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AUG/SEPT 2014 • www.cosatu.org.za

The domestic worker in history Article from New Nation | New History vol.1

T he domestic workers who cook, clean and care for children in most white households today are almost all women. The work they do is often thought of as “women’s work”. Many people do not think that work done in households is as important as the labour done in other jobs. Employers of domestic workers pay them miserable wages because they think the work is done for “love” or because the domestic worker is “part of the family”. The state does not provide protective laws for domestic workers – there are no minimum wages, maximum hours of work, pension provisions, unemployment bene fi ts or holiday, maternity or sick leave provisions. And domestic workers have found it dif fi cult to organise themselves into trade unions to fi ght for their rights. How did this situation come to being, what is it like to be a domestic worker and how are domestic workers today trying to improve their positions? The argument that domestic work is women’s work is not true. In the early part of the century, most domestic workers were men. While many women still remained in the country, black men in the city found they could earn a little in the white homes. Some found it humiliating to do work they thought too “feminine” for them, but it was a means of earning money. These black men inside white homes often had to

of work that they do has perhaps made the racism of their employers harder to bear. For many domestic workers, it becomes unbearably hard to feel that they are good enough to care for the children of their employers, to cook, clean and wash for them, but that they are not good enough to eat from the same plates. Often domestic workers have remained loyal to their employers in spite of these problems. The relationship in these cases resembles that of house slaves to their masters in the time of black slavery in the American South. In Britain, domestic servants were often very isolated from one another. But here in South Africa this isolation is less severe. The rich suburbs, which may seem to contain only whites, actually contained a rich underworld of cultural and social activities that domestic workers create. So it would be wrong to see domestic workers simply as victims of oppression without understanding the world they have built for themselves. An important form of social activity has been the suburban shebeen. Often employers don’t even know that it exists. Many domestic workers have supplemented their wages by brewing or buying liquor and selling it in their backyard rooms to people in the area. They have also provided a social network foe many a lonely woman in the suburbs. An enormous number of churches, sects and religious groupings

do work which was of personal nature, such as making beds and washing clothes. This created lots of tension between black and white, some of it sexual. As mines and industries expanded during the 1920’s and 1930’s and needed more labour, more black men moved out of domestic work. At the same time, more and more black women were moving into the cities and starting to replace men as domestic workers. Many of them had been to mission schools where they had been “educated for domesticity”. They have been taught Western ways and told that domestic work was a suitable occupation for women. For many newcomers to the city, working in the kitchens provided a way into the city life. It ensured accommodation, even if it was a dark, miserable room in someone’s backyard. It protected young girls against some of the harsher aspects of township and slumyard life. “Home girl” To get the job, many of them used the “home girl” contacts. “My friend was working in Parktown in 1924” said one woman, so I asked her to fi nd me a job and a place to stay. Some backyard rooms would have three to four young women in them. Domestic workers experiences have been unlike those workers in any other part of our society. The personal kind

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