 |
| A female domestic worker in the time of my grandmother around 1900. You could always recognize domestic workers on their cloths and of course the basket for groceries. I found this photograph in the photo album of my grandmother. Probably she was my grandmother's friend. |
When she was young, my grandmother on
father's side served as a domestic worker. It was a humiliating
experience but there was no other way to gain some income for her
poor family. My mother in law was also a domestic worker when she was
young. Her family was also very poor. However, she had good memories
of the time she worked as a domestic worker.
For the first time I learned more about
domestic workers during our stay in Colombia. First in the flat of
father Rosier who was travelling abroad. She was a sweet older woman
who did her best to make our lives as nice as possible. Later on we
stayed for a few months in a flat of a Colombian friend who was also
travelling abroad. The domestic worker was a very young woman.
Although we had only one domestic worker in our flat we had the
feeling to belong to an old aristocratic English family like you see
in the television series 'Dowton Abbey'.
As we grew up in a more or less
egalitarian Dutch society with little class differences, me and my
wife felt uncomfortable with a domestic worker in our house. We also
had the feeling that we had no privacy anymore. It was a strange
experience to eat in the sittingroom while the domestic worker was
eating in the kitchen. We decided to invite the domestic worker to
eat together with us, to share the same table. We then learned that
this created an uneasy situation for the domestic worker. That's why
we decided not to have anymore domestic workers in our house during
our stay in Mexico and Costa Rica. In stead we hired somebody, to
clean the house a few times a week.
We learned that wage and labour
conditions for domestic workers are on a minimum level like for
example a wage lower than the official minimum wage and not one day
off or one day off per week. Everything depends from the family she
is working for. Is it a nice and understandingly family or are they
using the domestic worker as a kind of slave without no or little
payment and no free days? In Indonesia I heard about the bad
conditions and the abuses of Indonesian domestic workers who had
migrated to the oil rich Arab countries with the aim to earn money
for their family that stayed in Indonesia.
Brazil
Therefore it was very good news to read
that a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for
domestic workers in Brazil has come into force on 2 April. “Manuela
Tomei, Director of the ILO’sConditions of Work and Equality Department, welcomed the vote in
the Brazilian Senate, which was passed unanimously at the end of
March after being approved in the lower house.
“With the passing of this law, so
culminates Brazil’s process of recognizing the dignity and value of
domestic work and domestic workers, who are to a large extent black
women - a process which began in 1998 when, for the first time, the
Constitution included a number of important labour guarantees for
these workers. Today's Senate decision is one additional step towards
narrowing the historical divide between the richest and "whiter"
stratum of society and the poorest and "darker" lower end
of the social ladder,” Tomei said.
It is particularly significant given
the dramatic rise in the numbers of domestic workers in Brazil over
the last few years – from 5.1 million to 6.6 million between 1995
and 2011. 17 per cent of all jobs for women are in the domestic work
sector. Latin America is one of the world’s fastest growing regions
in the domestic work sector.”
Global momentum
The IlO believes that because of the
approval of ILO Convention 189 and recommendation 201 in 2011 has
sparked a global momentum on labour legislation of domestic workers:
“Argentina
also passed a bill in March, which limits working hours and ensures
paid annual and maternity leave for domestic workers. The Indian
Parliament included domestic workers in legislation to eradicate
sexual harassment at work, which was passed last February.
Since
the Convention’s adoption, a total of nine countries have passed
new laws or regulations improving domestic workers’ labour and
social rights, including Venezuela, Bahrain, the Philippines,
Thailand, Spain and Singapore. Legislative reforms have also begun in
Finland, Namibia, Chile and the United States, among others.
So
far four countries have ratified ILO Convention 189 – Uruguay,
Philippines, Mauritius and Italy. Several others have initiated the
process of ratification, including South Africa, Costa Rica and
Germany.
The
European Commission is also pressing EU countries to implement the
ILO Convention and has called for safeguards to protect young
domestic workers.
| Facts and figures on domestic workers | |
|---|---|
| Worldwide | By region |
According
to an ILO study from January 2013, entitled Domestic
Workers Across the World,
at least 52 million people around the world – mainly women – are
employed as domestic workers. At the time of the research, only ten
per cent were covered by general labour legislation to the same
extent as other workers. More than one quarter were completely
excluded from national labour legislation.
ILO
legal specialist on working conditions, Martin Oelz, said that the
signs are encouraging: “The Convention and Recommendation on
domestic workers have effectively started to play their role as
catalysts for change. Giving social dialogue a central place, these
global minimum standards now serve as a starting point for devising
new polices in a growing number of countries.”
The above italicized text, the map and the worldwide facts are coming from the ILO website.
No comments:
Post a Comment