Breakthrough research on
domestic workers.
La Alianza is building a comprehensive data set on domestic work, through chatbot conversations with a subscriber list of more than 200,000 Spanish-speaking house cleaners, nannies and homecare workers.
EVERY WEEK We survey workers across the US to generate real time insights
Since 2018 NDWA Labs has been experimenting with using Facebook Messenger to find and engage domestic workers at scale, and succeeded in rapidly growing a chatbot for Spanish-speaking domestic workers.
By 2020, La Alianza, as the chatbot is known, was offering news and resources in Spanish to more than 200,000 domestic worker subscribers. Mostly cleaners, but including nannies and home care workers as well, La Alianza subscribers live in all 50 U.S. states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
Starting in March 2020, NDWA Labs began surveying Alianza subscribers every week to learn how the pandemic was affecting their lives and livelihoods. These weekly check-ins with thousands of workers give us a unique view into how the rapidly changing conditions of the COVID-19 crisis are affecting our country’s most vulnerable, essential workers.
In October 2020, NDWA Labs published “6 Months in Crisis: The Impact of COVID-19 on Domestic Workers.”
La Alianza in the News: Al Jazeera | The Stream.
This report sheds light on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Spanish-speaking domestic workers. The pandemic has demonstrated how essential domestic workers are to our economy and society, yet they continue to be underrepresented in official economic data. This invisibility further marginalizes this essential workforce and reinforces their exclusion from relief.
In addition to sharing insights from a unique dataset, the full report discusses our methodology and describes how we’ve adapted a popular chat technology into a rigorous research tool. This report shows that it is possible and urgently necessary to develop tools to bring more of our country’s essential workers into our month-to-month, and week-to-week, understanding of the economy.
Domestic workers need economic security and safety at work. That means providing access to pandemic relief to this essential workforce and winning policies to ensure that domestic workers are paid higher wages, have access to benefits like paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, health insurance, and are offered a path to legalization and citizenship.
