Platform for Labour Action (PLA) is a National Civil Society Organization that was founded in the year 2000. PLA is focused on promoting and protecting the rights of vulnerable and marginalized workers through empowerment of communities and individuals in Uganda.
Lives impacted
years of service
A domestic worker is one who works in or for another person’s home. For a person to qualify as a domestic worker, he/she must be engaged in domestic work within an employment relationship. The term “employment relationship” excludes those persons from domestic work who;
However, workers employed for the cleaning of public and private buildings and any other above-mentioned activities are not domestic workers as domestic work is a household work and is usually performed within the boundaries of a house.
Domestic work is one of the oldest occupations for women in world history. It has links to slavery and various forms of servitude, including colonialism. It is an unregulated and undervalued activity because, in most of the countries, labour laws are not applicable to the domestic workers.
In a new convention adopted by ILO in June 2011 (c189), domestic work is defined as the “work performed in or for a household or households”. Domestic work is different from the care work performed by members of a household as part of a family responsibility and without creating an employment relationship.
Domestic work includes (in a household or households)
Domestic workers can be broadly divided into two categories i.e., live-in and live-out domestic workers. Live-in domestic workers are those who reside in the house where they perform their work while live-out workers live outside their place of work. The other categories are full time, part time, child domestic workers, bonded/forced labour, and migrant workers including au pair. It is pertinent to mention that domestic labour, in Asia and Africa, exists also in the form of child labour and bonded/forced labour. Moreover, the au pair, initially a cultural exchange program for young people, is also a type of migrant domestic worker arrangement.
