Major blow to domestic workers in South Africa as households call it quits
A new report indicates that a fifth of domestic workers have lost their jobs over the last year – a significant portion due to their employers semigrating or emigrating.
According to SweepSouth’s 2024 Domestic Worker report 21% of domestic workers report having lost their job in the last year.
The percentage of those who lost their jobs because their employer could no longer afford to pay them remained stable from the previous annual surveys (25% in 2024 compared to 25% in 2023 and 24% in 2022).
There was a slight drop in the percentage who lost their jobs because their employer moved home, although still a significant increase over the previous year (34% in 2024 compared to 40% in 2023 and 25% in 2022), SweepSouth noted.
Among the employers who moved home most moved overseas (58%) while almost a quarter moved to a different city within South Africa (23%).
“These trends have continued to be compounded by the accelerating emigration of skilled professionals as well as the evolving semigration trends seen during the Covid-19 pandemic due to remote work possibilities,” the group said.
One positive, is the job losses due to emigration are slightly lower than in 2023, where 60% of job losses were attributed to emigration, but the numbers are still high.
South Africa does not track emigration data, but evidence from other countries that do—along with local population figures, stats data and other anecdotal evidence from various sectors and industries—points to a continued trend of emigration to other countries.
While some of these emigrants do come back, the scales are still heavily tipped to outflows.
Stats SA’s latest mid-year population estimates for 2024 show that the South African population has reached over 63 million – but tens of thousands of people are still leaving.
Previous migration data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs showed that close to 1 million South Africans are living abroad.
In 2000, there were a total of 501,600 South African citizens residing abroad. In 2005, this increased to 550,462 and only continued to jump from there: 743,807 in 2010; 786,554 in 2015; and finally, in 2020, the number reached 914,901.
Almost half of these expats live in three countries.
Jobs in decline
The health of the domestic worker sector is inextricably tied to private households in South Africa, which are the biggest employers of domestic help.
According to Sweepsouth’s report, the majority of domestic workers are part-time workers (79%), and 36% reported having lost a client because the household was unable to afford domestic help (12% indicated “maybe”).
The pressure domestic workers face from households being unable to hire them is clearly visible in the latest data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, which shows that domestic worker jobs are also in decline.
According to Stats SA, 23,000 domestic worker jobs were lost in the second quarter of 2024 (April to June), taking the total number of workers employed to 843,000.
This is a 3% drop in employment in the sector.
Adding to the pain for domestic workers, there was also a year-on-year decline in the number of employed, though this was a much smaller loss of 1,000 workers—a drop of 0.1%.
The worrying detail in the data is that South Africa is still employing about 150,000 fewer domestic workers than before the Covid-19 pandemic at the start of 2020.
This has been the case for the last four years, with the country unable to recover to pre-pandemic levels representing a likely permanent loss of jobs in the sector.
Pre-Covid-19, South Africa employed over 1 million domestic workers. Industry reports pointed to around 250,000 domestic workers losing their jobs during the pandemic.
By the end of 2023, only around 125,000 of those jobs had been recovered—a 50% recovery rate.
The latest employment data has further dented this, meaning around 161,000 domestic worker jobs are still lost, and total employment is still around 16% lower than pre-pandemic levels.
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