Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Our new report on Domestic Workers across the world is actually
a new kind of report that for the first time
links estimates on the size of the domestic workers workforce
with the extent of legal protection that they enjoy under the laws of the countries
in which they live and work.
So we had to do basically two things:
First, to come up with a solid estimate of the number of domestic workers
and the global number figure that we have estimated is
52.6 million domestic workers.
Globally, with Latin America,
the Caribbean and Asia being the regions employing most domestic workers
followed by Africa, and Europe and the Arab region.
The second thing we had to do is to analyse the legal protection
that's available in the countries,
and then we correlated these two aspects together
and this leads us to very important conclusions
on the number of domestic workers in the world
and extent of legal protection they enjoy.
Domestic work has been absent for a very long time from public policy debates
and this is mainly the case because
domestic workers are employed by private individuals,
in private households,
they work for families and homes rather than for workplaces
such as factories or offices,
so for a long time, domestic workers were absent
from the debate on social of reforms and labour protection.
In response to this,
the International Labour Organization has adopted recently a new convention
and a new recommendation on decent work for domestic workers
and this report is actually a tool
to assist countries, governments, workers and employers' organizations
to consider and discuss ways and means of implementing these new instruments.
Legislations are a very important aspect of protecting human rights of workers.
In the case of domestic work, what is also important actually is
a broad based social dialogue about
the value and the importance of domestic work for society
and this is a very good starting point to discuss legal reforms.
If one looks at the most frequent gaps in the protection that we see,
we have two very important areas that are the protection of wages
including minimum wage coverage for domestic workers,
and the second aspect is the issue of working time.
Domestic workers are exposed often to very long and unpredictable working hours
which of course has implications for the quality of services,
for the quality of lives and health of domestic workers as well.
A third aspect that we are covering in our new report is maternity protection.
It is estimated that some 83% of the world's domestic workers are women,
and in our new report, we show that among these women,
roughly one third,
more than one third are still excluded from important measures for maternity protection
such as maternity leave and cash benefits during maternity leave.
This report is very timely
because we have new international instruments
that point to a particularly pressing problem.
Domestic work is growing and it is growing rapidly
so it's important that the protection gaps that we have,
that we address that situation with the determination required,
and also respond to this need for domestic work
by extending decent and fair working conditions to domestic workers.