BRAZIL: Domestic Workers Still Lagging in Labour Rights

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 7 1998 (IPS) - Some 4.8 million people are employed in domestic service in Brazil. Yet most of these workers do not enjoy the rights conquered by other workers decades ago.

This exclusion begins with their “invisibility” as professionals, as their work is not even regulated and the great majority — 82 percent — do not even have signed working contracts.

But this year, before the elections scheduled for October, the sector’s unions leaders expect the approval of a law that will reduce discrimination against them. It is a favourable moment, as many congressional representatives would like to capture at least part of the millions of votes that the sector represents.

For nine years, there has been a legislative proposal pending in Congress which, among other rights, extends to domestic employees the Labour Time Guarantee Fund, a benefit created three decades ago for the country’s workers.

This benefits comes in the form of a fourteenth monthly salary that businesses pay, and which is collected into a fund to which a worker has access once she or he retires, is fired or needs it to buy a house, for example.

The proposal faces difficulties, however, because it would also extend unemployment insurance to domestic workers. But without securing a financial source for those additional costs, that benefit is unconstitutional, said the Minister of Labour, Edward Amadeo.

The National Federation of Domestic Workers conceded to give up that demand, acknowledging that the main objective was to regulate their work and consolidate other rights.

Now, a solution is being sought, possibly through a presidential veto on that point, in order to push through the approval of the legislation, said Maria Goreti Aleixo, an expert at the Women’s Centre for Research and Consultation (CFEMEA), which is serving as an advisor in the parliamentary negotiations in favour of the proposal.

According to some economists, the legislation will not benefit domestic employees, because it will exacerbate the informal nature of the work and will lead to more dismissals. Very few domestic workers have contracts, and the middle class – the largest employer – is going through a tight financial period.

Nevertheless, it will be beneficial, said Hildete Pereira de Melo, the author of a study on the sector sponsored by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), an agency of the Ministry of Planning.

Any legal advances in this area are “good for society in general, which does consider domestic service professional work, even though it is paid for”, argued the economist. The important thing is to change the mentality of those workers.

Domestic services is one of the lowest-paid sectors, which has a concentration of women with no professional training. Of the 4.8 million people that are employed in the sector, only 350,000 are men, said Pereira de Melo.

It functions as an “entry point for young migrant women who leave their homes in the countryside and settle in the cities”. Construction work plays a similar role for men.

The domestic employee is practically an institution in Latin America. One in every five economically active women in the region works as a domestic. In Brazil, domestic workers represent 19 percent of economically active women.

Technology has made domestic work easier in the last decades, but domestics are still necessary as more women in the middle class have begun to work outside the home. In Brazil, the number of domestic workers increased from 3.5 million in 1985 to 4.8 million in 1995, according to IPEA.

But there has been a decline in traditional domestic workers who live in the houses of their employers for so many years that they come to be considered “members of the family”. In the big cities, the relationship tends to be more impersonal now.

Luzia de Souza Barros is a typical example of the survival of the old-style domestic worker. For the last 24 years, she has been working for Angela Freitas Mizarela, a pedagogy expert who has been working since she was young in schools and as a public official in Rio de Janeiro.

A typical migrant, 26 years ago Luzia left her rural life in Ipu, in the interior of the state of Ceara, in the northeast of Brazil, because “she dreamed of living in Rio de Janeiro”. She helped raise the family’s three children, and is proud that they call her “grandmother”.

Now, at 63 years old, she says she is satisfied with the treatment her employers gave her.

She has certain rights secured, such as one-month holiday, a yearly bonus, a room with a television and other comforts. Now retired for three years with a minimum salary of 130 reales (112) dollars), she still works and makes another 330 reales (284 dollars).

She will continue “to work until I can”, and she says that she is happy, but she also acknowledges that many of her colleagues “suffer, because they are paid too little, are discriminated against and sometimes are treated like slaves”.