News

02/24/2010

WAGES & Home Green Home Co-op Featured in Green For All's "Women in the Green Economy"

Green For All honors Women’s History Month, with a blog entitled “Women in the Green Economy" which features Evelin Palacios, a founding member of Home Green Home, LLC in San Francisco. Read more: greentheblock.net/blog/green-block-2010-days-action-marchs-theme-women-green-economy

12/15/2009

WAGES & Natural Home Cleaning Co-op Featured in Race, Poverty & the Environment Fall Issue

An article entitled, "The Case for Holistic Economic Transformation", features Natural Home Cleaning Oakland-based co-op. Click on this link to read more: http://urbanhabitat.org/cj/swan.

10/28/2009

New York Times Debut for WAGES!

A New York Times business section article entitled, "Green Offshoots", features WAGES' model of small green business development. Click to read more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/business/smallbusiness/29sbiz.html?_r=1&ref=business

10/07/2009

Business Week Article has Praises for WAGES!

An interview with Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation has praises for WAGES. Here's a link to the good news:
www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/aug2009/sb2009085_100107.htm

07/15/2009

The Eco-Friendly Cleaning Co-op Network, powered by WAGES!

We celebrated its official launch in the summer of 2009. By combining forces, the member cooperatives and WAGES bring new tools to the fight against recession and poverty; the strength of unity, mutual support, and economies of scale. Check back soon for pictures of our launch celebration.

06/23/2009

The Greening of America: A New Deal for Everyone?

http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2009/2509.html

04/14/2009

Bringing green home: One S.F. business, The Thin Green Line

The cooperative takes the comprehensive view of green jobs: Workers receive training in money management (after all, they're part owners) and in cleaning techniques that minimize strain on the body—which, if you've read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, you know is a serious issue among Mini Maid-type companies. Home Green Home also takes pride in seeing how workers educate other members of their communities on how to get things clean without chemical cleaners.

03/16/2009

Home Run, Ideal Bite

You get a cleanup for about the same price as conventional services, the housekeepers make a living wage, and toxic chems stay out of our drains and waterways. It's a hit.

02/25/2009

home green home, MomGoGreen

The worker/owners of Home Green Home have completed intensive training, not just about the health benefits of green cleaning and the best techniques, but also about the intricacies of running a business. They’ve completed workshops in finances and customer satisfaction. The superior training is provided by WAGES, whose mission is to build worker-owned green businesses that create healthy, dignified jobs for low-income women.

02/08/2009

Green Jobs for Whom?, In These Times

In California, Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security has helped low-income immigrant women build four successful green housecleaning cooperatives that employ hundreds. And in Chicago, Growing Home has trained 100 formerly incarcerated, homeless or addicted individuals in organic farming. Sixty-five program graduates are now employed, and 90 have found permanent housing.

02/02/2009

Can a Clean House Create Jobs?, 7Gen Blog

WAGES and the coops they have incubated over the last 14 years have helped raise dozens and dozens of women and their families from poverty. It is an incredibly powerful story, one that involves not simply offering a handout, but instead extending a hand up. The coop members earn a sustainable living while enjoying benefits like healthcare and paid vacations, benefits that are virtually non-existent in their industry. They are trained in the skills necessary to run and own their own businesses, skills that motivate and empower.

07/31/2008

Create Your Own Workplace; YES Magazine

Life changed for Rosales years later when she learned about Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security, or WAGES, a San Francisco Bay-area organization that helps low-income women start businesses. The staff of WAGES invited her to join four other women in starting a cooperative. Under a cooperative business model, each participant is both a worker and an owner of the venture, sharing the costs and profits equally.

05/31/2008

Merging Green Cleaning and Social Equity: U.S. Green Building Council e-Newsletter

Green building practices are changing the way that we design and construct our buildings. But have we forgotten about how we maintain and clean our homes and offices? Implementing an ongoing maintenance program using environmentally responsible cleaning products is an important element to any sustainability strategy. One non-profit business incubator is merging green cleaning practices and social equity by starting cooperatives that improve the lives of low-income workers in Northern California and provide for a truly clean indoor environment.

