“I would love people to understand better is what it means to work in a cooperative and to be a worker owner specifically. Being a worker-owner is a really powerful and beautiful thing. We feel proud of our work, and if people hire a worker-owner, the owners of the business are doing the cleaning in their houses, and are incentivized to work hard and to do a good job because we know this is how our business grows and this is how we get recommendations. Working in a cooperative means working as a team. It means working for living wages, and it means working in an environment that’s free of exploitation.”
– Caridad Gutierrez, quote from Garden Collage Magazine, Sept 2017
Pa’lante Cleaning is a worker-owned cooperative in New York City offering professional cleaning services. They are deeply mission driven, valuing working conditions of their members as part of creating “dignified living wage jobs and the development of leadership and workplace democracy.”
Pa’lante is also committed to bettering the broader community through use of environmentally friendly cleaning products. Pa’lante currently has 16 members and is driven by the meaning of their name, roughly translating to “Forward” in Spanish. Pa’lante has received the Small Business Achievement Award from the Queens Tribune as well as various certificates of achievement from the city and state of New York.
Check out more about their work on their website, and read more about them in last September’s article on Pa’lante in Garden Collage Magazine.
