DALLAS — Getting creative during the pandemic continues to be the name of the game. Many who make a living doing domestic work say getting jobs isn’t like it used to be before the pandemic.
There are about 80 million domestic workers in the world. Many in Texas are people of color, and some use these jobs as side hustles because having one job will not cut it.
Rodrick Gulley ends his afternoons getting off work as a security guard for a local business in Dallas. He spends a minute or two to take a breath, and then he’s on the clock again to start his evening as the owner of his carpet cleaning service.
“I got my job from my father. He taught me how to buffer and how to clean the carpet. He taught me how to clean floors, everything,” Gulley said.
The reason Gulley works so hard is that he loves his kids so much. He has a 5-year-old and another one on the way due any day now.
“If I could not provide for my kids, I’d feel less than a man,” Gulley said.
For Gulley’s type of work, recommendations and jobs used to come by word of mouth. The pandemic is slowing things down, and some are finding it harder to lock down clients. Gulley said that is concerning for him because one of his biggest fears is his kids’ growing up seeing struggle as he did.
“My mother never had a job, she was always disabled,” Gulley said of his upbringing.
There is a way to find work by creating a business profile on Google or through sites such as Yelp. Tariq Khribech is the creator of an app called All Better. On his app, it’s people of color who usually offer most of the services.
His platform is different than the rest for Gulley and other domestic workers looking for work in the way you connect with potential customers. Customers aren’t just given the phone number for a business; there’s a space to send a direct message — similar to a business page on Facebook or Instagram.
“If you try to call someone on the phone, almost 90% if not 95% of those calls goes to voicemail. Then you start playing this phone tag and that gets you even more frustrated in the process,” Khribech said.
By using the platform, Gulley said he’s been able to make more house calls in North Dallas and areas that were unfamiliar with him before. We don’t know how long this pandemic will last, but Gulley wants to be sure he will have steady carpet cleaning jobs because that means his money will be steady.
