Employing more than one million people, domestic service is one of the largest sources of employment for black women in South Africa. In this article, we contend that, historically, the impact of apartheid has been to skew the analysis of employment relationships in domestic workspaces in South Africa so that the power asymmetry and exploitation that so characterise these relationships have been labelled an artefact of the racist apartheid regime and its legislation. By reviewing literature on domestic workers globally and drawing on a study into the impact of the Sectoral Determination for the Domestic Worker Sector, which was promulgated in 2002, we argue for a broader understanding of this relationship: one that takes into consideration its global similarities.

The brain drain has become one of the dominant realities within the South African economy. The official emigration statistics from South African sources inadvertently minimizes the seriousness of the threat, but emigration figures received from foreign countries are indicative of the size of the problem.Emigration, however, is not the only cause for the depletion of the human resource pool. Internal migration, pseudo-emigration and the influx of unskilled workers also negatively effect the composition of the human resource provision in the country. Murder, HIV/AIDS and related diseases severely impact industry and will increasingly contribute to the brain drain.A radical reduction of the skilled work force and a dramatic shift in the composition of the human resource pool towards unskilled labour negatively impact on industry and inhibits South Africa's ability to compete effectively in an increasingly global market.