05/05/2008

Small Business Awards 2008: Arthur Jackson Diversity in Business Award SFBG Online

Based in Oakland, the small WAGES staff helps low-income women form worker-owned cleaning cooperatives by offering leadership training, education, and management until the cooperatives can become self-sustaining. So far three of the cooperatives operate in the Bay Area, and a fourth is slated to open in San Francisco by the end of the year.

03/31/2008

Healthy Job, Healthy Body: A Profile of Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security, Breast Cancer Action Newsletter

WAGES’s success has had a noticeable impact on the housecleaning industry. The group continues to help organize other housecleaning cooperatives in the Bay Area and has helped others form green cooperatives, such as Eco-Bay Landscaping in Oakland, California.Organizations like WAGES and cooperatives like NHC show us that we can have good jobs that are also healthy jobs. Another world is possible, and these women are working toward it.

03/31/2007

Forget Mr. Clean, Try Ms. Clean, Terrain Magazine

Now, in its eleventh year, WAGES members stickto their core business. With cleaning's good profit margins, the women earn a decent income and benefits. Cleaning houses also proved a new front to promote environmental commonsense. Hilary Abell, WAGES' executive director, says that nearly all of the women have stories of acute and long-term health effects from previous cleaning jobs. Abell says that environmentally friendly, nontoxic, or minimally toxic alternatives have changed that grim picture for both workers and clients.

02/28/2007

Housecleaning co-op members see income, benefits rise sharply, Rural Cooperatives

Women's Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES), a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, Calif., was formed more than 10 years ago to help empower low-income women, both economically and socially, through cooperative business ownership. WAGES serves the greater San Francisco Bay area and specializes in housecleaning co-ops. Because the majority of housecleaners in California are Hispanic, WAGES focuses on helping Hispanic women. With WAGES' support, Latina women are moving out of poverty and into entrepreneurship.

01/28/2007

Fair WAGES at work: 7Gen Blog

Creating the opportunity for women to build a life for them selves and their families on a foundation of secure, respectable, and reasonably-paid employment is a dream that is beyond the reach of many Americans. WAGES is succeeding in creating this new possibility. Working with over 50 Latino women in the East Bay area of San Francisco, they have created three successful, worker-owned home cleaning business cooperatives that have changed lives and created hope.

01/31/2006

Microloans Mean Better WAGES for Women, Bay Area Business Woman

WAGES is on the cutting edge of "greening" the residential cleaning industry. WAGES calculates that the three coops will prevent the release of 4,000 pounds of hazardous materials to the environment in 2005. They are transforming the working lives of their housecleaners who are, in turn, changing their private lives. Claudia, a founding member of Eco-Friendly Cleaning in Oakland, formerly used toxic cleaning chemicals such as bleach all day long. "I would leave work with headaches, allergies, and feeling really tired. I felt really bad all around. Now I don't use chemicals and I'm really happy with my work. I even use natural products at home."

10/17/2005

Jon Carroll's column about WAGES, SF Chronicle

On one side of the corridor is the WAGES office; on the other side Natural Home Cleaning. The separation is important; WAGES is an advisory group, or an enabling group, or something; it does not employ the cleaners. The cleaners are members of a co-op; in addition to cleaning houses, they also meet to discuss profit margins and economies of scale....

08/16/2005

GREEN Clean, Green Homes Start with nontoxic cleaners, SFGate

But with the help of an Oakland-based organization called Women's Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES), Naranjo became one of the founders of a South Bay housecleaning cooperative called Eco-Care. WAGES helps low-income women form worker-owned cleaning cooperatives by providing training, technical assistance and three years of management services until the cooperatives can become self-sustaining businesses.

02/28/2003

Eco-clean Homes; YES! Magazine

WAGES, a nonprofit organization, opened in 1995 with the aim of enabling low-income women to become cooperative business entrepreneurs. It was WAGES' early trainees who selected the house-cleaning field as a business in which they felt comfortable and experienced. The “eco-friendly cleaning” aspect was added to give the new businesses a special market niche, but, more than that, it promoted cooperative values by emphasizing workplace and client health and community well-being. Now, all of the cooperatives WAGES sponsors are eco-friendly cleaning enterprises. The WAGES training program gave Iglesias skills in communication, business, and decision-sharing with her four co-owners, and also taught her professional techniques for eco-friendly housecleaning.