The Many Faces of Slavery: The Example of Domestic Work

Virginia Mantouvalou is co-director of the Institute for Human Rights and lecturer in law at University College London.

About a decade ago, most people in Europe would have assumed that extreme forms of labour exploitation, such as slavery and forced labour, constituted a phenomenon confined to the past. Working conditions at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century appeared to have little to do with such grave abuses. Scholars of human rights law would similarly have assumed that explicit legal prohibition of such conduct might be unnecessary as it no longer occurred in practice. The protection from slavery incorporated in human rights treaties might carry symbolic weight, but had no practical significance in present-day Europe.

The assumption that slavery and forced labour are concepts of only historic significance, and with no relevance in contemporary Europe, has been put into question in recent years. Judicial and legislative bodies have encountered extreme forms of exploitation in the employment relationship, causing them to develop the concept of “modern slavery” in legal documents and judicial decisions. Even though there is no generally agreed definition of “modern slavery” in law, instances that have been characterised as such in academic literature, legal documents and media reports very often refer to migrants who are trafficked from one country to another to work in agriculture, the sex industry, domestic labour and other sectors.

This article focuses on the abuse suffered by domestic workers and enquires whether it can be deemed a modern form of slavery. First, it examines the key features of domestic labour and highlights the special challenges that domestic workers face. Second, it considers the notion of slavery and the related notions of servitude and forced and compulsory labour, as they have been analysed in recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It then assesses whether the concept of modern slavery has been correctly approached therein, suggesting that it is a multifaceted concept which can include both de jure and de facto elements. Third, it discusses examples that show how national criminal law and international labour law have developed to address the problem of the abuse of migrant domestic workers. The paper closes with some concluding thoughts.

Working Conditions of Migrant Domestic Workers

Domestic workers typically work in private homes, performing various household tasks such as cleaning, gardening and caring for children or elderly people (these last are also known as “care workers”). This type of work is gendered, and is mostly done by women. Domestic work was delineated as a separate area when productive work (work outside the home, in the labour market) and reproductive work (work at home, such as child-rearing) became separated. In Victorian times, “menial or domestic servants” for middle- and upper-class families performed this type of work. With the decline in the employment of domestic servants the weekly cash-in-hand cleaner has become important for professional couples. In the post–Second World War period, a shift occurred in the model of the ideal family from one with a single wage-earning male head of household to one comprising dual wage earners. This shift required accommodations of new patterns of work and family life, whose results included an increasing need for domestic labour.

The positive effect of paid domestic work for contemporary society cannot be overestimated. With changes in the labour market, including the growth of the service economy, the higher participation of women, the sharing of household tasks by men, and globalisation, it has become clear that having domestic workers is beneficial for family members, the employers and the market as a whole. In today’s economic setting, domestic work is vital for the sustainability and functioning of the economy outside the household. Domestic labour can also be a desirable job for workers who are not highly skilled and might not easily be employable in other occupations. Not all domestic workers are low-skilled, though; some are educated, and migrate to work in the domestic labour sector in order to send income back to their home countries. Like other jobs, domestic work can be fulfilling: the worker develops a personal relationship of trust with the employer, sometimes to a greater degree than in other jobs, and may feel highly valued for the services provided.

Yet the particularities of domestic work set challenges, too. Much of the domestic labour workforce in Europe (and, indeed, globally) is composed of migrants who are often preferred by employers to a country’s nationals, particularly if they are live-in domestic workers. The intimacy that often characterises the relationship between employer and domestic worker makes the latter seem like a family member—not a worker. This sense of intimacy can be false, though, because the relationship between the domestic worker and the employer, who is a woman in most cases, is marked by a difference of status that the latter is often keen to maintain.¹ Moreover, domestic work is hard to regulate, being invisible because it is performed in the privacy of the employer’s household. The location of domestic labour makes workers more vulnerable to abuse by employers. Domestic labour also has a stigma attached to it, because it is the poorest and neediest that perform this work, and because the tasks required of the workers are gendered and undervalued.² Domestic work is precarious for social reasons (gender, race, migration and social class), psychological reasons (intimacy and stigma), and also for economic reasons.

Sadly, abuse of domestic workers is widespread. A recent report by Kalayaan, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working on migrant domestic workers in the United Kingdom, said that in 2010, 60 per cent of those who registered with it were not allowed out unaccompanied, 65 per cent had their passport withheld, 54 per cent suffered psychological abuse, 18 per cent suffered physical abuse or assault, 3 per cent were sexually abused, 26 per cent did not receive adequate meals, and 49 per cent did not have their own room. Working conditions were exploitative: 67 per cent worked seven days a week without time off, 58 per cent had to be