Economy & Trade, Gender, Headlines, Human Rights, Labour, Latin America & the Caribbean

LABOUR-BRAZIL: Slow Improvement for Domestic Workers

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 4 2006 (IPS) - Most of them are women of African descent. They earn barely 35 percent of the average wage, and only one-third have a proper contract. But according to the latest statistics, domestic workers in Brazil today are slightly better off than they were a few years ago.

There has been some improvement, “but it’s a very slow process, because there are no workplace inspections in what is construed as a private living space,” the president of the National Federation of Domestic Workers, Creusa Maria Oliveira, told IPS.

“We need to change the mentality of employers, and also that of employees so that they insist on their legal rights,” she added.

Nearly two-thirds (65.6 percent) of domestic workers do not have a proper employment contract, and are thus excluded from pension schemes, health insurance and other benefits and rights.

In this employment category, 94.3 percent are women, and 61.8 percent are black or mulatto, so the low wages domestic workers are paid contribute to depressing income among women and black people generally.

The most pronounced gain has been in the number of years of schooling these workers have received, which rose from an average of 5.4 years in 2002, to 5.9 years this March.

Today, 64 percent of domestic workers have less than eight years of formal education, seven percentage points less than in 2002, while the proportion who have completed secondary education rose from 9.3 to 14.2 percent in the intervening period.

These changes are due to the influx of young people into the labour market. “Domestic workers are mainly young women,” Oliveira explained.

National campaigns, backed by trade unions, are trying to persuade young people to go back to school, said the trade union leader, who herself returned to secondary school in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, at the age of 47.

The data compiled by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) is for the six main metropolitan regions in the country, where the labour market is assumed to be most highly developed and formalised. In those regions, there are a total of 1.6 million cooks, cleaners, childcare providers, chauffeurs, gardeners and other domestic service personnel.

Hildete Pereira de Melo, an economist at the Federal Universidade Fluminense and an expert on women’s work, estimated that there were some six million female domestic workers in Brazil as a whole, and said that domestic service had been the fastest-growing employment sector in the past decade.

According to the IBGE, women employed in private homes make up 8.l percent of the total working population, and 17.5 percent of the female workforce, in the six metropolitan regions.

The huge number of domestic workers is attributed to the enormous gap between rich and poor in Brazil, where affluent and middle-class families have historically enjoyed the luxury of hiring several “maids.” Even today, many houses and apartments contain “servants’ quarters.”

However, employer-worker relationships, which still had many of the hallmarks of slavery until a few decades ago, are changing. Gradually, the pattern of the “live-in maid” who was available for work virtually 24 hours a day, has faded away. Nowadays only 3.4 percent of domestic workers are in this situation, less than half the percentage of four years ago.

Oliveira also said wages in general have improved, especially for so-called “daily maids,” who work in different homes and are paid by the day. The downside in these cases is the informal nature of the work, the lack of employment stability and the lack of rights, she added.

The story of Madalena da Costa, 55, is an illustration. Born into a poor family and the daughter of a mulatto father, she began to work as a “domestic” in Belem, the capital of the northern state of Pará, at the age of 15. Twenty years later, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her partner and their seven-year-old daughter.

But shortly afterwards they separated, and she decided to give him custody of their daughter. “I couldn’t raise her alone in Rio de Janeiro. I was earning very little and I lived in my employers’ house,” she told IPS.

In recent years she has tried to get back in touch with her daughter, but has not succeeded.

Da Costa nearly always lived-in at the homes of her employers, until she became a “daily maid” 10 years ago. Instead of the minimum wage, she now earns more than double working just three days a week in three different homes, so she can afford to rent modest accommodation and pay pension contributions. She hopes to retire on a pension in six years’ time, and in the meanwhile she is looking for work for two more days a week.

Working on a daily basis is better, because she “earn(s) more, for a lot less trouble.” She also gets to know more people and can choose the best employers, she said.

“I am black and I have worked as a domestic worker all my life, since I was 10,” said Oliveira, who takes pride in her union activism which has opened the door for her to participate, for example, in the Fifth Congress of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Domestic Workers, held last week in Lima.

This year, Brazil’s domestic workers are celebrating the 70th anniversary of their trade union organisation, she pointed out.