The Home Front
Black domestic workers say low wages and poor treatment are apartheid holdovers.

By David Gilson

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, March 30 — Until yesterday, Maggie worked as a live-in maid for a white family in Randberg, a suburb of Johannesburg. When she asked her employers for a raise, "They said black people are stupid and that I was trying to be clever." Then they locked her out of their house.

She and her one-year-old son Prince spent last night with friends, and this morning she came to the Department of Labour in downtown Johannesburg to get help. As Maggie explains her situation to a department inspector, her baby chews happily on a piece of cheese and throws his socks on the floor.

Domestic workers in South Africa often complain of low pay and long hours. Some, like Maggie, lose their jobs when they challenge their employers. Photo by David Gilson.

A weary-looking black woman in her forties, Maggie says she worked for her employers for three years. She was paid $46 a month to clean the house and wash clothes. Her employers often took in boarders but did not pay her for the extra work. She decided to take a chance and ask for more money.

Shortly after her employers refused her request, she took a week off to visit her five other children, who attend school outside the city. When she returned yesterday morning, her employers told her they were moving and that she was fired. They did not let her collect her clothing, furniture and food from her room in the back of the house.

"Everything I have is in the house," she says. "If my employer goes tonight, I lose my things."

Maggie is one of more than one million women who work as maids, cooks, nannies and house cleaners in South Africa. Six years after the end of apartheid, the daily lives of many domestic workers, have changed little. Like Maggie, they work long hours for little pay and risk losing their livelihood if they ask for fair wages or better treatment.

Almost all domestic workers are black women (some men work as gardeners, drivers and handymen). By some estimates, domestic work is the most common job for black women in South Africa. With unemployment rates for black women at close to 40 percent, domestic work remains one of the few career options for poor uneducated women.

In many ways, domestic labor is a microcosm of South African society, where the aspiring many and the privileged few live — sometimes literally — in each other's backyards. Now, as domestic workers lobby the government for a minimum wage and more legal protection, this sensitive subject is soon to be the center of a heated debate that highlights the divisions between blacks and whites in post-apartheid South Africa.

Breaking with the past
On a Sunday afternoon, organizers from the Cape Town chapter of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union meet in a small office in a community center. The nine women here say the poor treatment of domestic workers is an apartheid-era relic that has no place in democratic South Africa.

"For domestic workers the struggle is not over until there is action," says union member Adelaide Buso. "The book on apartheid has been closed, but there has been no funeral. We are the ones who can bury apartheid." As the daughter of one of the women serves tea, they sit and talk about their jobs and their efforts to organize the domestic workers in the neighborhoods where they work. The meeting officially begins with a prayer and a rousing cry of the old liberation slogan, "Amandla! Awethu!" ("The power! Is ours!").

Domestic labor in South Africa originated in the 17th century, when Dutch settlers enslaved African women as household servants. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, but many of its exploitative and abusive aspects persisted. Under apartheid, the government generally did not interfere in matters between "master and servant," leaving employers free to treat employees as they saw fit.

Domestic labor is one of the most common jobs for black South African women. Paulina Legodi learns dress-making at a skills training project in Johannesburg. Photo by David Gilson.

Since 1994, South Africa has scrapped the apartheid-era labor laws that denied domestics legal rights and left them with little recourse if they were mistreated. A wave of new legislation entitles full-time domestic workers to a 45-hour workweek, overtime pay, sick leave, maternity leave and two weeks of paid vacation every year. They now have the right to enter into a written contract with their employers and the right to file complaints against employers.

"The only thing that really changed was the laws on paper," says Myrtle Witbooi, a former domestic worker who is the union's main organizer in Cape Town. She says few employers follow the new laws because the government can do little to enforce them. The Department of Labour does not have enough inspectors to handle all complaints from domestic workers and they cannot enter employers' homes without a court order. "The employers make their own law," Witbooi says. "They exploit you so much more now."

The women say employers take advantage of them, often to the point where they have little time for themselves. They review a typical day's chores: make coffee, cook breakfast, dress the children, make beds, clean toilets, wash windows, scrub floors, feed the dog, buy groceries, wash and iron clothes, prepare and serve dinner, wash dishes, and so on. Those who work as live-in domestics say they only see their families on their days off.

