* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
For decades, women’s rights advocates and their allies have been organizing for what the International Labor Organization (ILO) acknowledged in its recent Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers: domestic work as work and domestic workers as workers entitled to rights.
Following three years of policy development and negotiations, in June, the ILO, which consists of member governments, trade unions, worker associations and employer organizations, issued this first comprehensive set of global standards protecting domestic workers from exploitation and abuse.
According to Human Rights Watch, worldwide, at least 52 million – and more likely more than 100 million – domestic workers clean, cook and provide care to children, the elderly and people with disabilities. Because many women do this work without pay or with little compensation, it is not often regarded as work, an assumption that the Convention overturns.
More than 83% of all domestic workers are female, and a significant proportion of these females are girls. In many instances, female domestic workers enable the women of their households to take up paid employment outside the home.
Domestic workers face a wide range of abuses and exploitation including excessive working hours without rest, non-payment of wages, involuntary confinement, physical and sexual abuse, forced labor and trafficking. Migrant domestic workers are particularly vulnerable because policies in certain countries link their immigration status to individual employers. These migrants face exorbitant recruitment fees, language barriers and employers’ confiscation of their passports.
The Convention lays out protections such as adequate rest hours during the workday and rest days during the week; caps on daily and weekly working hours; minimum wages; overtime compensation; and protection from violence and abuse.
Also, for the world’s girl domestic workers, the Convention stipulates a minimum acceptable age and mandates access to education.
Feminists are heralding the Convention as a turning point both practically and symbolically.
Practically, the Convention and its accompanying recommendations lay out policy guidelines for governments, employers and workers. Although not legally binding, governments that ratify the convention report annually to the ILO on how well they are achieving the guidelines and what progress has been made to date.
Employers are given guidelines for fair, safe working conditions. Workers’ rights groups, migrants’ rights groups, women’s rights groups and children’s rights groups can all use the Convention to advocate for and benchmark policy progress.
Symbolically, the Convention’s recognition of domestic work as work opens the door for much needed macroeconomic policy that acknowledges and accounts for care work.
Here are five reasons women’s rights advocates are excited about this recognition of domestic work:
1. The ILO’s recognition exposes the fallacy of the male breadwinner model - namely that there is a male head of household that works full time and a woman who is at home doing care work without compensation and can adjust her time and tasks with maximum flexibility. Many social institutions, including workplaces and schools, are built upon this model. Most of the world’s households, however, have never fit this model, but it’s been easy to assume that they do, pay men higher wages and expect women to fill all the gaps.
2. Proper quantification of and compensation of care work, including through fair wages, reaffirms how much time and energy actually go into care work and how societies cannot function without it. To the extent that care work gets done with women working behind closed doors, often for free or low pay, economies benefitting from it with little cost have never been forced to account for it in their overall provisioning.
3. For countries such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, who have focused heavily on fostering growth and relied heavily on immigrant domestic workers, having more regulations including minimum wages and worker protections for domestic workers forces a recognition that what was once considered a cheap, invisible social safety net that enabled growth “behind the scenes” is actually a sector of the economy, just like agriculture, manufacturing and services, that must be accounted for and supported for any type of growth or prosperity to continue.
4. For countries that have enjoyed an abundant, inexpensive immigrant labor supply to substitute for care work, raising wages and imparting worker protections highlights the lack of public services and public coordination of care in these countries. As global geopolitics shifts, migration patterns change and migrants gain more rights, these inexpensive labor supplies will not be guaranteed, and governments will be forced to contend with long-neglected questions of care.
5. Finally, through this Convention, the assertion of the ILO as a multilateral body counters the weakness and ineffectiveness of other multilateral institutions, whose shortcomings have made it easy for some countries to offload their labor-related negative ‘externalities’ to other countries. To the extent that ILO members can work together for ratification, adherence to and implementation of this Convention, it will not only serve domestic workers but also could potentially contribute to reshape global governance patterns.
Finally, for the millions of women and men who clean the world’s homes and hotels, and care for their residents, rights are recognized and protected. And let’s hope that rights for them reshape the conversation in national parliaments and at international governance tables, decreasing discrimination and inequality against these sectors and building a more just society for all.
Masum Momaya and Kathambi Kinoti contributed to research and writing.
