Domestic workers won in court but the real test now sits with their employers

The hardest part of a right is not winning it. It is the distance between the judgment and the life it was meant to protect.

Every generation of struggle runs up against this distance eventually: the gap between what the law has been forced to say and what the world has been forced to do. Most rights die in that gap. They die quietly, in the space between a courtroom and a kitchen, an international convention and a woman on a ladder, a constitutional promise and the bureaucratic act that would make the promise real.

Domestic work is where this gap runs deepest into private life. It is also where, this year, South Africa is being asked whether it will bridge it at all.

On the morning of 31 March 2012, Maria Mahlangu drowned in her employer’s swimming pool in Faerie Glen, Pretoria. She had worked for that family for 22 years. She was partially blind, and she was cleaning the upstairs windows from a step ladder beside the pool when she slipped. She could not swim. She was not found for hours.

Her family fought for her name to be remembered. So did her sisters in the movement — Pinky Mashiane, Myrtle Witbooi and the domestic worker unions they led.

‘Not an employee’

When her daughter Sylvia approached the Department of Labour to claim compensation, she was told her mother was not an employee under the law. No Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act payout. No unemployment insurance. Twenty-two years of service, and a death at work that the state did not recognise as a death at work.

That is where this column starts, because that is where the law, until very recently, ended.

In 2018, as her family’s case made its way through the courts, I wrote about Maria and Sylvia, and what that case was asking of the law. I wrote, too, about Pinky Mashiane, who leads the United Democratic Workers of SA (Udwosa) and still carries the fight, and about Myrtle Witbooi, whose life’s work sits beneath much of what followed, and to whom I will return.

I wrote in support of the demands domestic workers had long been making, as a matter of principle: the same protection under the law, decent wages, decent working conditions, compensation for injuries and diseases contracted at work. The state, I argued, must finally be forced to recognise all their rights as workers.

We owed them nothing less.

Eight years later, some of that debt has been acknowledged on paper.

In November 2020, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, in Mahlangu and Another v Minister of Labour, declared the exclusion of domestic workers from the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act unconstitutional, and did so retroactively. Since 2021, domestic workers have been entitled to claim compensation for injuries and diseases sustained at work. The 2023 regulations extended inclusion further, making domestic workers eligible for the Unemployment Insurance Fund.

The case was carried, over five years, by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (Seri), led by Nomzamo Zondo, with the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (Sadsawu) as co-applicant and Udwosa, Izwi Domestic Workers Alliance and the International Domestic Workers Federation alongside. The Commission for Gender Equality and the Women’s Legal Centre came in as amici curiae. But Sadsawu did not arrive at that courtroom in 2020 by accident. It arrived on the shoulders of Myrtle Witbooi, who had by then been organising domestic workers for half a century. That is how a movement’s demand becomes a judgment: patiently, across generations, as movements do.

For a category of workers whose lives have always hung on the thinnest of threads, these were not small wins. They were the opening of a door that had, for generations, kept domestic workers outside the law.

And now, in 2026, the question is no longer whether we agree. It is whether we are willing to comply.

Mandatory annual declaration

The Department of Employment and Labour has gazetted the submission window for the 2025 Return of Earnings (ROE). From 1 April to 30 June 2026, every employer registered under the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act – including every household that employs a domestic worker – must submit an annual declaration of their worker’s earnings to the Compensation Fund.

A form, a deadline, a bureaucratic requirement. And also something more. The line between a right that exists and a right that works. The difference between recognition and protection. Between what is promised and what is lived.

Because the Return of Earnings is the hinge on which Maria Mahlangu’s posthumous victory turns. A Constitutional Court judgment is a promise. A Compensation Fund that can pay out when a worker falls off a ladder, inhales a lifetime of bleach, or loses an eye to a shard of glass is the keeping of that promise. For the worker whose back gives out, it means her medical bills are covered and she is paid while she recovers. For the family of a worker who dies at work, it means her children are not left destitute. For a worker whose lungs are scarred from years of cleaning products, it means a disability pension rather than the street. And that fund is built, worker by worker, household by household, through the unglamorous act of an employer logging onto a portal and declaring what their worker earned.

This is where the test begins – not in the courts, not in Parliament, but in the ordinary decisions we make in our own homes.

Domestic work in SA has always been organised around a simple, uncomfortable fact: within the private home, the employer holds an extraordinary degree of control over another person’s working life. It is a power inherited from a history that treated black women’s labour as both essential and disposable. For generations, that power has been dressed in language – “like family”, “part of the household” – but rarely matched by rights.

This is not a South African problem alone. The private home has long been where labour law meets its limit: a workplace that is someone else’s kitchen, where there is no shop floor to organise on, and where isolation is built into the job. This is why domestic work has been among the last forms of labour to be recognised, and why enforcement remains its hardest frontier.

The law has now entered that space. The question is whether we will let it stay.

