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Abstract
The post-apartheid South African state has launched one of the most extensive efforts anywhere in the world to protect domestic workers, giving them for the first time in South African history a political status, and the right to organise into trade unions. But the implications of democratisation for domestic worker unionisation have been relatively under-explored. Through a qualitative examination of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU), this article shows that domestic workers have been demobilised and depoliticised by the democratic state. The availability of an extended post-apartheid state apparatus for the protection of domestic workers has obfuscated the necessity for domestic workers to join a union, leading (in combination with the continuation of the historical limits to domestic worker unionisation) to declining union density in the sector. But the article also argues that the post-apartheid political inclusion of domestic workers through their construction as ‘vulnerable’ has positioned the state as the articulator, representative, and protector of domestic workers' collective interests in ways that have displaced the union in these roles, and depoliticised it. Combined with the union's strategic facilitation of this substitution of its functions by the state, this article argues that domestic workers have been demobilised and depoliticised, paradoxically, by the very efforts of the post-apartheid state to enhance their political capacities.
Notes
1. The official estimate for the paid domestic work sector, reported by the Labour Force Survey in September 2006, was 886,000.
2. Domestic workers as a single category of employment represented 6.9 per cent of the total South African workforce, according to the Labour Force Survey of September 2006.
3. The new Labour Relations Act (1996), and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (1997).
4. Sectoral Determination 7: Domestic Worker Sector (2002).
5. While the union's national office was located in Cape Town, the availability of support from COSATU in the same building, as well as processes described in this article of invitations by government going through the national office made the Cape Town office relatively anomalous compared to other offices of the union in the country. The Johannesburg branch, based in the largest metropolitan area in the country, with the most dense concentration of domestic workers, and representative of the national profile of domestic workers in the country, therefore remained instructive for researching the routine functions of the union in the sector.
6. Unemployment Insurance Fund.
7. South African Domestic Workers Association (SADWA), the Western Cape-based Domestic Workers Association (DWA), and the Natal-based National Domestic Workers Association (NDWA), the Port Elizabeth Domestic Workers Union (PEDWU) and the East London Domestic Workers Union (ELDWU).
8. Note that this is a relative assertion, in that the union for domestic workers was always weak compared to other sections of the working class. But relative to the history of domestic worker unionisation, SADWU was vital and strong.
9. South African Domestic Workers Booklet: Fighting for Our Rights (nd), published by Community Resource Information Center.
10. Membership records at the Johannesburg office in 2004 indicated a total union membership nationally of no more than 9,000.
11. The Labour Force Surveys of 2000 to 2003 indicate fairly consistent ratios of approximately 1 per cent union density in the sector, but with a workforce of nearly one million, the percentage proportion is too small to evaluate change over time. The membership database for the national union obtained through the Johannesburg office indicated a total membership of approximately 11,000 in 2001. With only 9,000 members in 2004, organisational records indicated a declining membership.
12. The union was able to sustain one phone and fax line, as well as a few pieces of office furniture, and some stationery. Beyond that, the union did not have much resources.
13. None of the union officials at the Johannesburg office received any salaries, and only intermittently received transportation money to sustain their efforts.
14. Hertz Citation(2004), in an econometric analysis using the same Labour Force Survey, showed that wages in September 2003 were 23 per cent higher than in September 2002, while for similar workers in other occupations, the nominal wage increase was less than 5 per cent. My own analysis of the Labour Force Survey (Statistics SA 2003) shows that the percentage of workers earning between R1 and R500 fell noticeably from 67.3 per cent in September 2002 to 33.6 per cent in September 2006, while the proportion earning between R501 and R1000 increased dramatically from 26.6 per cent to 43 per cent. At the same time, the labour relations system also formally improved. An analysis of Labour Force Survey data showed a remarkable change in just over a year and a half in the proportion of domestic workers reportedly having a written contract with their employers. While only 7 per cent of workers had a written contract of employment in February 2002, that figure had more than trebled to 25 per cent by September 2003.
15. A pension fund had been an important demand for SADWU, but was only realised in September 2007 when a pension scheme was established through a private–public partnership.
16. According to the Labour Force Survey of 2003, in that year, the vast majority (89.1 per cent) of domestic workers earned less than R1,000 per month, and almost half (47.3 per cent) earned less than R500 per month.
17. According to the Labour Force Survey, in 2003, 75 per cent of domestic workers still did not have a written contract of employment.
18. While Kenny Citation(2004) uses this term to describe the demobilisation of retail workers on the East Rand in the 1990s, it is useful to describe the trajectory of a broader range of worker categories in post-apartheid South Africa.
19. The protection of ‘vulnerable workers’ is considered one of the central tenets of the Ministry's policies and efforts in general, and includes other workers as well, such as farm workers and wholesale and retail workers. While many of these other categories of workers were subject to the same processes designated for ‘vulnerable workers’, the extent to which such efforts eventually displaced the union in the domestics sector is related to the relative weakness of the union. It is presumed that where the union was stronger, e.g. retail, these same state processes could have different implications for the union.
20. In the union's participation in the establishment of a state-supported pension fund, a similar process was evident. The state had already initiated a set of investigations into the possibility of establishing a pension fund for domestic workers, which ‘consulted’ with the union. A state formation, the Presidential Working Group on Women, then established the fund with the union as ‘stakeholder’. The union therefore did not function as the primary advocate of domestic workers in an initiating role.
21. The Presidential Working Group on Women established the state-supported pension fund for domestic workers, but the process was initiated by other agencies of the state prior to the Group's consideration of it, and the union's invitation to join it. Many South African feminists remain sceptical of the Group's political potential.