Buso, who has long worked as a live-in domestic for the same family, produces a bank receipt for a $27 holiday bonus and passes it around the room. She laughs bitterly, "After fifteen years, this is what I get." She says she dares not ask for better wages or a written contract. If she were fired, her age and failing health would probably prevent her from finding another job.

"I'm not 60 yet, but I'm finished," she says. Her joints ache from years of housework, but she says she must keep working. "A domestic worker cannot survive without work," she says. "It's just slavery until death."

A new wage confronts old attitudes
Not all domestics are mistreated or dissatisfied. Lydia Mahlaba, a 64-year-old retired maid from Johannesburg, says her employers of 18 years always paid her well, provided decent accommodations and treated her with respect. The work was hard, but being paid a living wage made it easier.

When Mahlaba's employers moved to the U.S. in 1995, they provided her with an apartment and a generous pension. She says they have even offered to fly her out to visit them. "They built me a house and are still paying me. Whatever I ask, they send," she says. "They are really good people."

However, Mahlaba says her situation is an exception. Many of her friends have not been so fortunate. "I wasn't working like the others," she says.

Domestic workers' wages vary, but most earn less than the national average income $.3310 GNP per capita. According to a government study, 80 percent of domestic workers earn less than $100 a month and 35 percent make under $45 a month. Perhaps due to the prevalence of domestic work, these salaries are on a par with many black South African women's. The 1996 census found that 48 percent of employed black women earn $77 or less per month. In contrast, less than five percent of white women fell into this category.

The South African Department of Labour is planning to announce the first minimum wage for domestic workers in October. The domestic workers' union is lobbying the government for a minimum wage of $185 a month for full-time domestics and $1.50 an hour for part-time workers. The union says that a fair minimum wage is just the beginning. It is also lobbying parliament to include domestics in legislation on unemployment insurance, worker's compensation, affordable housing and child labor.

Annemari van Zyl, who heads the Department of Labour's efforts to set a minimum wage, says the union's demands are unrealistic. "It's just too high," she says. "To improve from [$45] to [$185] will just kill employers." Van Zyl explains that the government's primary goal is to raise wages for the lowest paid third of domestic workers. In doing so, it must walk a fine line between domestic workers' basic needs and what employers' pocketbooks can bear.

Some employers have already said that a higher wage would force them to lay off their domestics, but most employers can afford some kind of wage increase, van Zyl says. It's largely a matter of priorities: some employers spend more on entertainment or church donations than on their domestic's salary. "We're telling employers that this is not some dehumanized being staying in your backyard," Van Zyl says. "What will they be prepared to forgo to pay a higher wage?"

Jean Bernstein, who runs a skills training program for domestic workers in Johannesburg, says that the country's struggling economy has pinched many employers' budgets, and some can no longer afford full-time domestics. She says that if the new wage were too high, "half the African servants would be thrown out."

The new wage might lead employers to fire their domestic workers, but only temporarily, says van Zyl. After a month or two of doing their own housework, they will readily rehire them. The union says that unless the government enforces the new law, employers will find employees who will work for less than the legal wage. At the very least, a minimum wage might remind employers that they need domestics' labor as much as domestics need their money.

One world, two universes
In the past, many South African whites expected maids, cooks and housekeepers as perquisites of the good life. Thanks to apartheid laws that made it difficult for black women to get anything but menial jobs, domestic servants were cheap, readily available and easily dismissed. "When I got married, we all had flats with upstairs rooms for servants," recalls Bernstein. "That was the traditional South African way of life." Many of the traditions of domestic labor have endured, from domestics calling their employers "sir" and "madam" to full-time domestics living in servants' quarters.

Domestic workers remain a ubiquitous part of the white world, and yet they never fully belong to it. They spend their days taking care of their employers' homes and families, but they are held at arm's length and sometimes viewed with distrust. South Africans joke about employers who don't know their domestics' last names, even after a lifetime of service. An urban myth that circulated before the first democratic elections in 1994 warned that maids were making secret inventories of their employers' homes in preparation for the anarchy that would follow the change to majority rule. The rumor, of course, was untrue.