SA has roughly a million domestic workers: black women, overwhelmingly, South African-born and migrant, who clean our homes, raise our children, care for our parents, walk our dogs. If you are reading this on a Saturday morning in a quiet house, the odds are that quiet was made possible, in part, by someone else’s labour during the week.

The Constitutional Court ruled almost five-and-a-half years ago. Registration with the Compensation Fund has been a legal obligation for households since 2021.

Damning

The numbers since are damning. By mid-2022, 19 months after the judgment, fewer than 1,700 households had registered with the Compensation Fund — less than 1% of the employers who should have. Virtually every household that employs a domestic worker in this country has not. Three years after the judgment, fewer than 20 claims from injured domestic workers or their dependants had been submitted – in a sector where back injuries, burns, falls and chronic respiratory illness are routine. The fund exists. The law exists. The worker exists.

What is missing is us.

We know how to speak about domestic workers. We know how to say they are “like family”. We know how to list their virtues. We know how to express care, even affection.

What we have not learned to do is the thing that makes those words real.

No, it is not enough to talk nicely about how wonderful Mavis and Violet and Zoliswa are, and then send them away with a few thousand rand when they are too old or too sick for us to extract any more of their labour.

We now have, for the first time in this country’s history, a mechanism through which a domestic worker injured at work can be compensated without depending on the conscience of her employer. The mechanism is the Compensation Fund. The key to the mechanism is the Return of Earnings.

The hand that turns the key is ours.

But that key exists because others spent their lives forcing the door open.

Myrtle Witbooi, and the movement she built, is the reason much of this is possible, and she is no longer with us to say it herself.

Myrtle died on 16 January 2023, at the age of 75, after a long struggle with cancer. She had been organising domestic workers for 52 years. She began at 17, a live-in domestic worker in Cape Town who had moved from the Moravian mission town of Genadendal, and who in 1969 read an article in a newspaper that denigrated a member of her profession and did the thing that would define the rest of her life: she wrote back.

She co-founded the South African Domestic Workers Union in 1986, under apartheid, at a time when the law excluded domestic workers from labour protections and the state treated their organising as a political threat. She was imprisoned three times, and nearly killed in a bomb attack at Community House in Cape Town for her trouble. When Sadwu did not survive the transition, she did not give up. In 2000 she helped form Sadsawu, and served as its general secretary until her death.

Her reach went far beyond our borders. In 2013, when domestic workers around the world established the International Domestic Workers Federation – the first global union run by women, for work done overwhelmingly by women – Myrtle was elected its founding president. She was central to the campaigns that produced ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers in 2011, the first international instrument of its kind, which she greeted with the line that ought to be carved somewhere public:

“Today we’ve got our dignity and respect. Slaves no more, but workers just like all of us.”

A movement that reshaped labour law on four continents

From a garage in Cape Town, she built a movement that reshaped labour law on four continents.

It is worth sitting with the paradox. The world’s most radical recent legal victory for domestic workers did not happen in a Scandinavian welfare state or a wealthy democracy with a strong enforcement apparatus. It happened in SA – a country whose Constitution is itself under strain, whose labour inspectorate is under-resourced, whose state is failing on so many fronts that the ordinary citizen has learned to expect little of it. It happened here because the movement was stronger than the state. Myrtle and her comrades built, from the bottom, an argument the courts could not refuse. What remains is not their work, but ours.

She did not live to see full implementation here at home. Maria Mahlangu did not live to see the judgment that bears her family’s name. Sylvia Mahlangu, who fought the case in her mother’s memory, has since also passed.

The women who carried this fight paid for it with the years, and sometimes the substance, of their lives. The least the rest of us can do is pay the assessment fee.

So this is not a sentimental column, because sentiment is not what this moment requires.

The instruction, plainly: if you employ a domestic worker, she must be registered with the Compensation Fund, and her earnings must be declared to the Compensation Fund before 30 June. If this has not been done, you have about two months to do it. The Department of Employment and Labour runs an online portal. Sadsawu and Izwi Domestic Workers Alliance can help if you need it. None of this takes longer than the things already on your to-do list this week.

But beyond the instruction sits a harder truth. The Constitutional Court did its work. The legislature did its work. The domestic workers’ movement, bleeding leaders along the way, did its work.

What remains is not awareness. It is will. We are the last mile. And the last mile is where promises are either kept — or quietly abandoned.

The 30 June deadline is a mirror.

Dignity vs comfort

It will tell us whether we meant what we said when we spoke of dignity – or whether, when it came time to act, we chose our own comfort instead.

There is another way to understand what this work costs. My mother worked a 27-year stint, mostly for one family – long enough for us to joke that she had done a 27-year sentence like Mandela. She worked on and off after that, more than three decades in total. She stopped when her body could no longer carry the work.

There was no ladder, no pool, no single moment the law could recognise. Only the long, accumulated cost of a life’s labour that freed others to go out into the world and build their lives.

There is a fund now. It did not exist for her. It exists for the woman who will clean someone’s house tomorrow morning. Whether it reaches her is up to whoever employs her.

That is what the deadline is for. DM