Domestic workers’ lived realities of empowerment and disempowerment within the South African labour legislative context: Two sides of the same “coin”

Abstract

South Africa is heralded as a global ambassador for the rights of domestic workers. Empowerment, however, remains an elusive concept within the sector. Fear-based disempowerment still characterises the employment relationship, resulting in an absence of an employee voice. The dire need to survive renders this sector silent. This article explores the role that legislative awareness can play in the everyday lives of domestic workers. By means of a post-positive, forwardlooking positive psychological and phenomenological research design the researchers sought to access the voiced experiences of domestic workers within their employment context. Consequently, purposive, respondent-driven selfsampling knowledgeable participants were recruited. In-depth interviewing generated the data. The distinct voice of each participant was noted during an open inductive approach to data analysis. Findings indicated that empowerment was an unknown construct for all participants. They lacked the confidence to engage their employers on employment issues. Nevertheless, domestic workers should embrace ownership and endeavour to empower themselves. This would sanction their right to assert their expectations of employment standards with confidence and use the judicial system to bring about compliant actions. The article concludes with the notion that legislative awareness could result in empowered actions though informed employee voices.

Maintaining the Status Quo through Repressed Silences: The Case of Paid Domestic Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa

“…Domestic labour is an uncomfortable relationship to participate in. The asymmetrical nature of the relationship is often displayed through unspoken boundaries, rules and resistance related to space (Dickey, 2000; Murray and Lambert, 2019), food (Archer, 2011) and in cases of possible confrontation and its avoidance (Marais and Van Wyk, 2015; Murray and Durrheim, 2019b). So much of this relationship is navigated in the realms of the ambiguous, the unspoken, the implied, the invisible and the silent (Archer, 2011; Murray and Durrheim, 2019b).…”