The employment relationship in the domestic workspace in South Africa: beyond the apartheid legacy

Abstract

Employing more than one million people, domestic service is one of the largest sources of employment for black women in South Africa. In this article, we contend that, historically, the impact of apartheid has been to skew the analysis of employment relationships in domestic workspaces in South Africa so that the power asymmetry and exploitation that so characterise these relationships have been labelled an artefact of the racist apartheid regime and its legislation. By reviewing literature on domestic workers globally and drawing on a study into the impact of the Sectoral Determination for the Domestic Worker Sector, which was promulgated in 2002, we argue for a broader understanding of this relationship: one that takes into consideration its global similarities.

Keywords:

• domestic workers
• employment relationship
• South Africa
• legislation
• domestic employment

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Dr Shireen Ally at the University of the Witwatersrand for her encouragement and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. The four racial categories – African, Coloured, Indian and White – were inherited from apartheid and refer to people of indigenous African ancestry, mixed ancestry, continental Indian ancestry and European ancestry, respectively. The term ‘Black’ refers to Africans, Coloureds and Indians collectively. These terms are used for official purposes and, with some variation, in popular discourse. In this paper, they have been used with initial capitals to indicate that these are categories rather than real groups of people.

2. In 2007, the Determination specified the minimum wage that employers had to pay domestic workers as follows:

3. The same could be said of labour that is unskilled, casual and difficult to organise, and a comparison of working conditions in these environments might be an instructive area for further research.