ONE group of workers in Zimbabwe whose rights have been violated and nobody has said a thing are house workers.
Many domestic workers in Zimbabwe, just like elsewhere in the world, are abused away from the public eye while hidden in private homes.

It is this private environment that allows house workers to be abused and be kept in semi-slavery conditions in many homes.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the major perpetrators of abuse are women who in most cases are married, women where the husband’s capacity to protect the female house worker is limited by other emotional issues that could arise if the husband opens his mouth in defence of the domestic workers.

In many households, domestic workers come from rural underprivileged families or poor communities in the cities and as such have limited education and are not aware of their rights, making them easy victims of abuse.

Of late there have emerged house worker agents in cities who go and “harvest” poor women and girls to “sell” to urban families for a fee as low as $20. Sadly, the law has looked aside when this happens.

In worse instances, under-aged girls as young as 12 years are offered as domestic workers where the young girls are condemned to “slavery”.

Once a domestic worker arrives in a new family, she loses all rights to feminine dignity as where she sleeps has no privacy, no facilities for personal hygiene issues, in worse cases, she gets abused by men of the home, which includes the man of the house, his sons and other male relatives who live in the household.

Due to related threats, small payment she gets from the men, the poor woman remains silent.

Generally, these domestic workers are paid very low wages and, in some households, the wages are as low as $25 and the worker is told some of the money goes towards her food, accommodation and other related things.

In worse cases, the worker gets nothing but the money is sent to her family in rural areas by the employer or through the unscrupulous “agent”.

There are cases where house workers have been beaten by their employers and got injured with related treatment happening in private.

Coupled with beatings is starving the house worker and serving them with substandard meals as they are not allowed to eat the employer’s food they have prepared.

The working hours are cruel as the poor employee is the first to wake up and the last to go to bed and at night, she is on duty as she sleeps while looking after children she shares a room with and in worse cases, she is made to sleep on the floor in some inappropriate space or substandard room in domestic quarters that hardly have any running water, window panes are missing, the door hardly locks and cooking facilities are at times not existent not to mention the quart toilet that is a reminder of our Rhodesian toilets.

Any investigation of these conditions is very difficult to make as hardly any house worker is willing to go public about any of these abuses.

Further, those who have reported have found the law not on their side as they will have no capacity to litigate.

Generally, those workers who have tried to go and report cases to the Ministry of Labour have done so after losing their jobs and where the employer is found in the wrong, they have been paid a maximum of three months’ notice pay less the value of what the worker will have alleged to have damaged during tenure.

In conclusion, this is a minefield shrouded in secrecy, very difficult to investigate and also very hard to get evidence and witnesses.

What needs to be done is to borrow from Global Domestic Worker Rights investigation and actions that have been taken to reduce the hardship and thereafter, craft our own legislation to improve human rights and workplace rights of domestic workers.

-Davies Ndumiso can be contacted on: Email: [email protected].