Exploited, Undervalued – and Essential: Domestic Workers and the Realisation of their Rights. Edited by Darcy du Toit. Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 380 pp. ZAR225.00, $22 paperback, available online.

Abstract

Exploited, Undervalued - and Essential: Domestic Workers and the Realisation of their Rights. Edited by Darcy du Toit. Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 380 pp. ZAR225.00, $22 paperback, available online.Starting points matter. The University of Western Cape's Social Law Project's recent, insightful volume could easily be missed by those concerned about the future of labor law as general field. After all, the book focuses on one of the most groups of workers, resolutely situated in labor law's peripheries: domestic workers performing historical care work. And, the book emerges out of marginalized continent, albeit in the African member of the BRICS, South Africa. Yet Emeritus Professor Darcy du Toit's edited volume centers and contributes meaningfully to core debates on the direction of labor law, nationally and internationally because, I would argue, it takes peripheries as starting points.The volume considers the potential of the International Labor Organization (ILO)'s alternative vision to the Washington consensus: that is, decent work as manifestation of social justice in the global economy. It does so within state constitutional framework that is historically self-conscious (p. 45) and that has social transformation from an apartheid-based to democratic society as its fundamental purpose. For Du Toit, the adoption by the ILO in 2011 of the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) and Recommendation, 2011 (No. 201) is a milestone in that it settled the long-standing debate as to whether domestic work should be considered as 'work' for purposes of labor legislation (p. 2). For South Africa, which has staggering 8.7 percent of its population working in this sector (p. 1), rethinking the regulation of domestic work through principles like equality, freedom and development is hardly peripheral. It is intimately wedded to contemporary labor law's renewal.Drawing on the substantive equality framework in the international instruments (domestic work is both work like no other and work like any other) (ILO 2010), Du Toit and his colleagues build on the (p. 47) that South Africa, which has ratified Convention No. 189 along with 16 other states, has been more proactive than most on the regulation of domestic work. Most contributors modestly understate the extent to which that intuition is accurate: while majority of countries worldwide have barely turned their attention to regulating domestic work progressively, South Africa has specific regulations on conditions of employment that were model for the ILO; it also has specific regulatory mechanisms that are accessible to domestic workers and offer conciliation, mediation, and arbitration on termination of employment. Labor inspectors occasionally conduct blitzes in the homes of domestic employers to assess compliance. Yet Social Law Project members are careful to question the perception that South Africa is somehow exemplary, by demonstrating that concretely, little has changed for domestic workers despite 20 years of significant legislative reform. In particular, Pahmidzai Bamu offers detailed analysis of the extent of noncompliance with the specific legislative framework establishing domestic workers in Chapter 5. And as Kitty Malherbe carefully canvasses with great technical precision in Chapter 4, domestic workers lack many forms of social security protection. The situation is even more bleak for migrant domestic workers from neighboring countries, as presented by Jennifer Fish, who advocates move from border control to regional mobility rights through the harmonization of immigration and labor law (Chapter 6). Profound challenges to collective organizing for empowerment are assessed in historical and contemporary context by Nandi Vanqa-Mgijima, Yvette Wiid, and Darcy du Toit in Chapter 7.Both to engage the specific challenge of regulating domestic work, and to insert their work into broader labor governance debates, the authors employ the framework of transformative constitutionalism, or fundamental social change through law and litigation that is backed by popular mobilization. …