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ILO / DOMESTIC WORKERS REPORT
STORY: ILO / DOMESTIC WORKERS REPORT
TRT: 2:44
SOURCE: ILO
RRESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH /NATS
DATELINE: 15 JUNE 2021, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND /FILE
FILE – OCTOBER 2013, MALAWI
1.Various shots, female domestic worker at work
15 JUNE 2021, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
2.SOUNDBITE (English) Guy Ryder, ILO Director-General:
“In our new report on domestic workers, the key figures are that there are just over 75 million domestic workers in the world. This is a very substantial part of the workforce, a highly feminine workforce; three quarters of the workforce are women, and extremely high levels of informality. 81% of domestic workers work in conditions of informality. What we are trying to do is to see to what extent we are achieving the goals set in that Convention adopted ten years ago, which stated simply that to provide these workers, who are real workers like everybody else, with the same equivalent labour protections; working time, pay, social protection, as those that are attributed to other parts of the workforce. We are seeing progress but not yet enough.”
FILE – THAILAND, DATE UNKNOWN
3.Various shots, domestic worker broll
15 JUNE 2021, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
4.SOUNDBITE (English) Guy Ryder, ILO Director-General:
“What we’ve seen with the pandemic is that domestic workers have lost their jobs in greater numbers than others or that they’ve had their working time reduced more than others. So, they’ve been hit harder in numerical terms. But looking underneath those numbers, what does it mean? Well it means that domestic workers, many of them live I the homes of the people they work for, they may have lost their place to live. They’ve lost their home. Many of these workers are migrant workers so their status within a country may be called into question. They may be stranded. So this is very quickly where the drama of losing your job, and there’s always drama of losing your job, becomes almost a humanitarian problem. A problem simply of how do you get by? How do you survive? This exposes the underlying vulnerabilities of the lack of protection which too frequently afflicts these workers.”
FILE – 2011, URUGUAY
5.Various shots, domestic worker cleaning
Ten years after the adoption of an historic International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention that confirmed their labour rights, domestic workers are still fighting for recognition as workers and essential service providers.Working conditions for many have not improved in a decade and have been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new ILO report.
At the height of the crisis, job losses among domestic workers ranged from 5-20 per cent in most European countries, as well as Canada and South Africa. In the Americas, the situation was worse, with losses amounting to 25 - 50 per cent. Over the same period, job losses among other employees were less than 15 per cent in most countries.
Data in the report shows that the world’s 75.6 million domestic workers (4.5 per cent of employees worldwide) have suffered significantly, which in turn has affected the households that rely on them to meet their daily care needs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated working conditions that were already very poor, the report says. Domestic workers were more vulnerable to the fallout from the
pandemic because of long-standing gaps in labour and social protection. This particularly affected the more than 60 million domestic workers in the informal economy.
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