Astonishingly, only two percent of domestic workers in Mexico receive benefits of any kind, according to researchers from two universities in Mexico City.
Most domestic workers in Mexico (often referred to here as sirvientas or servants) are employed in private households, often without clear terms of employment, and are largely excluded from the scope of the nation’s labor legislation. They carry out essential tasks for the household, including cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, and often caring for children and elderly members of the employer’s family.
Recent investigations carried out by Martha Lamas of the UNAM and Mary Goldsmith of UAM for the Centro de Apoyo y Capacitacion para Empleados del Hogar (Caceh) reveals that nearly all of Mexico’s domestic workers, the vast majority of whom are women, labor in the “informal economy,” without health insurance, holidays, pensions and other benefits.
They have an average age of 39, 70 percent are mothers and one in three earns less than the minimum salary – 2,000 pesos a month.
Although Mexico signed the International Labour Organization’s Domestic Workers Convention (189) in 2011, it has yet to rectify the treaty, which came into force in September 2013.
Under the convention, domestic workers are entitled to the same basic rights as those available to other workers in their country, including weekly days off, limits to hours of work, minimum wage coverage, over-time compensation, social security and clear information on the terms and conditions of employment. The new standards oblige governments that ratify to protect domestic workers from violence and abuse, to regulate private employment agencies that recruit and employ domestic workers, and to prevent child labor in domestic work.
Since the convention’s adoption in 2011, dozens of countries have taken action to strengthen protections for domestic workers. Although eight countries from Latin America have ratified the convention, Mexico has only pledged to do so.
Caceh this week delivered a letter to Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong signed by 124 leading figures, calling for the government to quickly ratify the treaty.
At a press conference this week, Lamas admitted that mechanisms to enroll domestic workers in the country’s Social Security system need to be streamlined to encourage employers to register their workers.
Marcelina Bautista of Caech said politicians have tended to ignore the rights of domestic workers because “in spite of their numbers they are not organized into a movement that exerts any pressure.”
Worldwide, it is estimated that some 53 million people, the vast majority women and girls, are employed in private homes as domestic workers.