The full-time domestic job – one worker, one household, five or six days a week for years – is quietly disappearing from South Africa, and it is not coming back in the numbers it once had. The country employed roughly a million domestic workers before the pandemic; by the middle of 2025 the figure had fallen to somewhere between 831,000 and 850,000, a loss of about 400,000 jobs in five years. That is not a temporary dip waiting for recovery. It is a structural shift in how households buy cleaning, and the interesting question is no longer why the old model shrank but what is replacing it.
The cause is money, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Reporting for Daily Maverick, the sector’s own data showed a median domestic wage of about R3,635 a month against a basic household cost of roughly R4,500, and 39 per cent of workers earning below the legal minimum. On the employer side, electricity has risen 68 per cent and water 50 per cent over five years. Lourandi Kriel, chief executive of the platform SweepSouth, put the mechanism plainly: the economy has not grown, tough conditions mean some families can no longer afford domestic help, and others are emigrating. Households did not stop needing cleaning. They stopped being able to afford it as a full-time salaried post.
From one employer to many
What a family that cannot fund five days a week can still fund is one day a week, and this is the demand the market is reorganising around. A household that once employed one person full-time now buys a morning here and an afternoon there, often from different workers. For the worker, the old security of a single long-term employer is being replaced by a portfolio of shorter engagements – three or four homes rather than one. This is more precarious in one obvious sense, because no single client carries the whole risk, but it is more resilient in another: losing one of four clients is a setback, not a catastrophe, whereas losing the only one is destitution. It also changes the balance of power in a quiet way. A worker who depends entirely on one household can be pressed to accept less than the R30.23 hourly minimum, or to swallow unpaid overtime, because the alternative is nothing; a worker with three other clients can say no to the fourth. Diversification is not only an income strategy. It is the closest thing a domestic worker has to bargaining power.
The problem with a multi-client working week has always been friction. Finding the second, third and fourth client is hard, slow and dependent on word of mouth, and each new household means starting from zero on trust. A worker good at cleaning is not necessarily good at marketing herself to strangers, and a household wanting only one morning a week will not run a formal hiring process for it. The market failure is not a shortage of demand or of willing workers. It is the cost of introducing them to each other, one small engagement at a time.
What a platform actually changes
This is the specific gap that introduction platforms are built to close, and it is worth being precise about the mechanism rather than the marketing. Kleana, which operates across South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, publishes searchable listings showing a cleaner’s skills, service area, rate and verification status, while withholding her name, photograph and number until an introduction is made. A household searches by area and availability, shortlists without seeing identities, pays a single introduction fee, and is connected. The cleaner pays nothing, and the platform takes no share of her wage and no monthly cut – it charges once and then steps out of the relationship.
Two features matter for a fragmented market specifically. The first is that verification is portable: a listing marked as checked – identity document sighted, a former employer telephoned – is a credential the worker carries from one household to the next, so she is not rebuilding trust from scratch with every new client. The second is that the model is deliberately not agency employment. A traditional agency that placed a worker in four homes would take a slice of four wages every month, which makes the multi-client model expensive precisely when the worker can least afford it. A one-off introduction fee paid by the client leaves the earnings with the worker, which is the only way a portfolio of small jobs adds up to a living.
Designing for the market we have
The temptation, faced with 400,000 lost jobs, is to mourn the full-time post and wait for growth to restore it. The more useful response is to accept that the demand has fragmented and to build for the shape it now has. That means treating each short engagement as real work with written terms and the R30.23 hourly minimum, not as casual help that escapes the rules because it is only a morning. It means portable proof of who a worker is and where she has worked, so trust does not have to be rebuilt four times over. And it means keeping the cost of the introduction off the worker’s wage, because a market of small jobs cannot carry an agency’s recurring cut.
The single-household job was never as secure as it looked – Dimakatso Mokoena, a Germiston worker profiled in the same reporting, took the work part-time in 2021 to fund a qualification precisely because one income was not enough. The market that is emerging is more fragmented and, handled carelessly, more precarious. Handled deliberately – with portable verification, fair introductions and terms that hold across every client – it can be something the old model rarely was for the worker: diversified, and hers to grow. The move that matters is to design for the market South Africa actually has, not the one it is nostalgic for.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
