From 'Domestic Servant' to 'Domestic Worker'

Abstract

For several centuries domestic work has been subject to legal regulation. The article claims that in order to understand the disadvantage of domestic workers in thinking about the legal mechanisms regulating their terms and conditions of work, it is crucial to consider how the law has dealt with domestic workers in the past. It does so by focusing on the historical legal category of ‘domestic servant’ that existed in British labor law until the mid-twentieth century, showing how the current legal situation of domestic workers is rooted in this past historical categorization, emphasizing that continuity extends between that historical category and the current sectoral disadvantage of domestic workers. Even though it may seem that ‘[t]he eighteenth-century hired domestic servant’s contractual status and legal persona make her or him difficult to compare with unregulated, informal twenty-first century domestics’, within legal thought there is, in fact, a strong link between the two situations. On that basis the article analyses the ILO Convention and Recommendation on Domestic Workers.