read financial statements during the WAGES training program for co-op members.

WAGES PHOTOS

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