World Congress of Domestic Workers
With Ernesto Murro
“Foreign domestics
need special protection”
need special protection”
A large number of the foreign workers who have recently migrated to Uruguay, which has become once again an immigration country, are in the domestic sector and need special protection, Ernesto Murro, head of the country’s Social Security Agency (BPS), said.
Murro was one of the guest speakers at the foundational congress of the International Federation of Domestic Workers held in Montevideo on October 26-28, with Rel-UITA (IUF Latin America) as co-host.
The head of the BPS started off speaking with emotion of the role that the IUF and its former regional secretary Enildo Iglesias had played in the re-organization of the labor movement during the dictatorship. “At that time, the IUF was one of the few places where we could meet to rebuild our sole trade union confederation, the PIT-CNT,” he said.
“We might not realize the historic importance of this congress,” he continued, “because generally the organizations that represent domestic workers are weak, they have problems, they’re not like large unions, which have all sorts of resources. Which is why we have to support initiatives such as this; the fact that the IUF goes all out here is very important,” he added.
According to Murro, Uruguay has made “special efforts to regularize the situation of domestic workers, and that has been translated, on the one hand, in the ratification of ILO Convention 189 and, on the other, in a law drafted with the agreement of all three parties (government, workers, and employers) that includes provisions that are not very common, such as the possibility of verifying compliance through inspections conducted in the homes of employers.”
This inspection power was what made it possible, for example, for the state to “regularize the situation of a group of Bolivian women who were employed under totally irregular working conditions in the home of one of the richest families in the country, forcing the employers to pay the domestics what they were owed,” he highlighted.
Living with immigration
The law also made it easier to identify and regularize the situation of “more than half of the domestics working in the country. There’s still the other half,” Murro said.
“As of 2010, after decades of driving people out, this has become once again an immigration country. In the last three years, some 25,000 foreign workers have registered with the Social Security Agency, and a significant number of them are domestics. We’ve held specific meetings with Peruvian and Bolivian women workers,” Murro said.
Uruguay is a signatory of “two of the three multilateral agreements that exist worldwide that apply to this sector, the Ibero-American agreement and the Mercosur agreement,” but more progress is needed in terms of bilateral and multilateral agreements with other countries.
Domestics move from country to country, and if there are no social security agreements in place that allow them to accumulate years of service workers will suffer more than what they already suffer in their countries. A domestic working a few years in Bolivia, a few more in Spain, and some years here must be able to accumulate those years towards a more or less fair pension,” he explained.
Uruguay’s current legislation provides equal rights for national and foreign workers, “but immigrants are naturally more exposed to abuses and discrimination from locals, and we need to be constantly alert to protect their rights.
We have to learn to live with immigration, to integrate immigrants, not reject them,” he concluded.
Photo: Rel-UITA