Abstract
Domestic workers form one of the most vulnerable and exploited sectors of the workforce in the world economy. In 2002 South Africa became one of relatively few countries to promulgate special legislation aimed at extending protection to domestic workers in the form of Sectoral Determination 7: Domestic Worker Sector, South Africa. In the context of current debate about setting international standards for the domestic employment sector by means of a Convention and/or Recommendation of the International Labour Organisation, the article examines what has been achieved in South Africa over the past decade in extending legal protection to domestic workers, problems that have been encountered and possible ways in which those problems may be addressed.
Highlights
Over recent decades the precarious nature of domestic employment has been analysed in depth from sociological, historical, economic and legal perspectives, both in South Africa and internationally
“What do we do as workers? We have highlighted those things, the failure of the Department of Labour, the failure of our employers to see us human beings... you know they treat us without dignity but, as workers, what do we do for ourselves – do we sit back? There are laws in South Africa and they say you have a right to join a trade union. [Minister of Labour] Mdladlana speaks of unionism
Describing the different worlds inhabited by white women and their black female servants, the book developed a paradigm of the domestic employment relationship which to a large extent remains valid today: a relationship which is liberating for the employer but exploitative of the employee, even though both are women experiencing the general oppression of women, but in vastly different ways
Summary
Over recent decades the precarious nature of domestic employment has been analysed in depth from sociological, historical, economic and legal perspectives, both in South Africa and internationally. To do this will mean unravelling the heritage of centuries of degradation, inequality and exploitation in very concrete forms In guiding this process the law must engage with members of society – those who dominate as well as the subjugated – as it finds them and define a route towards realisation of the constitutional vision which they are able to follow. Nowhere is this interaction more complex and challenging than in the domestic employment sector, where the new dispensation has hardly begun to take root. It is in this context that the issues addressed in the article need to be understood
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