Essay: Exploring the Lives, Roles, and Challenges of Domestic Workers

This essay delves into the multifaceted lives of domestic workers, examining their crucial roles within households and the significant challenges they encounter. The author highlights the various activities domestic workers undertake, from cooking and cleaning to childcare, emphasizing their importance in modern society. The essay explores the historical context of domestic work, tracing its roots and evolution. A significant portion of the essay is dedicated to the problems faced by domestic workers, including abuse, exploitation, and poor working conditions. The author presents statistical data, such as the high percentage of women in this profession, and discusses the vulnerability of domestic workers to violence and human trafficking. The essay concludes by advocating for measures to protect domestic workers and ensure their fair treatment, recognizing their essential contributions to society. The essay includes references to support the arguments and findings presented.

Running head: DOMESTIC WORKERS
Domestic Workers
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1DOMESTIC WORKERS
The term “Domestic Worker” is usually referred to a person who is known to work
within the owner’s home. Domestic Workers are known to help the people of the home with
various activities like cooking, washing, looking after the children of the household as well as
the maintenance of the house itself. Domestic Workers have been around for longer times,
and were once referred to as the slaves and they had arrived for the first time in the English
society in the Victorian era. Therefore, this area will be focused on the life style and the
activities of the domestic workers around whom the essay will be based upon.
The purpose of this essay is to describe the life and the activities of the domestic
workers and the problems that they face in their daily live as well.
It has been found in a particular study that the domestic workers play a very important
role in almost all families of the world. This is because in the modern times, the homes
require more work because most of the family members tend to be away from the homes as a
result of which, they are not able to concentrate on the job themselves. It is exactly the reason
that there is need for the domestic workers to offer their services to the homes so that the
people in these homes could go their work knowing the fact that their household tasks are
being taken care of by someone else in the house (Sibal, 2019). The option of having a
domestic help in the household allows the individuals of the family to concentrate on their
jobs. On the other side, the domestic workers can fulfil their jobs of looking after household
while the members of the family are away.
Domestic Workers are indeed an important part of the society that we live in. It is
being said that more than 60 million domestic workers around the world provide essential
services to the households where they serve. Another use of the domestic labour in the
countries us that it helps to keep the economy of the countries and also keeps the labour
working all across the glove of the world (McIntyre, 2019). It has also been found in an

2DOMESTIC WORKERS
estimation that most of the domestic labour in the countries of the world are women. From
this fact, the conclusion can be reached that the women perform the role of the domestic
labourers in the countries more than their male counterparts.
Domestic Workers provide a number of services to the house holds which depends
on them being male or female. While domestic workers are mainly needed to sweep and
clean the houses and the rooms, they might also be required to perform other activities which
range from looking after the children of the homes to providing security services to the
homes where they work. Female domestic workers on the other hand are required in most
cases in the cleaning and the cooking parts while the male domestic workers are mainly made
to work as gardeners or drivers or other professions. As stated by McIntyre (2019), it is
widely known to all that around 67 million individuals are employed as domestic employers
in the houses that they serve. The statistics prove that around 80% of the people involved in
domestic labours are women which also proves the point that 1 in every 25 women in the
world are domestic workers themselves. All these statistics and the information presented
helps to prove the fact that women domestic labourers in the world are much more than that
of the male domestic labourers in the country.
However, this does not mean that the life of a domestic worker is a bed of roses since
they get to work in rich families. There are information from various sources which prove the
point that the domestic workers are being abused by their masters in the households where
they work. Cases of violence against the domestic workers are not uncommon in the world.
Domestic workers are not only beaten but also sexually exploited in many countries by their
masters. And on top of that, these domestic workers are not even treated or given food
properly by those who employ these people (Higgs, 2016). As a result, the domestic workers
had to tolerate the tortures of their masters as well as have to continue working for the
families as well. In most of the cases, it has been found that the abusers send abusive

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messages or carry out violent acts against the labourers in the workplace because of the fact
that they consider the labourers tio belong to a lower class than those of the owners
themselves. Apart from that, sometimes the workers feel the need to inflict violence on the
domestic labourers purely out of pleasure. Sexual abuse is another important factor which
affects the domestic labourers in a lot of ways. It is being said that the female labourers are
forcedly involved into sexual exploitation in the countries by their masters. Another problem
that the domestic labourers face is that sometimes they are even forced into human
trafficking, where they are sold into other countries and forced into the sex trade or other
illegal activities (Sujatha, 2014). It has been estimated that a large number of domestic
workers die every year because of the abuses received at the hands of their masters.
From the above discussions, it can be concluded that the domestic workers indeed
play an important role in the families in the society by looking after various activities which
cannot be done by the members of the society. Although these workers suffer abuse at the
hands of their masters, they still continue to work for their masters in the hope that at least
they will be able to get food and sleep in the houses which they could not as they often are
quite poor. Thus, steps must be taken to make sure that the domestic labourers continue to
work without being abused by their masters in the households.

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Reference List
Higgs, E., 2016. Domestic Servants and Households in Rochdale: 1851-1871. Routledge.
Macintyre, M., 2017. Women miners in developing countries: Pit women and others.
Routledge.
Scrinzi, F., 2017. The globalisation of domestic work: women migrants and neo-domesticity.
In Gender and Insecurity (pp. 77-89). Routledge.
Sibal, H.T. and Foo, S., 2016. A study on the information seeking behaviour of Singapore-
based Filipino domestic workers. Information Development, 32(5), pp.1570-1584.
Sujatha, D., 2014. Redefining Domestic Violence. Economic & Political Weekly, 49(47),
p.19.