Women's Day in South Africa: The Work That Was Never Counted

The Work That Was Never Counted

There are two kinds of work happening in your house, and for most of recorded history neither of them was counted.

Yours appears nowhere. There is no record that the school run happened, that the uniforms were found, that somebody noticed the medical aid needed renewing and dealt with it before anyone else knew there was a problem. It is work, and it is skilled work, but it produces no document. Nothing accrues. At the end of a decade of it there is nothing you could hand to anyone as evidence that you did it.

Hers is different in the way that matters most: she is paid for it. It is a job, with a rate and hours and an end date somewhere in the future. But for most of the last century it was not counted either — not by the labour laws, not by the unemployment fund, not by the department that would have compensated any other worker injured on the job.

This Was Never Only a South African Problem

 Around the world, women do roughly three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. That is not a figure of speech. It is the International Labour Organization's measurement, and while the multiple varies, there is no region on earth where the gap closes.

Here is the part that is easy to miss. That work is not merely undervalued in some vague, cultural way. It is formally excluded. The international rules that countries use to calculate the size of their economies draw a line called the production boundary, and unpaid household services sit outside it by design. When you cook a meal for your family, it is not counted in the national accounts. When a restaurant cooks the same meal, it is. The work did not change. The accounting did.

The feminist economist Marilyn Waring spent a career pointing this out, most famously in a 1988 book whose title says the whole thing: If Women Counted. Her argument was narrower and harder to dismiss than "women's work is underappreciated." It was that the system for measuring an economy had been built to leave that work out — and that whatever a system does not measure, it never has to pay for.

There is a word for this: patriarchy. It is the name for a very old habit of accounting — the one that decided, long before any of us arrived, which work would be paid, which would be written down, and which would simply be expected.

 What That Looked Like Here

On 9 August 1956, more than twenty thousand women walked to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the extension of the pass laws to Black women. They stood outside in silence for half an hour, and then they sang. Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo — you strike a woman, you strike a rock. It was organised by the Federation of South African Women across racial lines, which in 1956 was neither simple nor safe, and led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.

The pass was itself a counting system. It recorded where a woman was permitted to be, whose permission she held to be there, whose house she worked in and whether he was satisfied with her. What it never recorded was what she was owed for any of it, or what she had built up by doing it for years.

That distinction is the whole of it. There is a difference between being on a list and being on the record.

How Recently the Law Arrived

Until 1 January 1994, a domestic worker was not regarded as an employee under South African law at all — the relationship ran on common law and nothing else. Hours, leave and notice reached her then. The wage floor took another eight and a half years, arriving in 2002. UIF followed in 2003. And it was only in November 2020, in Mahlangu v Minister of Labour, that the Constitutional Court found the exclusion of domestic workers from injury compensation unconstitutional — until that judgment, a woman injured while working in someone's home had less protection than a woman injured in a factory.

None of those dates arrived on their own. Each was argued for, much of it led by domestic workers themselves, against a system that had managed without them for a century.

Domestic work is still one of the single largest occupations in this country — around 854,000 people. Worldwide, the International Labour Organization counts at least 75.6 million domestic workers, three quarters of them women. It took until this century for most of that work to be counted as work at all. 

What You Can Actually Change

None of this has been repaired. The production boundary still excludes unpaid household services, exactly as it did in 1988. Your own work at home will not start producing a record this year or next, and if you have ever had the sense that the whole arrangement is designed to run on women's time without recording that it did, you are not imagining it. It is not a personal failing that the system still stands.

But there is one place where the accounting is yours to do.

Whether the woman who works in your home has her work counted is no longer a question of policy or history. The law arrived. What is missing, in most households, is the recording — and in that house, the person who does the recording is you. A contract sets out the hours and the rate, so the two of you are counting the same job. A payslip attaches a number to a month that would otherwise blur into the one before it. A leave record turns her three weeks a year from an idea into days she can actually take. And UIF is the purest form of counting there is: a fund that pays out only what the record says went in.

