Living Fair has moved and I didn’t have to hire movers

Living Fair moved to a new home http://blog.laborfair.com/

MySpace for labor? Hey, cool, we’ll take it.

Great news! Today, Laborfair appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Home and Garden section as a great new way to find help. One user, San Francisco based Reiki practicioner, Kate Donnelly, coined Laborfair as the “myspace for laborers.” Kate found a painter and a house cleaner on the Laborfair marketplace and states, “you can get anything done, any time.” At company headquarters, our little one room abode inside the Renaissance Center for Entreprenuership, we know that frequent users of Laborfair find help for all kinds of tasks and now, Bay Area lovers of home and garden know too. Thanks Kate. We’re here to please.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/12/HOS9TCDKH.DTL&hw=paul+kilduff&sn=001&sc=1000

Moving Tip #28 Friends Don’t Let Friends Move Them

Budget Rental has a humorous ad campaign. Combine stick figure drawings and pithy counsel on making moving bearable and be memorable. I don’t know about asking your friends to move for you, particularly at this time of year. Any time of year for that matter. I made this mistake three years ago when I moved out West from New York City. What was supposed to take 4 hours, took 10. There is always way more to deal with than you think when you first look around. I vowed never to ask personal friends or family members for moving help. I felt so guilty I could barely concentrate on the move and well, my brother bitched about how he was going to reciprocate one day. He obviously forgot I painted his office and cleaned his windows last time I visited. The holidays are an insanely busy time of the year for just about everyone. Right now, we have over 50 movers with references looking for extra moving/hauling gigs. Don’t want to ask your friends? Get the online equivalent at a fair price. YES! You just have to rent the truck and find some new friends on Laborfair.

What to tip for labor this holiday? We asked.

The holidays are fast approaching and we all know what that means. Get the decorations out of the garage; decide on your annual holiday gift-giving budget and feel anxious about what to give your favorite provider. Is it cash, a gift certificate, a sweater? What amount of money or kind of gift? Take a deep breathe. It’s not as hard as it seems.

A gift, at its most basic, is a gesture of gratitude, a heartfelt appreciation for a job well done. Your choice will reflect the level of personal relationship you have with your service provider and your budget. As a mom, you probably have a favorite babysitter or a regular childcare provider or housekeeper. These individuals work in your home regularly as trusted, dependable and quality care providers, however, you might not know their preference, tastes, and/or hobbies or what is an appropriate amount to tip.

In order to help answer these questions, we conducted an informal survey of participating consumers and providers about holiday tipping habits at Laborfair (http://www.laborfair.com). Poll participants unanimously agreed upon the three most popular methods for tipping during the holidays: cash, gift certificates or a small gift. Users also provided some guidance about the best way to share each of these holiday gifts.

1). Cash: A gift of cash is always desirable and always welcome. As part of the Laborfair survey, full-time childcare providers and housekeepers overwhelmingly indicated a preference for cash. Housekeepers recommended a range of tipping between $30-50 (depending on frequency of cleaning) while childcare providers suggested a tip ranging from one week’s pay to a one-time gift of $200. It’s always nice to personalize a gift of money by adding the envelope to a gift bag that includes a scented candle, homemade cookies or holiday candy.

2). Gift Certificates: These are always welcome by providers, but they are much harder to personalize. It’s difficult to know which stores your nanny or housekeeper might patronize. Laborfair asked polling respondents to share some of their favorite stores: Gap, Old Navy, and Macy’s earned top billing. Additionally, if you know what your provider likes to do for recreation or as a hobby, then gift certificates from smaller, more specialized stores might also make sense.

3). Gift: A purchased gift is a nice holiday gesture because it shows that you have a sense of a person’s interests, style or hobbies. Purchase a gift they might normally have found for themselves but would consider an extravagance. Polled participants mentioned their favorite gift items as a manicure and pedicure at a local salon, basket of seasonal food items, and the highly coveted extra paid day off.

The holidays are a season of generosity, both of spirit and material wealth. If you have more, give more. If you have little, give little. Finding a meaningful way to express your appreciation is the most important part of gift giving.

Jenna Raby

Some socially conscious gifts for fair minded folks.

Listed below are some online sites to shop for socially-conscious gifts, including fair-trade chocolate, coffee, household items, and environmental furniture. I’m not just telling you the products here are fabulous. I know. I’ve bought and enjoyed items from every one of these socially conscious companies. Who doesn’t love chocolate or having a gorgeous piece of hand-crafted furniture–all the while knowing you have put food on someone’s table with your purchase? Buying fair trade products supports conscientious producers in developing nations all over the world so you can feel good about your purchases. Remember, more than 4 billion people make less than $2 a day. Wow. We can help change that this holiday season. Most or all of the items available on the websites below are certified fair trade. This means that the workers who produced them were paid a living wage in safe working conditions.

Global Exchange Online: http://store.gxonlinestore.org/index.html: Global Exchange, run by my friend Kevin Danaher, an iconoclast to be sure, is an excellent organization, truly committed to helping change the world through its Green Festival and the products it has on the website.

Grounds for Change (coffee and chocolate): www.groundsforchange.com: Yum, fair trade coffee. It’s delicious and there’s chocolate here too.

Ten Thousand Villages: www.tenthousandvillages.com/home.php: I love this company. They buy potholders, napkins, placemats, hair accessories and beautiful furniture–all made in sustainable ways in developing countries.

Tropical Salvage: www.tropicalsalvage.com: Run by another friend of mine, Tim O’Brian, this Portland, Oregan based sustainable furniture company goes above and beyond conventional environmental practices. Innovative, to be sure, Tropical Salvage actually reclaims and recycles beautiful tropical hardwood by mining them where for centuries caches of large, species-diverse trees have laid buried by volcanic eruptions. They salvage trees felled by floods and landslides caused by Indonesia’s annual intense rainy season. Once mined, the beautiful wood, centuries old, is hand-crafted by indigenous craftsman into beautiful wine cabinets, book cases, stools, dining tables, armoires etc. You name it.

Go ahead shop till you drop and maximize generosity.

Jenna

What’s Fair? Laborfair announces Bay Area first quarterly Wage Report

How much to pay for a job well done is a concern and frustration for just about everyone who wants and needs household, personal and family care. As our name suggests, we help you as the consumer make informed decisions about what is a fair hourly wage for your job request.

At Laborfair we create a transparent marketplace that ensures both consumers and providers are fairly charged and compensated for work performed.

Rate Guidance:

Our rate guidance table (visible in the What’s Fair section of this blog) can be used as a benchmark for average hourly rates per category in your local area. Use this to help you determine what is the fair wage for your job. The information is a summary of real time data collected across our site on September 22, 2007. Of course, your agreed-upon rate with the provider varies depending on the specifics of your job. We will release these quarterly.

These numbers clearly show that savvy consumers can save money by contracting directly with a qualified and experienced service provider. At the same time, the report gives us a unique window into what people in business for themselves are earning as a living wage instead of what they would earn as a minimum wage at a larger company or agency. The report also highlights some interesting variances around the Bay Area in the costs of services by region. For example, the average fee charged by a handyman on the Peninsula is $33.68 while San Francisco is much less at $22.15. Hmmm, interesting. Other averages across big categories here at Laborfair are:

• Child Care: $19.24/hour
• Housekeeper: $17.83/hour
• Handyman: $25.75/hour
• Adult Care: $17.00/hour
• Gardener: $17.37/hour
• Painter: $22.29/hour

So, now that you are getting your house or apartment in shape for those holiday parties, you know what it might cost you. Enjoy, Jenna

Ten Easy Tips for Greening Your Abode with Laborfair

At Laborfair, living green can be easy as well as feel good. It’s a fun challenge to make your home align with your values. Check out these 10 tips on how to “green” your home and use laborfair service providers to help you make it happen:

