Dignificant and quality employment: utopia in domestic work?

Abstract

Domestic work in Spain is a highly feminized sector, where regulation, with significant and manifest gaps, is deficient and not adapted to the current context. The lack of political will and social awareness, as well as an approach to the reality of the daily problems that domestic workers have to face, are some of the reasons that explain the precariousness with which this relationship operates labor cataloged as special. With the aim of offering the reader an overview, this study, starting from the concept of “decent work”, examines some key elements of the legal framework for the regulation of domestic employment in Spain. With special emphasis on the need to ratify ILO Convention 189, basic aspects referring to the working conditions of the service relationship provided in the family home are reviewed and analyzed (especially, working time and salary), the difficulty to articulate the right to collective bargaining in this area, to lack of protection in the face of job loss and the consequences of the non-application of the Occupational Risk Prevention Law, in particular the problem when identifying and qualifying the risks derived from work and, consequently, to determine the scope of the employer's responsibility, investigating the contributions made by the most recent judicial doctrine and, thus, determining its positioning on a subject of great practical relevance.