Then there is the money, which is what the accounting was always really about. From 1 March 2026 the National Minimum Wage is R30.23 for every ordinary hour worked. That is the floor — not the going rate, and not a target. A rate that is written down, paid on time and shown on a payslip is the difference between a wage and an arrangement.

 The Two Days Nobody Counts

One practical note, because this year has a wrinkle.

Women's Day falls on Sunday 9 August 2026, and under the Public Holidays Act a public holiday landing on a Sunday makes the following Monday one as well. So there are two — the 9th and the 10th — and the same rules apply to each. If it is a day she would ordinarily work and she stays home, she is paid her daily wage; a public holiday is not an unpaid day off. If she works it, she is owed at least double. And she cannot simply be told to work it.

So it comes down to her days. If either the Sunday or the Monday is one she normally works, there is something to sort out before the weekend rather than after it.

What the Record Is For

Underneath the pass itself, what the women at the Union Buildings were objecting to was being counted the wrong way — recorded as a presence to be managed, rather than as people who worked, earned, and were owed.

Seventy years on, the version of that available to you is unglamorous and takes about an hour. Hours written down. A rate that is at least the floor. Leave that accrues to a number instead of living in your memory. Contributions that go in under her name and stay there.

It does not undo the accounting. Patriarchy will not be settled from a South African kitchen on a Monday in August, and the system is still arranged against both of you. But one woman's work, in one house, can be counted properly and paid properly — and that is not a small thing to be able to do, least of all for someone who knows from the inside what it is to work without a record.

Your own will go on being uncounted for now. Hers does not have to.

If the recording is the part that keeps slipping — the payslip you keep meaning to sort out, the leave days living in your head — that is precisely what The House Keeper was built to carry. thehousekeeperapp.com

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is Monday 10 August 2026 a public holiday in South Africa?

Yes — and so is Sunday 9 August. Women's Day falls on a Sunday in 2026, and section 2(1) of the Public Holidays Act provides that when a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday is also a public holiday. Both days are public holidays, and the same pay rules apply to each.

2. What do I pay my domestic worker for a public holiday?

If it falls on a day she would ordinarily work, she is entitled to her daily wage whether or not she comes in. If she works it, clause 18 of Sectoral Determination 7 entitles her to at least double her daily wage. If it is not a day she ordinarily works and she comes in anyway, she is owed her daily wage plus her hourly wage for every hour worked. She cannot be required to work a public holiday except by agreement — reached on the day, or already set out in her contract.

3. How much annual leave does a domestic worker get?

Under Sectoral Determination 7 her default entitlement is at least three weeks' paid annual leave for every twelve months of employment — fifteen working days on a standard five-day week. You may agree instead on one day of leave for every seventeen days on which she worked or was entitled to be paid. For most schedules the two come out in much the same place, so what matters is being clear which of them you have agreed.

This post is general guidance, not legal advice. For anything beyond the day-to-day rules above — a dispute, a CCMA referral, a contract question — speak to a qualified labour-law professional.

Sources

International Labour Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (Geneva, 2018).

International Labour Organization, Making Decent Work a Reality for Domestic Workers (Geneva, 2021).

United Nations, System of National Accounts 2008 and the 2025 revision.

Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (Harper & Row, 1988).

South African History Online, "The 1956 Women's March in Pretoria."

Sectoral Determination 7: Domestic Worker Sector (2002) — clause 18 (public holidays) and Part E (annual leave).

Public Holidays Act 36 of 1994, section 2(1).

Basic Conditions of Employment Act 3 of 1983, extended to domestic workers on 1 January 1994; Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997.

Unemployment Insurance Contributions Act 4 of 2002.

Mahlangu and Another v Minister of Labour and Others (CCT306/19) [2020] ZACC 24.

Statistics South Africa, "Domestic Workers Face Slow Post-Pandemic Recovery," 12 November 2024.

National Minimum Wage from 1 March 2026, Government Gazette 54075.