Domestic Workers in Switzerland protected by the Country’s first Sectoral Employment Contract

Mauro Moretto

Vania Alleva

In Switzerland as elsewhere, the State has been retreating on social policy in recent years. This is leading to a decline in social service provision and, consequently, to an increase in demand for domestically based services. Nobody knows exactly how many waged employees are currently at work in Swiss private households (as many are unreported), but statistical estimates suggest that their numbers are continually increasing. At the end of 2007, the Unia trade union, on the basis of various studies(1), put the number of full-time jobs in the sector at about 125,000 (approx. 4 per cent of the total workforce). More than 90 per cent of these employees are women. Many are migrants, often without any legal residency status. They come from a whole range of countries where they had often previously gained academic qualifications and worked in other occupations. Recently, increasing numbers of women from the new EU member states have been finding jobs in Swiss private households.

The global crisis, unemployment and HIV&AIDS: what role for public works programmes?

Francie Lund

South Africa faces a severe and seemingly intractable unemployment problem. The narrow or strictest definition of unemployment produces a rate of approximately 25 percent. This problem existed before the global financial crisis, and has been made worse by it. The government makes unrealistic promises about the numbers of jobs that it will create each year; each year these hopes are dashed.

Unemployment rates are highest amongst the poor and unskilled, higher for women, and higher in rural areas – and in all cases, the situation is worst for African and Coloured people. A 2008 survey showed that the relationship between unemployment and poverty is strong: 31 percent of households have no-one in employment, and the poverty incidence in these households is 81 percent (Leibbrandt et al 2010: 48, using data from the National Income Dynamics Survey – NIDS). Shockingly, more than half of the unemployed said that they had never worked before.