Domestics celebrating the approval of the convention concerning decent work for domestic workers (Convention No. 189) at International Labour Organisation headquarters in Geneva in June 2011. Credit: ILO

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 16 2015 (IPS)

Her last two jobs left a bitter taste in the mouth of Yoloxochitl Solís, a 48-year-old single mother from Mexico. She sums up the experience in two words: abuse and discrimination.

“My employer would throw the food and medicine back in my face,” Solís told IPS. “She started to be rude to me, because she didn’t like me to say hello to people who were visiting her, she wanted me to stay shut up in the kitchen – I couldn’t even go out to the bathroom.”

Solís, who raised her 24-year-old son on her own, and whose first name means “flower heart” in the Náhuatl indigenous tongue, worked from 2000 to 2005 in a home in Villa Olímpica, a middle-class neighbourhood on the south side of Mexico City, where she cleaned, cooked and took care of a woman in her eighties.

“The hostile way she treated me was really strange, because there was no reason for them to discriminate against anyone,” she said, talking about the elderly woman and her son, who was in his sixties.

She earned roughly 20 dollars a day, two of which paid for her one-hour commute to and from work every day. Her workdays were long, from Monday through Saturday, and the only benefit she received was a small annual bonus. Tired of the mistreatment, she finally quit.“Domestic workers are fired without justification, accused of theft, thrown in jail over accusations of all kinds just to avoid paying them, and suffer sexual harassment. They have no protection, and their work is not valued.” -- Marcelina Bautista

But her next job was even worse. She was recommended by a nephew, and began to look after a stroke victim who had two children, also in Villa Olímpica.

Theoretically her workday was from 8:30 to 15:00. “But I would leave as late as eight o’clock at night; there was always something to do, and even if I was ill, I couldn’t miss work.”

In March, Solís ended up sick in bed with a fever in her home in the poor neighbourhood of Magdalena Contreras, to the south of Mexico City. “They shouted at me, insulted me, wouldn’t listen,” she said. As a result, she quit the job she had since 2006.

Stories like hers are routine in Mexico, where domestic workers suffer discrimination, exploitative working conditions, sexual harassment and low wages, with little protection from the law.

Mexico has not yet ratified International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 189 concerning decent work for domestic workers, which was adopted in 2011 and went into effect two years later.

The binding convention, which Mexico signed in 2011, asserts that domestic workers are entitled to the same basic rights as other workers, including weekly days off, limits to hours of work, minimum wage coverage, overtime compensation, clear information on the terms and conditions of employment, freedom of association, collective bargaining, protection from abuse and harassment, formal contracts, social security coverage and maternity leave.

Convention 189 is accompanied by Recommendation 201, a non-binding instrument that provides practical guidance on possible legal measures to help enforce the rights and principles established in the convention.

The recommendation also addresses areas not covered by the convention, such as vocational training policies and programmes, international cooperation, and protection of the rights of domestic workers employed by diplomatic personnel.

“Domestic workers are fired without justification, accused of theft, thrown in jail over accusations of all kinds just to avoid paying them, and suffer sexual harassment,” said Marcelina Bautista, founder and director of the non-governmental Centre for Support and Training for Domestic Workers (CACEH).

“They have no protection, and their work is not valued,” Bautista, originally from the impoverished southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, told IPS.

Bautista, who is also the Latin America regional coordinator of the International Domestic Workers Federation, speaks from experience: she began to work as a domestic in Mexico City at the age of 14.

The abuse she experienced opened her eyes to the difficulties faced by domestics, and she returned to school with the aim of helping to improve conditions for maids.

CACEH receives three to five complaints a day, most of them involving unfair dismissal and discrimination, which are referred to a group of pro bono lawyers if they are not settled through dialogue. The Centre also offers advice to domestics about their rights, and runs a job placement programme.

The numbers tell the story

In the report “Labour Conditions of Domestic Workers”, published in April by the National Commission for the Prevention of Discrimination, stresses the classism, violence, racism and grievances suffered by domestics.

An estimated 2.3 million people, over 90 percent of them women, work as domestics in this Latin American country of 120 million people.

Domestics tend to have little formal schooling, are often paid under the table, have long workdays, and frequently inherit their positions from their mothers or other family members.

Based on surveys among domestics and their employers, the National Commission found that the main conflicts arose from false accusations of theft, searches of their belongings, verbal abuse including putdowns and insults, and even physical mistreatment.

Domestics interviewed complained that they had no social security coverage, were paid low wages and were mistreated, and that they had to do heavy and demanding work with no set working hours.

They also complained that their employers violated the terms of their contracts.

They said they had become domestics because they couldn’t afford to continue their studies and did not have other options.

The average age of the respondents was 35, while 28 percent were between the ages of 18 and 25, and five percent were minors.

Of those interviewed, 36 percent began to work between the legal working age of 15 and 18, and 21 percent started before turning 15.

In addition, 23 percent were indigenous, and of that portion, 33 percent had suffered derogatory treatment and 25 percent were prohibited from speaking their own language.

During the 104th Session of the ILO’s International Labour Conference, held Jun. 1-13 in Geneva, the Mexican government reported that it was studying how to reconcile Convention 189 and Recommendation 201 with the Federal Labour Law that was amended in 2012 without including the commitments assumed in Convention 189.

But the government did not meet the prior invitation by the ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations to send the text to the legislature as early as possible for ratification, in order for it to enter into effect.

