Aaron Seyedian is careful to make the ever-so-slight distinction between his housekeeping business and its quasi-competitors. Well-Paid Maids is not a company that simply happens to pay a living wage. It’s a living-wage cleaning company. Its entire branding rests on the idea of treating employees justly. For the 12 maids on board, that means a starting […]

At her former cleaning job, Kimberly Reyes was paid a set amount, in cash, even if the house was a disaster. Sometimes there wasn’t enough work, so she got a second job working nights and weekends at a restaurant. Because she was a contractor, she had to save up to pay taxes on her income […]

This D.C. home-cleaning service pays its employees a living wage of $16 per hour. Will it catch on? Aaron Seyedian is running an experiment. He has launched a service to provide housecleaning services in the D.C. area and is asking residents to pay as much as $139 to have a spotless one-bedroom apartment. That’s more […]

Small business owners like Aaron Seyedian have long utilized MIT’s living wage calculator to account for cost of living and set pay, which differs by region. Seyedian, who employs ten workers at his D.C. area business called Well-Paid Maids, is willing to pay his employees more if it means they can keep the phone on […]

Aaron Seyedian, who runs a home-cleaning service that operates in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, shared that while he is proud to ensure his employees have paid leave, a state-run program like the one that already exists in D.C. both would reduce his costs as a small-business owner and ensure his employees have better coverage […]

“To being moral, logical [and] practical, paid leave is affordable and beneficial to businesses in the business community,” said Aaron Seyidian of Montgomery County who founded Well-Paid Maids three years ago to provide housecleaning services in the D.C. area. “I’m skeptical about any business who thinks this is going to burden them,” he said. [Read […]

Aaron Seyedian closed his housecleaning business, Well-Paid Maids in Washington, D.C., for four and a half months before reopening in early August. Even when his employees weren’t working, he paid $5,000 a month toward their health insurance, including vision and dental. “I didn’t think the right thing to do was to kick my employees off […]

“I think any labor market slack will always hurt pro-worker practices,” said Aaron Seyedian, founder of Well-Paid Maids, a Washington, D.C.-area home cleaning start-up known for its commitment to workplace equity. “I also fear that pay transparency will be crowded out given how many new health and safety issues workers will need to fight for […]

Well-Paid Maids founder and living wage advocate Aaron Seyedian notes how a single-payer system would alleviate headaches for small business owners such as himself, and provide better coverage for workers. “You don’t feel like you’re getting anything for your money” he says in reference to commercial health insurance premiums. “All in all it’s a very frustrating experience.” […]

“I’m faced with an impossible choice of either reopen in an environment that I think is unsafe, risk my customer health, my staff health, just so we can generate the revenue to cover our insurance premiums, or stay closed, which I believe is the right thing to do, and at some point throw my employees […]