Legal protection for domestic workers' rights

Domestic workers are the most neglected lot so far as the labour laws of the country are concerned. Of course, there is the Domestic Workers Welfare and Protection Policy, 2015, which defines elaborately what is meant by domestic work. It also bans employment of children under 12 in household work and prohibits their engagement in heavy and risky work. But the Policy has no provision for the domestic workers to seek redress if its directives are violated by an employer. To be honest, the said Policy lacks the legal teeth to protect any domestic worker who has been maltreated by her/his employer.

Similarly, to regulate the relationship between workers including child workers and their employers, there is a special law titled, Labour Act, 2006. Sad to say, the Act is also silent about domestic workers and their rights, though it  forbids child labour and specify labourers' daily working hours, their welfare issues, and so on. So, the domestic helps including the household child workers have no right, so to speak, even under the Labour Act, 2006. Then, who is going to protect some 2.5 million domestic workers, whose existence, to all intents and purposes, is denied under the existing labour laws of the country? Against this backdrop, a Washington-based non-profit outfit styled, Solidarity Centre, Bangladesh, has come up with the findings of a study it carried out on the gaps in the legal and policy framework centring around domestic work in Bangladesh and, particularly, in the domestic workers' protection and welfare policy 2015.

About the child domestic workers, the study in question said that they are working up to 15 hours a day. Further it added that 80 per cent of the domestic workers get wages that are far lower than the workers in other sectors of the economy. That 53 per cent of these workers are not paid their wages regularly, though they work, on an average, 11 hours a day. Worse yet, the concept of minimum wage is something foreign to them, though the workers in the readymade garment (RMG) sector, for instance, have a minimum wage of Tk8,000 a month and they work 8.0 hours a day. Small wonder that 87 per cent of these domestic workers are denied the right to enjoy any leave or holiday as they have no support, according to the study, from any legal aid service. In this connection, the leader of a domestic women workers' body informed that the most vulnerable are some 400,000 child workers who make 16 per cent of the total number of domestic workers in the country. Reported abuses suffered by this group of domestic workers that often leads to their untimely death do prick the conscience of the nation. But, in most cases, such acts of homicide committed by employers of these child domestic helps are not followed by any legal proceedings to punish the offenders. What is most saddening is these cases of murder are often hushed up in exchange for money.

But despite the existing legal system's apparent lack of concern about these instances of serious discrimination against domestic workers and those of gratuitous human rights abuse should not go unanswered. Obviously, the situation calls for either revamping the existing labour laws and policies to include the rights of domestic workers or frame a separate law for them.  Hopefully, the government would give the issue some serious thought to end the domestic workers' plight.