Paid domestic work and outsourcing in South Africa: Clients’ views on trust, control and power relations

Abstract

Outsourced domestic cleaning service suppliers reconfigure the bipartite employment relationship between employers and domestic workers into a tripartite one between clients (former employers of domestic workers), the management or franchise owners, and domestic employees. While this transformation is attractive to some, outsourcing domestic work involves more than the outsourcing of physical tasks of household cleaning. It also involves the outsourcing of the employment relationship where trust, control and power relations are passed on to the management of the domestic cleaning service suppliers. By taking trust, control and power relations as being reconfigured through outsourcing, this article debates why such reconfiguring might not be convenient for some. By doing this, trust, control and power are conceptualised and how it is perpetuated in a bipartite and tripartite domestic employment relationship. By drawing on 16 in-depth interviews with former clients of a domestic cleaning service supplier in South Africa, this article illustrates that perhaps outsourced domestic services are not an appropriate solution to everyone’s domestic cleaning needs and that some clients expect a particular relationship that is not achieved through outsourcing.