This Day in Labor History: October 26, 2005

On October 26, 2005, the European Court of Human Rights decided in the case of a domestic laborer from Togo named Siwa-Akofa Siliadin in her case against her French employers, which held her against her will. It decided mostly in favor of Siliadin, though it did not rule her as having lived in slavery. This became a critical case in the fight to treat domestic laborers as real workers with rights.

That domestic work is among the most exploitative forms of labor in the world is widely known. The situation is always ripe with possibilities to treat people horribly. You are an isolated worker in someone else’s home. Barring there being a bunch of servants in a house, which really doesn’t exist anymore in any meaningful way, you are on your own. That’s especially true when we are talking about child care. You are expected to provide not only real labor, but also emotional labor. You are doing the domestic duties that, for whatever number of reasons, households do not do for themselves. Often this is because both parents have careers. Nothing wrong with that of course. But these domestic workers are often young women and thus are seen as prey for sexually predatory men and sometimes sexually predatory women, who find a single isolated women irresistible. Or if they are not sexually predatory, they lock her up, beat her, steal her wages, threaten to send her home. What is she supposed to do?

Now add in the new globalized dimension of this. Very few native born Americans or Brits or French are going to do this work. The one exception might be au pair work and the possibility of exploitation definitely exists here too, but these are women with options to get out. So instead, let’s hire our help from Africa, Asia, or Latin America. These are women without many options, whose families at home are often relying on her sending wages home. The possibility for horrible stories are almost endless. So is the reality.

Siwa-Akofa Siliadin was 15 years in 1994 when a family brought her from Togo to be a domestic worker. The head of the family was a French national, also of Togolese origin. This fact isn’t too relevant–plenty of native-born French did the same thing, but it explains a bit about how this particular young woman was recruited and forced to stay. The idea is that she was in debt to her employer until she paid off the price of her plane ticket and other expenses to get her to France. That’s an inherently exploitative situation right there and it’s all too common throughout the labor history of migration. The employer then took her passport, making it almost impossible for her to leave. There were all kinds of promises–money, the possibility of an education, regularized immigration status. These were all lies. She was a prisoner at work.

Siliadin had a very hard work life. She had to being work at 7:30 AM and she continued until 10:30 PM. That’s a 15 hour day. She worked seven days a week. The only time she was usually allowed to leave the house was to go to mass and that was under supervision. She had to do all the domestic labor, taking care of children, cooking, cleaning house, etc. She also had to clean the apartment that the employer had turned into his personal office. She did not have a bed. Rather, they threw a mattress on the floor for her in the baby’s room. Of course, if the baby or one of the kids was sick and needed something in the middle of the night, that was completely on her as well.

Siliadin wanted badly to escape. It did not happen for two years. She finally managed to sneak away. A Haitian woman took pity on her and took her in. But she made the mistake to go back to the family after about six months. I am not going to get in the mind of someone who do this after what she had experienced, but once again there was all sorts of promises and once again these were all lies. It seems that this was arranged by her family back home that pressured her and it makes sense that there would be some connection between the families given how this all started. Well, this all continued for another couple of years. Finally, she got to know a neighbor of the family. She confided in the neighbor what her life was really like. The neighbor was not only horrified that this woman was effectively a slave, she decided to take action on Siliadin’s behalf. She called the Committee against Modern Slavery, which is an agency in the French government dedicated to ensuring that new forms of slavery do not develop. The police acted almost immediately and searched the couple’s home. They found plenty of evidence of the slavery. This was in 1998.

This case ended up before the European Court of Human Rights. It took seven years for adjudication. It worked its way up through several French courts and then went to the ECHR. Importantly, this was the first case in which the ECHR decided that a domestic worker had been forced into compulsory labor and servitude. It however did not rule that she had been a slave. This caused a good deal of controversy in the human rights community and led to a lot of debates over just what slavery means in the modern context. Moreover, this case spawned a second debate–is household labor really labor? For me, this is obviously a yes. But for lots of people, childcare was something totally different from labor and so there was nothing abnormal about a domestic worker spending all day every day taking care of children. So the reason it ended up eventually at the ECHR is that the various stakeholders in wanting to make a point here believed the French courts abnegated their responsibilities through their sexist defending of unpaid domestic labor.

In its ruling, the ECHR stressed the need to eliminate this kind of repressive labor from the homes of Europeans. This had wide consequences, if more in principle than in enforcement, because rich Europeans across the political spectrum and across the continent employed domestic workers in their homes in all kinds of conditions. The ECHR noted that domestic workers must have time off and the freedom of movement, as well as health insurance and a legally enforceable contract.

Importantly, even before the ECHR’s decision, not only did Siliadin get her immigration status regularized, but the French tightened up their laws around domestic labor. Still, much work remains to be done to ensure that domestic laborers in this globalized world have rights.

I borrowed from Adele Blackett’s Everyday Transgressions: Transnational Challenges to International Labor Law in the writing of this post.

This is the 500th post in this series. Previous posts in this series are archived here. And hey–500 posts! That’s a lot of labor history!!!! I am very proud of this series and thanks for reading this over the last 12 years.