When a domestic-work arrangement in South Africa ends in a dispute, or when a worker is injured on the job, the households that kept records and the households that did not end up in very different places. One produces a folder; the other produces an argument. Most families who employ a cleaner still run the relationship on goodwill and memory, and for years that felt like enough. It is not what the law assumes, and the distance between the two is now the most avoidable risk in the whole arrangement.
The obligations are neither new nor heavy. A household that employs someone for more than 24 hours a month is, in law, an employer. It must register that worker with the Unemployment Insurance Fund and pay the monthly contribution – one percent from the employer and one percent from the worker. Since the Constitutional Court’s 2020 ruling in the Mahlangu matter, domestic workers are also covered by the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act, which pays out when someone is hurt at work. Pay itself sits under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the sector’s own determination, with a minimum wage of R30.23 an hour from 1 March 2026. Almost all of this is settled law. Much of it is quietly ignored.
How badly was set out by GroundUp, which reported that large numbers of household employers have never registered their workers at all. Pinky Mashiane, who founded the United Domestic Workers of South Africa and speaks for some 820 members, said many of them work for employers who have “still not registered their workers for Compensation or with the Unemployment Insurance Fund”. The consequence shows up in the claims data: Sifiso Dlamini, a deputy director at the Compensation Fund, said the fund had received only 43 claims from the entire sector, 40 of them for occupational injury. In a workforce of roughly a million people, that is not evidence that domestic work is safe. It is evidence that when something goes wrong, almost no one can claim.
The reason is not only reluctance. The systems are genuinely hard to use. Password resets fail, the online declaration platform falls over, and the Department of Labour’s offices are stretched. A household acting in good faith can still be defeated by the machinery, and that deserves saying plainly rather than treating every unregistered employer as a villain. But difficulty is not the same as impossibility, and the workers themselves are clear about what they want. “The Department of Labour should make inspections in private residential areas where we work and compel our employers to register us,” the domestic worker Hannah Kaisa told GroundUp. The demand is not for charity. It is for rules that already exist to be followed.
What a record actually does
What protects both sides is unglamorous: a written record of the relationship, kept from the first day. Not corporate bureaucracy, but a plain file. Who was hired, and from when. What was agreed – days, hours, duties, pay and notice. What was paid, and when. Whether the worker was registered for UIF, and the reference number if she was. The value of the file is that it converts a relationship most people carry in their heads into something that can be checked, and checked by someone other than the two parties. A registration number can be verified. A payslip can be produced. A start date fixed in writing cannot be re-remembered to suit whoever is angrier.
This is the point at which an introduction platform earns its place, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not do. Kleana, which operates in South Africa alongside Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, asks both the household and the cleaner to accept a professional charter before any introduction is made: the engagement is work and only work, the terms are agreed up front, and either side can end it or report a breach. That charter, and the start details that come with an introduction, are the beginning of the file the law assumes a household keeps. The platform is not a payroll service and does not register anyone for UIF; that duty stays with the employer. What it changes is the default. Instead of a name passed along in a WhatsApp group, the relationship starts with terms written down and agreed by both people.
What it changes on the worst day
For the household, the pay-off is protection when things go wrong. If a worker resigns and later claims she was dismissed, the file answers the question. If she is injured, a registered employer points to the Compensation Fund rather than facing the cost alone. If the CCMA becomes involved, the household that can produce a contract, a record of hours and proof of payment is in a wholly different position from the one relying on its word. For the worker, the same file is the thing that lets her claim what the law already promises her – unemployment benefits between jobs, compensation after an injury – instead of watching those rights evaporate for want of a reference number.
The move that matters can be made this month, and it does not require a lawyer. Register the worker on uFiling, or by phoning the fund directly if the website defeats you, and keep the reference number. Write down the terms you are already working to, and both sign them. Keep a simple record of what you pay and when. A household that does this has not become an employer overnight; it already was one. It has simply stopped pretending that goodwill is a substitute for the paperwork that decides what happens on the worst day.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