The Latin American countries that have ratified the convention so far are Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay, according to the ILO.

Solís admitted that she had no idea there was an international convention that could protect her and other domestic workers. “It’s very important for us to be oriented about our work and our rights,” she said.

Bautista said it was difficult to raise awareness among decision-makers. The activist said Convention 189 was “fundamental because it is better than any national law. Furthermore, legislation must be brought into line with the convention; the laws do not protect domestic workers.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Paulina Nuza, Ernestina Ochoa and Petra Ermillo Martínez (left to right) discussing issues raised at the global congress of domestic workers in Montevideo. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

“We have come together to join forces, to be heard, because we want to speak for ourselves,” said Ernestina Ochoa, a Peruvian domestic worker, at the close of the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation in the Uruguayan capital.

Uruguay was chosen to host the Oct. 26-28 meeting because it was the first country to ratify Convention 189 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which establishes basic labour rights that the great majority of domestics around the world do not enjoy. The congress was attended by union leaders from more than 50 countries.

But even in Uruguay or other Latin American countries with ground-breaking national laws aimed at protecting domestic workers, enforcement is a major problem. And in Asia and the Middle East, the situation is much more critical.

“For many years only non-governmental organisations spoke for us, through studies and research…but we domestic employees and our unions have done the day-to-day hard slogging,” said Ochoa, vice president of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN), which changed its name to Federation at the congress.

“Now we have said ‘enough’s enough’, let’s found a large federation that unites us, let’s work together to organise ourselves, defend our rights, create unions, improve the laws and help countries where there are no laws, empower domestic workers, train leaders and have a voice vis-à-vis governments and employers,” she said in an interview with IPS.

The IDWN was founded after the first global congress of domestic workers was held in 2006 in Amsterdam. The umbrella organisation, which currently has member unions in 87 countries, was established to fight for the adoption of ILO Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C189), which went into effect in September.

Map of progress made by domestic workers. Credit: Courtesy of Human Rights Watch (click to enlarge)

At that time, Ochoa said, they had no idea how much they would grow. She said it had become necessary to create a federation to achieve independence, especially in negotiations with global institutions.

Progress has been made in many Latin American countries, such as Uruguay. But most countries in the world do not have legislation on domestic workers, the Peruvian trade unionist lamented.

C189 establishes “the first global standards for the more than 50 million domestic workers worldwide – the majority of whom are women and girls, and many of whom are migrants,” says the report “Claiming Rights: Domestic Workers’ Movements and Global Advances for Labour Reform”, presented at the congress in Montevideo.

“According to the ILO, almost 30 percent of the world’s domestic workers are employed in countries where they are completely excluded from national labour laws,” adds the study published jointly by the IDWN, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and Human Rights Watch.

The report says live-in domestic workers, girls and migrants face a heightened risk of abuse. And while child labour declined in other sectors, child domestic labour actually grew by nine percent from 2008 to 2012.

Nisha Varia, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said change was slow in Asia and the Middle East.

And she told IPS that while advances have been made in Latin America, the challenge in this region is in translating the new legislation into actual improvements in the lives of domestic workers.

The basic rights established by the C189 include weekly days off, limits to hours of work, a minimum wage, overtime compensation, and social security.

So far, C189 has been ratified by Bolivia, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa and Uruguay.

The report also notes that the Philippines, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Spain and Venezuela, which have not yet ratified the convention, adopted labour reforms that protect domestic workers.

Graciela Espinoza, with the Uruguayan union of domestic workers, STUD, said “we still have to put our house in order,” referring to her country, despite the adoption of a law on domestic labour, the ratification of C189, and three collective bargaining agreements negotiated with employers.

“There have been many improvements,” Espinoza told IPS. “But there are still domestics who are not officially recognised as workers, and until they are, we have to continue fighting.

“The day society as a whole recognises our work as domestic employees will be the day when we can say: we have reached one goal, now we have to move on towards the next.”

The trade unionist said the most significant changes have been seen since 2006, when a law on domestic labour went into effect, and especially in 2008, when the first national collective bargaining agreement was signed. “That was when the revolution happened in Uruguay,” Espinoza said.

The proportion of domestic workers registered in Uruguay’s social security system climbed from 32 percent in 2004 to 66 percent today. And over half of the registered domestics have labour accident insurance.

Her colleague Lucía Gándara said that “even though Uruguay was the first to ratify C189, rights here are violated, including the right to organise,” which protects labour activists from being fired or abused by their employers because of their trade union activity.

“Domestic workers who form part of the STUD secretariat cannot attend meetings if they are held during their working hours, because they are fired,” Gándara said.

As Espinoza explained, “we work in isolation from each other, a situation that works against us as a union; for example we cannot carry out an occupation of a building – we can’t occupy a family’s house – as a protest measure.”

“The most we can do is explain to the employer the rights and duties of domestics, and that’s what we’re doing. In these cases, the domestics sometimes continue working, and in others they’re fired,” she said.

Despite the lingering problems faced by domestics here, Paulina Nuza, a member of Peru’s Training Centre for Domestic Workers (CCTH), told IPS that “Uruguay is a model.”

“Domestic workers in Peru do not earn decent wages and do not have the same conditions as other workers,” she said. “Although there is a gender equality plan that says that 50 percent of the one million domestic workers in the country are to be insured by 2017, not even six percent of us are currently insured.”