Domestic Worker Unionisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Demobilisation and Depoliticisation by the Democratic State

The post-apartheid South African state has launched one of the most extensive efforts anywhere in the world to protect domestic workers, giving them for the first time in South African history a political status, and the right to organise into trade unions. But the implications of democratisation for domestic worker unionisation have been relatively under-explored. Through a qualitative examination of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU), this article shows that domestic workers have been demobilised and depoliticised by the democratic state. The availability of an extended post-apartheid state apparatus for the protection of domestic workers has obfuscated the necessity for domestic workers to join a union, leading (in combination with the continuation of the historical limits to domestic worker unionisation) to declining union density in the sector. But the article also argues that the post-apartheid political inclusion of domestic workers through their construction as ‘vulnerable’ has positioned the state as the articulator, representative, and protector of domestic workers' collective interests in ways that have displaced the union in these roles, and depoliticised it. Combined with the union's strategic facilitation of this substitution of its functions by the state, this article argues that domestic workers have been demobilised and depoliticised, paradoxically, by the very efforts of the post-apartheid state to enhance their political capacities.