Memory is not a record system. Most South African households that employ a cleaner keep the whole arrangement in their heads – what was agreed, what gets paid, when leave was taken – and it works right up until the day it does not. When a dispute reaches the CCMA, or a worker is injured, or the Department of Labour asks a question, the household with a file is safe and the household with a story is exposed. You do not need corporate bureaucracy to close that gap. You need six plain records, kept from the first day.
The context is not encouraging. GroundUp reported that many household employers have never registered their workers for the Unemployment Insurance Fund at all, partly through neglect and partly because the systems are genuinely hard to use. Pinky Mashiane of the United Domestic Workers of South Africa said many of her members work for people who have “still not registered their workers for Compensation or with the Unemployment Insurance Fund”. A file will not fix a broken government website, but it does mean that when the machinery works, you have everything the forms ask for.
The stakes are concrete. A domestic worker who believes she was unfairly dismissed can refer the matter to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, and there the burden of showing a fair process falls on the employer. A household with nothing in writing walks into that hearing carrying only its version of events. The six records below are not about distrust; they are simply the evidence any employer is expected to be able to produce, scaled down to the size of a single home.
1. A written agreement
Start with the contract the Basic Conditions of Employment Act already requires: the parties, the start date, the place of work, days and hours, duties, the rate of pay and the notice period. It does not need legal language. It needs both signatures and a date. This single document settles most of the arguments that ever arise, because it fixes in writing the things people later remember differently.
2. Identity and contact details
Keep a copy of the worker’s identity document or, for a foreign national, her passport and work authorisation, together with a current address and phone number and someone to call in an emergency. This is not suspicion; it is the same basic file any employer keeps, and it is what lets you complete a UIF registration or a compensation claim without scrambling for details you never wrote down.
3. Attendance and hours
Note the days worked and the hours, especially where they vary or overtime is involved. The minimum wage for domestic workers is R30.23 an hour from 1 March 2026, and it is enforced by the hour, so a household that cannot show what hours were worked cannot show that it paid correctly. A simple diary or a shared calendar is enough.
4. Payments
Record every payment: the amount, the date and the period it covers, whether by payslip, bank transfer or a signed cash record. Proof of payment is the record employers most often lack and most often need. It answers a wage claim in a sentence, and it is the raw material for the monthly UIF declaration.
5. Leave and notice
Track annual leave, sick leave and family-responsibility leave as they are taken, and keep anything in writing that touches the end of the relationship – a resignation, a warning, a notice period served. When a worker leaves, the reason and the manner of leaving decide what she is owed and whether she can claim from the UIF, so this is not a detail to reconstruct from memory afterwards.
6. UIF and compensation registration
Register the worker for the Unemployment Insurance Fund through uFiling – both employer and worker contribute one percent of monthly pay – and keep the reference number and the monthly declarations. Confirm that she is covered under the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act, extended to domestic workers by the Constitutional Court in 2020. These two registrations are the difference between rights that exist on paper and rights she can actually claim.
Where the file starts
The reason a file works is that it moves the relationship out of memory, where both parties are unreliable witnesses, and into records that can be checked. It is also most easily started well at the beginning. An introduction platform such as Kleana asks both the household and the cleaner to accept a professional charter before they are put in touch – work is work, terms are agreed up front, either side can end it or report a breach – which is, in effect, record one and part of record two written before the first morning. The platform does not run payroll and does not register anyone for UIF; those remain the household’s job. What it does is start the paper trail on the right foot instead of with a phone number and a hope.
Kept together, these six records turn a household from an easy target into a defensible one. Fewer disputes reach a hearing, because most are settled by producing the document in question, and the disputes that do proceed are winnable. The worker gains too: the same file is what lets her draw unemployment benefit between jobs and compensation after an injury, rights that vanish when no one wrote anything down.
The move that matters is to open one file this week – a folder or a single phone note – and put the agreement in it first. Add the identity copy, then a running log of hours and payments, then the leave record, then the UIF number the moment you have it. It takes an afternoon to start and a minute a week to keep. It is the cheapest insurance a household employer will ever buy.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
