Employer practices and perceptions on paid domestic work: Recruitment, employment relationships, and social protection

This study report is an important contribution towards understanding employers’ perceptions, rationale and bases that underlie how employers in urban India engage, value, and perceive domestic work.

To do so, it draws upon data from personal interviews with 403 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities– Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, neighborhood type and across households with and without women working for wages. This report is the third of a three-part series, with the first report looking at paid and unpaid hours taken to reproduce a household in urban India, and the second report looking at the quality of employment for paid domestic workers.

ITUC Economic Briefing: Ensuring Migrants’ Access to Social Protection

Social protection is a universal human right, providing people with security against poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion. It is moreover a catalyst for inclusive economic growth.

Despite numerous international commitments to extend social protection, nearly half of the world’s population lack any access to these critical benefits and services, and coverage gaps are especially acute in low and middle-income countries.

Migrants are disproportionately excluded from social protection schemes, and their economic vulnerability is compounded by their underrepresentation in the labor market, concentration in precarious and low-paid work, discriminatory laws and entrenched xenophobia.

Legal exclusions to accessing social protection benefits, insufficient build-up of social security contributions within destination countries, lack of possibilities to preserve or transfer social security contributions within destination countries, practical barriers to accessing benefits, and migrant’s labour market exclusion are some of the main reasons for their lack of access. Increased globalization, conflict, demographic change and climate change – and the resulting migration due to these trends – all raise concerns about how to better address migrants’ vulnerability.

This brief examines the reasons for migrants’ exclusion from social protection systems and reviews some ways for closing these coverage gaps. It moreover outlines existing international frameworks related to migration and social protection, as well as provides some selected good practices at national level. Finally, it sets out unions’ key demands for ensuring universal social protection systems that are inclusive of migrants.