1. Get a High-Efficiency Showerhead and call a plumber to install it inexpensively.
2. Recycle Water in Your Bathroom: did you know there are these great devices which allow you to reuse sink water for flushing your toilet?
3. Compost–that’s right, turn your food scraps and lawn trimmings into food for your plants. Most gardeners on Laborfair know how to do this so just ask.
4. Purchase Green Power From Your Utility–ah, green power, cool.
5. Improve the Efficiency of Your Existing Hot Water Heater–the handyman and the insulated water heater, save money and time.
6. Use High-Efficiency Outdoor Lighting
7. Replace High-Use Indoor Lights with Compact Fluorescents or LEDs
Consider compact fluorescent bulbs or LED bulbs for those non-dimmable circuits (especially for holiday lighting). They are true energy misers, and will last for as long as you live in your house.
8. Load Up the Washing Machines
Make sure you run dishwashers and clothes washers only when their full. Better yet, invest in a front load washing machine that pools the water instead of filling the entire basin. Energy star appliances really save.
9. Drive Smarter: I love this one. You don’t need to get on the waiting list for a Prius or invest in fuel cell technology to drive smarter. Drive at (or near!) the speed limit, keep your tires inflated, make sure oil and air filters are clean, and step on the gas / brakes carefully.
10. Avoid the Daily Waste of Fast Food and Shopping
Use reusable shopping bags whenever you go to the store. Say “No Thanks” when the pharmacist or grocery store clerk tries to put your one or two items in a bag.

How did you make your home green? We’d love to hear your suggestions and comments on your favorite tips.

Bottled Water and Going Green

I’m happy and grateful for the earth. In this season and age of plenty, the popular expression “reduce, reuse, recycle” has never made more sense. If we want a world where our grandchildren don’t have to live in a plastic bubble, filtering every environmental pollutant through a fire hose of sanitized oxygen, we better make “going green” a personal and a public necessity. I’m not a huge fan of California’s current governor, but I am supportive of his environmental policies—advocating for solar technologies, reducing fuel emissions, more widespread applications for bio-fuels and all around aggressive strategies to reduce our dependence on oil, domestic or foreign. As we think about easy steps to go green in our houses, what about going green with our personal choices? I’m not talking about organic food, more algae-based Omega 3 supplements instead of fish based ones, or the holy grail of health, drinking more water. No one’s against drinking more water and less Coca-cola except maybe kids. It’s our universal love of bottled water that concerns me. In 2005, Americans alone drank some 37 billion bottles of water, despite the well known fact that in most parts of the country, public tap water is not only perfectly drinkable but also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart. Our public water systems disclose the quality of their water while most bottlers refuse to do the same. Only 10% or so of these bottles are currently recycled—imagine 33.3 billion bottles in a landfill in the US alone.

Add that manufacturing plastic bottles for bottled water creates an astounding amount of pollution in the packaging, transport, and refrigeration– an annual equivalent of 1.5 billion barrels of oil, according to Food & Water Watch. In an effort to cut costs (have you seen the price of gas these days?) and live my beliefs, I changed my approach to consuming water. Here’s what I did. I bought a Brita Water filter so I was on the absolute safe side around lead and mercury content. I poured the filtered tap water into a funky grey Nalprene bottle I purchased at Walgreens for $5.99. These nifty, lightweight and dishwasher safe bottles are not just for hitchhikers and athletes anymore. I carry it around with me at work and monitor both my daily water intake and the cash I’m saving. My goal is to buy a gorgeous personalized metal water container, like the Boy Scouts used to use with all the money I save. Hippie chic—yep, that’s right. Pull that one out at a meeting with the big boys in the pressed suits. So here’s my rant–just don’t buy bottled water, stick to drinking filtered tap and wine in glass, recyclable bottles, of course. Interested in how corporations are bottling tap water and selling it as from “the source”, check out www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org.

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Originally uploaded by jenna_raby

