Domestic worker

• 1. Introduction

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  Domestic workers number at least 67.1 million people worldwide, according to estimates by the International Labour Organization, and experts believe the true figure may reach 100 million. The gap between those two numbers tells you something important: the work happens behind closed doors, away from official records, and often beyond the reach of labor law.

  Who are these workers? What legal rights, if any, protect them? Why does the demand for paid household help persist, and even grow, in the modern world? And why do the people who do this work, most of them women, so often find themselves among the most vulnerable in any country's workforce?

  The answers reach back through centuries of domestic service, from the rigidly structured households of Edwardian England to the harrowing conditions faced by child workers in Bangladesh and Pakistan today. They run through the American civil rights era, the migrant corridors stretching from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, and the landmark international convention that recognized domestic workers as workers with the same rights as everyone else. That recognition came in 2011. The gap between recognition and reality, however, remains wide.

• 2. A Long History of Service

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  Britain's Master and Servant Act of 1823 was the first law of its kind, and its very name reveals the relationship it encoded. The Act influenced similar legislation in other nations, yet those laws typically favored employers over the people they employed. Before such statutes existed, servants had no legal protection at all. The only material advantage domestic service offered was food, lodging, and sometimes clothing, plus a modest wage.

  In Britain, this system grew enormously elaborate. The Victorian era saw domestic service reach a structural peak, and the Edwardian period that followed brought perhaps its most rigidly stratified form, a reflection of the limited social mobility that existed before World War I. Great country houses employed workers in strict hierarchies, each role precisely defined. The lord of the manor hired a butler to manage the household staff beneath him; below that came footmen, parlour maids, scullery maids, kitchen maids, and a long train of specialized positions.

  Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the Parisian version in his Tableau de Paris. He wrote that "an army of useless servants is kept entirely for show", and that their presence in the capital had left the countryside noticeably empty. A tax-farmer's household, he observed, maintained 24 servants in livery, plus scullions, kitchen maids, and six lady's maids. Some lackeys adopted the manners of their masters and dressed in a similar style.

  In England, the degree of supervision servants faced was extreme. Mistresses enforced a "no followers" rule, banning servants from meeting men while off duty. The servant and writer Margaret Powell described "follower" as a degrading term. The only way a servant could meet someone was to slip out to the road under a pretense, such as needing to post a letter.

• 3. Women at the Center

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  Eighty-three percent of all domestic workers are women, the International Labour Organization reports, and that figure has held true across regions and centuries. In the United States after the Civil War ended legally in 1865, formerly enslaved women found that domestic service was, in practice, one of the only occupations open to them. The Freedmen's Bureau informed freedpeople that they must either sign labor contracts with white planters or face eviction from land they had lived on.

  African American women who moved north to seek better wages encountered a different, but parallel, set of restrictions. Before World War I, domestic service was essentially the only occupation open to Black women in either region. These workers were commonly viewed, in the language of the time, as childlike beings ignorant of the world around them. Yet the practical reality was that their labor sustained entire households and their wages supported their own families.

  One practice, called "pan toting" or the "service pan", illustrates the informal economy that grew up around domestic work. African American servants in households such as those in Athens, Georgia, regularly took food scraps and discarded clothing from their employers. A survey from 1913 found this happened in almost two-thirds of employers' households in that city. Employers used the practice to justify lower wages; workers used it to compensate for what those wages could not cover. White commentators then cited pan toting as evidence of supposed Black dishonesty, using it to reinforce racial stereotypes and excuse racist paternalism.

  During the Great Depression, domestic workers lost jobs at high rates as white families could no longer afford to pay them. Many house-jumped, knocking on doors to find any cleaning work available. Those who remained employed faced wages that dropped even further and workdays that stretched to 18 hours. Agricultural workers and Black women domestic workers were explicitly excluded from Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act under New Deal legislation. Domestic workers of all races were not included in Social Security coverage until 1950.

• 4. Civil Rights From the Kitchen

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  Nearly ninety percent of Southern African American women worked as domestic workers during the Civil Rights Movement era. Their role in that movement went largely undocumented at the time, yet historians have since noted that Southern African American women were, in the words recorded about them, "the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement."

  Because white households depended on these workers, domestic workers held a form of leverage that went largely unacknowledged. They boycotted buses. They attempted to register to vote, and many were denied and imprisoned. Inside jails, domestic workers used the time to educate other African American women about the movement and how to participate.

