Making an invisible care workforce visible: a survey of domestic workers in three cities in China

Abstract

Domestic workers are a fast-growing segment of the labor force in China, but their work remains invisible. Using a respondent-driven sampling survey data collected in Beijing, Jinan, and Changsha during 2019 and 2020 (N = 2,20), this study provides socio-demographic and work profiles of domestic workers in these cities. Most domestic workers are rural women with junior-high-school or lower education. They are predominantly informal workers with no labor contract and have no access to labor rights protections and social security. A majority of domestic workers have done overtime work that is often underpaid or unpaid. Live-in domestic workers work excessive hours and earn significantly less per hour than their live-out counterparts. While the hourly wages of child and elder care workers are significantly lower than those of other domestic workers, the hourly pay of elder care workers is the lowest. Despite the working conditions, domestic workers have high levels of job satisfaction probably partly due to their low perceived value of paid domestic work. Policy implications of this study include the formulation of specialized laws to protect domestic workers’ labor rights and regulate family employers’ behaviors, improving informal domestic workers’ access to social security, change the social norms that devalue care work mainly performed by women, and collecting systematic statistics of paid domestic work.