"Employers will say, 'She's just like a member of the family — but she can't use the bathroom,'" says Stephen Francis. Francis, a New Yorker who moved to Johannesburg after he married a South African, sees "the maid thing" as a unique reflection of South African society. Along with two other cartoonists, Francis produces "Madam & Eve," a comic strip that chronicles the misadventures of a matronly white "madam" and her outspoken black maid, Eve. The strip, which has been running in South African newspapers since 1993, is a national hit, and plans for a sit-com are in the works.

In addition to satirizing South African politics, "Madam & Eve" parodies many aspects of the maid-madam relationship. Hardly a week goes by without Eve asking for a raise — without success. In one strip, Eve hypnotizes her boss into doing her own housework. "We're taking stereotypes and standing them on their heads," says Francis. The rivalry between the strip's characters is always good-natured. "Madam and Eve actually love each other, but they never admit it."

But the distance between Madam and Eve's real-life colleagues is not so easily bridged. On a sunny afternoon in an affluent Johannesburg neighborhood, domestic workers go about their work in an apartment complex. In the garden, black men in blue coveralls mow the lawn and trim bushes. Black women in pink uniforms occasionally appear in the windows as snippets of conversations and radio programs in African languages drift though the halls.

From the outside of the building, a string of small windows is visible on the fifth floor. The windows are big enough to allow for ventilation, but too high to look down into the garden or to see the downtown skyline rising over the nearby cricket stadium. These are the domestics' rooms.

One woman who owns an apartment in the building has employed the same domestic for 30 years. Both women are nearly 70 years old. She says she pays a fair wage and puts money aside for a retirement plan in addition to providing free food, lodging and utilities. Her family also helped her domestic's son attend college and when he graduated, they helped him find a job. But she says her generosity has been barely acknowledged. "There's no sense of gratitude. They just expect these things because of the past."

"They don't see us as human beings," says Hester Stephens, a 60-year-old domestic worker from Cape Town. She says her employers rarely acknowledge her contributions to their family, such as taking care of their young son since he was an infant. Her employers do not want their son to become too attached to her because she is black. They told him to stop visiting her in her room and she says he recently told her, "Auntie Hester, mum and dad say you're not my mommy."

At times like this, there is little to do but retreat to her room in the family's backyard. "You are so isolated in that room. There is no one in that room with you when you go to sleep," she says. "You just pray and you go to bed."

A longtime union organizer, Stephens frequently comforts other domestics who have nowhere else to turn. Though she is optimistic that the union can secure a living wage and better work conditions for domestics, she is pessimistic about employers' willingness to change their attitudes. "Employers in South Africa, even in the year 5000, will always be the same," she says.

Waiting for change
The ill-feeling between domestic workers and employers inevitably takes on a racial overtone, says Vusi Masinga, a commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, a government body that negotiates labor disputes. "The relative sense of deprivation in domestic workers is higher than in any other industry," he says. They see the contrast between their lives and their employers' lives as a reflection of the larger divisions between blacks and whites. Likewise, employers often feel that domestic workers' demands are just attempts to redistribute their wealth.

"There are raised unreasonable expectations on one side," says Masinga, referring to the domestic workers. "On the other, the employers feel like they're being screwed because they're white." Many employers are resistant to change, and as Masinga says half-jokingly, "The maids are becoming cheeky."

Resolving these tensions is extremely difficult, says Masinga. Most of the domestic labor-related cases he handles involve women who have already been fired. In these situations, it is nearly impossible to restore a domestic worker's job and too late to mend the relationship with her employer.

At the Department of Labour in Johannesburg, inspector Khosi Mbombo listens to Maggie's story. Mbombo explains that under the law, Maggie's former employers must let her retrieve her possessions and they owe her a month's wages in severance pay. Mbombo tries to phone the employer, but there is no answer. She says she will try to organize a police escort to take Maggie to her ex-employers' house the next morning, but she can't make any guarantees.

Carrying her baby and the green plastic bag that holds her few belongings, Maggie walks back to a waiting area and sits down. It could be a long wait.

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