Exploited, Undervalued – and Essential: Domestic Workers and the Realisation of their Rights. Edited by Darcy du Toit. Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 380 pp. ZAR225.00, $22 paperback, available online.

• Date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12158
• Published date: 01 September 2015

References

Hirschl, Ran (2004) Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitu-

tionalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.Press.

——— (2010) Constitutional Theocracy.Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

***

Exploited, Undervalued – and Essential: Domestic Workers and the

Realisation of their Rights. Edited by Darcy du Toit. Pretoria:

Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 380 pp. ZAR225.00, $22

paperback, available online.

Reviewed by Adelle Blackett, Faculty of Law, McGill University

Starting points matter. The University of Western Cape’s Social Law

Project’s recent, insightful volume could easily be missed by those

concerned about the future of labor law as a general field. After all,

the book focuses on one of the most marginalized groups of work-

ers, resolutely situated in labor law’s peripheries: domestic workers

performing historical “care” work. And, the book emerges out of a

historically “marginalized” continent, albeit in the African member

of the BRICS, South Africa. Yet Emeritus Professor Darcy du Toit’s

edited volume centers and contributes meaningfully to core debates

on the direction of labor law, nationally and internationally because,

I would argue, it takes peripheries as starting points.

The volume considers the potential of the International Labor

Organization (ILO)’s alternative vision to the Washington consen-

sus: that is, decent work as a manifestation of social justice in the

global economy. It does so within a state constitutional framework

that is “historically self-conscious” (p. 45) and that has social trans-

formation from an apartheid-based to a democratic society as its fun-

damental purpose. For Du Toit, the adoption by the ILO in 2011 of

the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No.

189) and Recommendation, 2011 (No. 201) is “a milestone in that it

settled the long-standing debate as to whether domestic work

should be considered as ‘work’ for purposes of labor legislation” (p.

2). For South Africa, which has a staggering 8.7 percent of its popu-

lation working in this sector (p. 1), rethinking the regulation of

domestic work through principles like equality, freedom and devel-

opment is hardly peripheral. It is intimately wedded to contempo-

rary labor law’s renewal.

Book Reviews 801