The story of ALO MAIDS began to take shape in 2008, when I moved to Dubai to join my husband after we got married. Like most working couples, we needed help keeping our home clean and in order. So we began hiring part-time cleaners through local agencies, a practical solution at the time. But what started as a simple transaction soon became a window into a reality we never expected.
As I spent time listening to the stories of the girls who came to clean, iron, and do the laundry, I realized they were helpless and almost had no voice. Many didn’t receive their salaries on time, sometimes for a number of months. They worked for at least 10 hours a day. They had almost no contact with their families and were homesick. They relied on their customers to see a doctor when they got sick, because they had no medical insurance and couldn’t afford a physician’s consultation fee.
Their passports were often held by their employers, and going home, even for a family emergency, wasn’t an option until their contracts ended. Most of them came from ultra-poor backgrounds and had to sell their land or cattle to pay agencies to come to the UAE. I remember speaking to a lady from Nepal whose family would travel to a nearby town to speak to her on a landline phone, where she called them once every couple of months.
As a customer, we were paying 140 dirhams for a session of 4 hours, which is 35 dirhams an hour, without cleaning tools or supplies. Simple math showed that each cleaning worker/domestic helper earned over 6,000 dirhams a month. This made me seriously wonder why these poor cleaners were paid so little.
The answer was simple: because there were no regulations to protect them.
I wished to do something about it because I believe that ethical conduct should be driven by humanity and not by policy or government regulations. However, I couldn’t do much other than quietly preparing financially, professionally, and physically until January 2013, when ALO MAIDS Cleaning LLC was finally born as the highest-paying and most ethical cleaning company in the UAE.
From the beginning, we paid AED 1,550 per month, more than three times the market rate, with a guaranteed AED 1,200 basic salary. We introduced comprehensive medical insurance and provided enhanced medical insurance plans, gave workers SIM cards with 100 international minutes and data to support family connection and their mental wellbeing, and allowed paid yearly vacation even before they would complete one year of their labor contract.
We didn’t stop at wages. I trained the staff myself in basic housekeeping skills and techniques, safe chemical handling, taking responsibility for their work and actions, health and wellbeing, and even communication skills. We built a culture of participation, responsibility, dignity, and wellbeing, not just compliance with best practices in international human resource management.
The results speak for themselves: higher retention, healthier and happier workers, better service quality, and a sector-leading reputation. Our compensation packages were benchmarked across the industry and remain a benchmark today. More importantly, we proved that ethical and responsible business is not only possible but also sustainable and transformative.
Nasreen Ali
