The latest employment data from Stats SA shows that the jobs crisis for domestic workers in South Africa continues, with thousands more jobs lost in the latest quarter. 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. Like other informal work in South Africa, domestic worker positions are often seasonal and fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter.
However, looking at the historical trends, the second quarter of the year usually shows in increase in domestic worker employment. The second quarter data from 2024 shows a reversal of this trend, with jobs declining. This was last seen during Q2 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and hard lockdown kicked in.
Before that, a Q2 decline was only seen in 2019 and 2015. 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 a 30-year review of unemployment in South Africa by the Bureau for Economic Research (BER), private households are only one of two sectors in South Africa that have seen an overall decline in employment since 2008.
The BER noted that tertiary sectors—which private households are a part of—are the largest employers in the economy and are experiencing the fastest employment growth. However, private households have gone the opposite way. The economists warned that the tertiary sector is unable to absorb South Africa’s stock of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, for which demand from the manufacturing and construction sectors has declined.
“This highlights South Africa’s structural unemployment problem,” the group said. Private household employment is tied to the overall health of the economy as well as affordability factors like inflation, interest rates and salary growth. South Africa has been under pressure across all of these fronts for some time, but it has been exacerbated in recent years by the Covid-19 pandemic and the global cost of living crisis driven by inflation and high interest rates in the post-pandemic recovery.
BER senior economist Shannon Bold recently outlined that households—particularly middle-class and higher-income households who tend to be the employers of domestic workers—are suffering with salaries not increasing above inflation. Previous analyses of the sector have pointed to other issues. On top of the affordability question, private households have also steered away from hiring domestic workers as the government has moved to make it more administratively burdensome to employ them.
While these are positives for the workers themselves—giving minimum wages and protections for occupational hazards while ensuring they can claim from the compensation fund—households find it easier and cheaper rather to cut the “luxury” of domestic help. Other analysts have also pointed to emigration among middle to higher-income households as another area of loss for the domestic worker segment. Meanwhile, low-income workers such as domestic workers are also under financial pressure in the same environment, with the job crunch just adding to their woes.
shows that domestic workers have the lowest median salaries in the country, coming in at around R2,350 a month. This is less than half the national median of R5,417 a month and below the national minimum wage, which amounts to approximately R4,400 a month. At the same time, these workers are also heavily indebted and remained at the top of the pile in terms of the percentage of consumers who had debts in default at the end of 2023.
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