Most disputes between a household and the person who cleans it come down to one thing: two people remembering the same conversation differently. Was Saturday always part of the deal? Was the rate meant to rise this year? Memory is a poor contract, and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act does not accept it as one – it expects the terms of domestic employment to be written down. Reporting from the Human Rights Festival at Constitution Hill in March 2026, GroundUp described a sector still riddled with unpaid overtime and vague arrangements, and noted a campaign, Dignity in Every Home, built to give employers practical guidance. Amy Tekie, co-founder of the Izwi Domestic Worker Alliance, has pointed to how much of the insecurity flows from workers fearing to raise terms that were never fixed. A written agreement is the cheapest fix available, and it needs only seven things.

1. The duties

Write down what the job actually is: the rooms, the tasks, the laundry, whether ironing and windows are included, whether the dog is her responsibility. A job described as cleaning quietly expands into childminding and cooking when nothing is written, and the worker absorbs the extra unpaid. Naming the duties fixes the scope, and anything added later is a new agreement, not an assumption. It also protects the worker’s dignity: a role that is written as cleaning cannot be silently rewritten into being on call for whatever the household forgot to plan for.

2. The hours and days

State the days, the start and finish times, and the lunch break. This is where overtime hides. The BCEA caps ordinary hours and requires overtime to be paid at a premium, so a vague finishing time is a standing liability. If she sometimes stays late for an event, agree in advance what that is worth in rand. Note too how public holidays and Sundays are handled, since these carry their own pay rules, and write down whether she is expected to work them at all. The households that argue most about hours are the ones that never fixed them.

3. The arrangement: live-in or live-out

Decide plainly whether this is a live-out job – fixed days, a day rate, arriving and leaving – or a live-in job with a monthly salary and accommodation on the property. These are different deals with different rules, and blurring them causes more trouble than any other single omission. A platform such as Kleana separates the two categories deliberately for exactly this reason.

4. Access and conditions

Write down what she may use: which toilet, where she eats, whether she has a key, what she may take from the kitchen. The Dignity in Every Home guidance treats access to water, a toilet and a place to eat as basic, not generous. Putting it on paper spares both sides the daily awkwardness of unspoken rules that only surface when they are broken.

5. The pay basis

Record the rate, whether it is hourly, daily or monthly, the pay date and the method. From 1 March 2026 the national minimum wage is R30.23 an hour, and domestic workers are on the same floor as everyone else, so the written rate must meet or beat it – the published weekly and monthly equivalents make this easy to check. Note the UIF deduction too, so the one per cent that comes off her pay is not mistaken for shortchanging, and give a simple payslip each payday showing hours, rate and deductions. A worker who can see how her pay is calculated rarely suspects she is being cheated, and a household that keeps the record has an answer if the calculation is ever questioned.

6. Notice and leave

Set the notice period each side must give, and the annual and sick leave she is owed under the BCEA. This is the term Grace Masuku’s family never had: her mother was dismissed after 35 years with nothing. A notice clause will not make a parting pleasant, but it turns an ambush into a process, and it is the single term that best protects a long-serving worker.

7. Conduct and how it ends

Agree the plain rules – timekeeping, honesty, confidentiality – and how either side raises a problem or ends the relationship. Kleana’s professional charter frames this well: the engagement is work and only work, dignity is non-negotiable, and either party can end it on notice or report a breach. A short conduct clause gives both sides a route that is not a shouting match, and a reference to fall back on if things go wrong.

Why the afternoon is worth it

None of this turns a home into a corporation. The seven terms fit on two pages, and writing them removes the ambiguity that quietly favours the more powerful party in the kitchen, which is almost never the cleaner. A household that has written them down also has what it needs if a dispute ever reaches the CCMA, where an undocumented arrangement is the weakest case in the room. The worker, for her part, gains something a verbal promise can never be – proof, held by someone other than her, of what was agreed.

So make the afternoon this week rather than after the first argument. Sit down with the person who cleans your home, write the seven terms in plain language, and both sign two copies. If you are hiring for the first time, agree them before the first morning, not after the first misunderstanding. The law has expected this of South African households for years. The households that do it are simply the ones who stop leaving the most important relationship in the house to memory.

Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa