This deeply rooted tradition and the culture’s acceptance of child labor prevents many children from attending school which means they have no opportunity to escape the life of a househelp and the cycle of poverty. A 2003 ILO/IPEC-Ghana Statistical Service survey on child labor found that out of the 2.47 million children engaged in some form of economic activity, 64.3 percent of them still attended school.
Friends of mine and recent Wake Forest University graduates, Kristin Eberman and Kevin Duck, researched the phenomenon of househelps and filmed two documentaries using interviews with househelps themselves as well as community members. Last summer they spent five weeks recording footage and interviews and then made two separate films to share the stories of these domestic servants. (Please watch the videos here: http://www.vimeo.com/4165854) The interviewees’ accounts varied with their living situations. Some like nineteen-year old Christiana claimed to feel like part of the family: “They are okay to stay with…if I do something wrong, they just correct me...They treat me like their own child.” But many more shared experiences of abuse, overwork, and other forms of mistreatment. “I go to bed at 12 a.m. and get up at 3 a.m.,” said Ayiku. “I only get 30 minutes of sleep at one time. I can be awoken at any time.” Christopha, 15, reported that if he oversleeps his househelp mother will dump water on him and beat him. These children cannot escape these human rights abuses because they have no other option, some do not even know where they came from if they were hired at a young age.
The issue of domestic child labor, including the practice of househelps, is complex. One could argue that some children could be even worse off if they were not househelps. Yet the practice perpetuates the cycle of poverty and compromises children’s well being and right to a childhood. Governments must find a solution that will ensure the safety of the work of children and a way to support their right to an education, a way out of poverty and hazardous labor.
It is hard to regulate this form of domestic child labor because of the isolated nature of the work. Unlike other forms of labor there are no monitoring systems in place. Domestic workers in the US face similar exclusion as they are consistently left out of many basic workplace laws. Domestic workers in the US are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act, which means that they do not have the right to organize. They are also excluded from the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Family Medical Leave Act. Organizations like Domestic Workers United are working to protect domestic labor to ensure they have rights, respect, and fair compensation for their labor.