The Rinse Cycle and Leather Pants

At Laborfair, our goal is to connect people looking to hire household or personal help with those looking for work in a fair, trusted, and responsible way. We don’t believe the world needs more employment agencies but we know finding good quality responsive providers isn’t always easy. People, well, they are not products, they don’t perform always the same way every time your invite their services. Indeed, everyone’s view of the accuracy and excellence of a job completed varies based on subjectivity. For example, I love the fact that Irma cleans my refrigerator weekly and throws out any food that is slightly “suspect”. I marvel at how she meticulously folds the toilet paper into corners on the dispenser like they do at the Ritz Carlton or dare I say, one of nasty Queen Leona’s former establishments. This could be way too intrusive for some, and very very welcome by others. I am a bit less thrilled about Irma’s bizarre inclination to hide my bathrobe from me–I have realized this twice now, both times on a cold, fog-filled morning once out of the shower, shivering, mildly wet and annoyed. Or perhaps the time she washed my leather pants in an effort to clean them (I promptly cursed all hearty combinations of New York slang appropriate to lament the demise of my clubbing leathers and made the mental note never to leave any article of clothing slung haphazardly over a chair again). Well, I guess anyone would have an issue with that. But, you get my point. People are people and it’s important to be clear about what you do and do not want done. While contractual arrangements can be part of any good employment arrangement, they’re not always completed, we don’t always follow that level of detail. Beyond a personal checklist which I recommend highly for housecleaning, childcare, gardening and handymen interaction, I recommend posting a review. Reviewing a provider is a great way of being honest and even helpful to the provider with extravagant praise or constructive criticism. Just as restauranteurs read reviews of their food and service to tap the pulse of the public, providers can learn from your comments, well intentioned either way. Lastly, I can’t stress enough how important it is to trust your gut feeling after you meet with someone you get from Laborfair or any other service–even if they come very highly recommended. It’s up to you.

Laborfair sister site in India, different worlds, same message

Today, I was thrilled to see a feature article appear in the Technology section of the New York Times about a former Microsoft employee and internet entrepreneur that is using the power of social networks to bring more jobs to India’s masses making less than $3 a day. The title of the article is: “In India, Poverty inspires Technology Workers to Altruism.” Check it out at:

Check it out here:

New York Times article about Babajob

He’s beginning in Bangalore where there is an endless flood of expatriates with a need for local services and the money to purchase them. It’s a great idea–one that I’m proud to say we had first in the US and have worked on for the better part of two years. I feel well-qualified to comment then on this subject.

The people Babajob aims to help are those service sector personnel, e.g. painters, cooks, childcare workers, handymen and chauffeurs (yes, you definitely do not want to drive yourself in India), who lack a viable social network and the ability to connect with potential employers. The company has identified low (if any) computer literacy and limited access to a computer as the primary roadblocks to that connection. Oddly enough, the problem in India and its growing economy, is the same one here: how to connect independent, qualified service providers with those looking to hire them in order to increase their opportunities and simultaneously redistribute a bit of wealth back into the economy. Laborfair tackles that head-on here in the US by making the hiring process for those same types of services far more efficient – resulting in cost savings for consumers, more consistent job opportunities, and a resulting higher wage for independent service providers.

In India, without social networks and the connections they foster, these service providers are relegated to a life of poverty. In America, there is less overall poverty, but our challenges are of a strikingly similar nature–access to living wage employment, health care, affordable childcare, etc. Laborfair and Babajob share the same ideological genetics. We both believe in using business to create social change, and in supporting the entrepreneurial drive of the world’s people to have better paying and more consistent work opportunities. We’re proud that Laborfair began by helping non-profit worker centers throughout the Bay Area find more employment opportunities for their in-need clients (and continues to do so).

But there are also differences in our approaches necessitated by the unique cultural differences. Where Babajob charges the employer to contact providers and pays intermediaries to interview computer illiterate workers and post their profiles on the web, Laborfair sells a highly efficient and affordable marketing and communication platform to the provider in order to keep the service free for the consumer. We believe that in order to help service providers build their businesses, they must make the barriers to entry as low as possible for potential employers. There is also much greater computer access in the US, meaning that we do not have to carry the overhead of intermediaries to interview and post worker profiles. And like Babajob, we’ve made it much easier than previously possible for consumers who need quality, trustworthy personal help to find it at a fair price. With Laborfair, you can forget the hassle and expense of contacting an overpriced housecleaning service or mining the yellow pages for service professionals without a review or ratings. Instead, there’s a great independent local service provider waiting to do your job.

I find this article incredibly encouraging. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a giant corporation or a small startup approaching the issues of poverty alleviation and the growing income divide, whether they’re focused globally or domestically, or even if they treat it as a business opportunity or a philanthropic effort. The point is that there’s room for everyone to be the catalyst for change. Your consumer choices and the conscious capitalism you display in your daily hiring decisions are the real and genuine power here. Businesses like Laborfair and Babajob demonstrate how innovative businesses concepts, both in the US and abroad, can create social change –the main ideology behind our mission here at Laborfair.com. Kudos to them. Perhaps there’s a partnership in the making.