Paper short abstract:

The subjugation of impoverished black domestic workers persists amid protective laws in South Africa. The paper offers a viable clinical model on bonded labour, among poor, isolated, vulnerable exploited women. Apartheid, education, patriarchy and class inform the transformative change agent model.

Paper long abstract:

A post-apartheid democratic South Africa continues to subjugate black African women employed as domestic workers. Despite the promulgation of legal frameworks that outline minimum wage, working hours, unemployment benefits, registration of domestic workers and leave requirements; harsh exploitative work environments have remained unchanged. Domestic workers operate in isolation in suburban homes for wealthy middle-class families. Isolation has been the key impetus for their continued and further exploitation at the lowest rungs of employment.

Researchers have failed to capitalise on developing a clinical model that ought to offer definitive social scientific strategies to mitigate the risk of isolation, exploitation and vulnerability among bonded workers that underscore their continued exploitation in an unequal South African context.

The proposed clinical model seeks to address key intersections of apartheid remnants, racial bias, gendered structures, patriarchal practice, class and human rights violations, experienced by domestic workers. The model identifies the extent and degree of the slave experience, evident, from the variance influence on poor women.

Domestic work as a form of bonded labour is pervasive lending to poor levels of education, inherent gender bias apartheid structures and inadequate state regulations necessitates consideration in the clinical model. This model, therefore, seeks to offer change agents, in the private and public sector, a scientific methodology to address bonded labour, among poor vulnerable black African women. The model explicitly identifies entrenched inequalities to address the exploitation, vulnerability and protection of domestic workers in South Africa.