(Photo by Alisdare Hickson via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)
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Every day around the world, approximately 75 million household workers provide essential domestic services for families. These services include child care, cooking, cleaning, and looking after senior folks or pets — everything required to maintain a smoothly run household. Over 75% of these workers are women, primarily from the Americas and Asia. Despite representing 4.5% of global employment and delivering a vital resource, over 80% of these individuals face insecure working conditions, meaning they do not have access to proper social or labour protections.
Often unseen and unheard of, these workers are the central heart that pumps blood into the veins of the corporate global body by taking care of a house and family while their employers go to work. Domestic workers are represented disproportionately in upper-middle-income countries like Qatar and Thailand, which contain more than half of all total household workers.
Yet, despite the necessity of their services and the relative wealth of their employers, mistreatment of domestic workers is common. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 20% of all domestic workers “enjoy effective employment-related social security coverage.” Household labourers are also more likely to work long hours and are “commonly exposed to chemical, ergonomic, physical, psychosocial, biological hazards and are especially vulnerable to violence and harassment.”
The treatment of many household workers is so abusive that advocacy groups often categorize their situations as “domestic slavery.” Channel 4 News documented a group of volunteers, Voice of Domestic Workers, who have rescued over 220 individuals from some of London’s wealthiest areas over the last five years. Workers were snuck out in the middle of the night or even disguised to escape their employers. One Voice of Domestic Workers volunteer told Channel 4 that “[we are] their last option to escape from that hell,” while one rescued worker expressed that “the fear is still in [their] heart, but now [they’re] happy because [they] came out of a [difficult] situation.”
The main reason conditions in domestic work are poor is that employment arrangements are often informal. As a result, domestic workers get denied social security and benefits typically offered in formal employment. Discriminatory cultural and gender beliefs, lack of accurate information and knowledge about social security, the low bargaining power of informal domestic workers, and the low capacity for labour inspection in this sector also contribute to the lack of protections and governments’ hesitancy to implement them.
Formalization and the JHWU
In recent years, governments and advocacy groups have taken positive steps to protect the human rights of household workers and formalize their employment. The ILO introduced the Domestic Workers Convention in 2010, which became legally enforceable in 2013. The Worker’s Convention succeeded in implementing comprehensive “minimum wages, rest days, paid holidays, written contracts, access to labour courts, and collective bargaining agreements” legislation in many countries.
However, only 36 countries have ratified the convention after being introduced ten years ago, and regions where workers’ rights breaches are the most extreme, such as Asia and the Middle East, remain severely underrepresented in ratification.
Where governments are lacking in implementation of these protections, domestic workers are taking it upon themselves to organize their safety. Enter the Jamaica Household Worker’s Union (JHWU), established in 1991 and one of the first of its kind in the Caribbean. Despite a membership of just 7,280 members out of an estimated 56,000 domestic workers in Jamaica, the women-led union has single-handedly made groundbreaking steps in pushing for protective legislation and informing household workers of their rights.
For instance, the JHWU pushed for the Jamaican government’s ratification of the ILO’s convention in 2016, only three years after being introduced. The JHWU was also a key, persistent negotiator in the fight to raise the national minimum wage, which resulted in an increase of 44% — from JMD 9,000 (CAD 79) to JMD 13,000 (CAD 114) per week in June of 2023.
Furthermore, the JHWU played an integral role in the construction and passing of the Sexual Harassment (Protection and Prevention) Act of 2021, which specifically addressed abuse in the workplace, which Jamaican media dubbed the “silent epidemic” of domestic workers. The legislation provides a preventative framework for policy moving forward, offering a channel for workers to report abuse under police protection to lessen fears of employer retaliation and provides access to counselling services.
The JHWU has also provided frameworks for domestic workers to play a more active role in Jamaica’s economy and help secure their members’ financial futures. In 2022, the JHWU succeeded in securing distinct commemoration for domestic workers in Jamaica’s National Insurance Scheme (NIS), in which workers pay a small fee to the government in exchange for a retirement pension, health insurance, and maternity allowance usually excluded in informal work arrangements. The President of the JHWU, Shirley Pryce, collaborated with the ILO to hold workshops nationwide to educate as many household workers as possible about registering and contributing to NIS.
Relative to its Caribbean neighbours, Jamaica is steadily progressing towards making decent work a reality for domestic workers — mainly due to the efforts of the JHWU. Because of their persistence, improved work standards are keystones of the social justice and gender equality pillars in Jamaica’s national development plan, Vision 2030 Jamaica. Vision 2030 integrates the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which supports formalizing work as part of its sustainable and inclusive growth and decent work goals.
Barriers to Unionization
The road to fully formalized and protected domestic work remains long and complicated, and the challenges on the path to unionization are unique in each country and region. However, one of the biggest obstacles is the nature of domestic work itself. Rather than a storefront, office, or warehouse, where groups of workers meet daily and thus have an opportunity to organize collectively, household work takes place in private, inherently contradicting physical spaces to facilitate unionization. Coupled with long hours and fear of potential retribution by employers, forming a network with other workers becomes extremely difficult.
Furthermore, because of the historical diminishing of “women’s work” — such as cleaning, childcare, and cooking — despite its necessity, domestic workers are often unaware that they possess labour rights. Urmila Boola, a UN expert on contemporary slavery, offers that “domestic work is not considered as ‘real work’ due to underlying social norms or discriminatory attitudes, particularly if migrant domestic workers are also members of marginalized communities such as Indigenous or caste-affected groups.”
Most domestic workers come from impoverished and underdeveloped countries, and many migrate to foreign countries with different languages and legal processes, which makes advocating for themselves intimidating or impossible. Moreover, many countries like Canada, Lebanon, and the UAE have sponsorship programs in place which directly tie domestic worker employers to their path of permanent residency, creating opportunities for widespread abuse. However, these visa systems are profitable and give countries little reason to enact reforms that might prevent abuse. Many domestic workers will endure these abuses in the hopes of achieving a better life for themselves and their families, feeling that the potential personal risks of unionization are too great.
Strength in Numbers
However, the tides are slowly turning in favour of this invisible sector. Once considered an “unorganizable” workforce, the ever-increasing spread of information and communication through technology — and the dogged determination of groups like the ILO — have created more improvements for domestic workers in the last ten years than ever before. While still few and far between, unions like JHWU are proving that an organization of domestic workers is effective.
More than 40% of domestic workers are in Asia, where barriers to unionization are often considered the greatest because of the extreme normalization of low payment and mistreatment of domestic workers. However, trailblazers are paving the way forward. In 2009, Phobsuk Gasing founded the Thai Domestic Workers Union to organize with the International Domestic Workers Federation, which includes more than 500,000 members in 54 countries. Gasing’s union achieved Hong Kong’s ratification of the ILO Convention, gaining local insurance, standard wages, and contracts for domestic workers: “When we unite them [and] when they are together”, said Gasing, “they have visibility. They have the strength, courage, and power to speak out and demand their rights.”
With unions gaining membership and political sway in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong, more countries are becoming pressured to ratify the ILO’s convention and construct protective legislation. For all domestic workers to receive decent and formal work, public perception must first shift towards acknowledging household labour as legitimate work.
Their plights, with their hopes and dreams, must be brought out of the darkness and into the light.
Edited by Chelsea Bean and Anthony Hablak