  They also resisted in quieter ways. One was to refuse to live in the employer's home, a practice that had been standard and had kept domestic workers under round-the-clock control. By insisting on returning to their own homes at the end of a workday, these women drew a clear boundary between employment and personhood. That shift helped transform the structure of domestic service and opened space for collective organizations that pushed for better wages, better treatment, and basic respect.

• 5. Migration and Global Demand

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  The flow of domestic workers from poorer nations to wealthier ones has become one of the defining patterns of the global labor market. In Hong Kong, approximately five percent of the entire population consists of foreign domestic workers, and roughly 98.5 percent of those workers are women. Most come from the Philippines and Indonesia, working on specific visa categories that exempt their employers from many of the obligations that apply to other workers.

  In Saudi Arabia, a 2008 Human Rights Watch report cited official figures of around 1.2 million household workers. The country employed an estimated 600,000 domestic workers from Indonesia, 275,000 from Sri Lanka, and 200,000 from the Philippines. The same report documented a range of abuses these workers faced, and Saudi officials interviewed acknowledged the problem. Kenya alone reported 274 deaths of its domestic workers in the Kingdom over a five-year period, with 55 deaths in a single year.

  Singapore had approximately 255,800 foreign domestic workers as of June 2019, according to the Ministry of Manpower. The government began the Foreign Maid Scheme in 1978, drawing workers from Malaysia, Bangladesh, Burma, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Nearly one in five Singapore households employs a domestic worker, a rate tied to rising household incomes, dual-income families, and an aging population.

  This migration pattern creates what some academics have called a cycle: women in wealthier countries take on paid employment outside the home, generating demand for someone to care for their children and households. That demand is met primarily by migrant women from poorer countries, who leave their own families and children behind. The liberation of one group can depend on the labor of another.

• 6. Children in Domestic Labor

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  More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than in any other category of child labor worldwide. The practice has a particular form in Haiti, where it is called "restavek", a word that names children sent by rural parents to live with urban households in exchange for schooling and shelter. In reality, UNICEF identifies domestic work as one of the lowest-status forms of child labor, and most child domestic workers are live-in workers who remain under the round-the-clock control of their employers.

  Globally, at least 10 million children work in domestic labor jobs. In Pakistan alone, between January 2010 and December 2013-52 cases of torture inflicted on child domestic workers were reported, including 24 deaths.

  The International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour identified a list of specific risks these children face: long and exhausting working days; exposure to toxic cleaning chemicals; carrying heavy loads; handling knives, axes, and hot pans; inadequate food and shelter; and humiliating or violent treatment including physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Access to education, the very thing that rural parents often believe they are trading their child's labor to secure, is frequently denied.

• 7. Law on Paper, Life in Practice

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  In July 2011, delegates at the International Labour Conference adopted the Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers by a vote of 396 to 16, with 63 abstentions. The convention formally recognized domestic workers as workers entitled to the same rights as anyone else. Uruguay was the first country to ratify it, on the 26th of April 2012.

  South Africa ratified the same convention in 2013, classifying domestic work as formal labor and entitling workers to contracts, wages, and social protection. Yet South Africa also set the minimum wage for domestic workers at 75 percent of the national minimum wage, a structural inequality written into the law itself.

  In the United States, domestic workers remain broadly excluded from the National Labor Relations Act and from many other protections that cover other categories of workers. Only thirteen percent have health insurance provided by their employers. A report from the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that nearly a quarter of nannies, caregivers, and home health workers earn less than the minimum wage in their states, and nearly 48 percent earn less than the amount needed to support a family. In recent years, advocacy from groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Domestic Workers United has resulted in a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passing in New York, Hawaii, California, and Illinois.

  In Tanzania, domestic workers known locally as "BekiTatu" earn an average of roughly 50,000 Tanzanian shillings, equivalent to nearly 20 US dollars, with no union or collective association to represent them. The contrast with Guatemala is stark in a different direction: Guatemalan labor law explicitly states that domestic work is "not subject to schedules or limitations of working day", although workers are legally entitled to ten hours of free time in 24 hours, a minimum that is routinely disregarded. In India, as of 2024, the Supreme Court disposed of a petition by the NGO Common Cause without resolution, leaving domestic workers there still without a dedicated safety or social security law.