Photo credit: ITUC campaign on Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention, 2026
A new policy brief, Domestic Work, Digital Platforms and Labour Policy in South Africa, asks whether worker-owned platforms can deliver decent work for domestic workers where investor-owned apps have failed.
Ask a domestic worker what an app has done for her, and you may not get the answer the tech sector expects. She might tell you about the long trip across the city to a home she had never seen, the hours of waiting, and the booking that never came. She might also tell you the GPS tracking made her feel safer on the way there. Both are true, and this tension is at the heart of a policy brief authored by Dr Neha Vyas of Newcastle University Law School. The brief asks a question that matters beyond the domestic work sector: when investor-owned platforms reproduce the same old exploitation in a shiny new form, is there a better model, and can it survive?
The problem is the reach of the law
On paper, domestic workers are well protected through a layered legislative framework, including the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997 (BCEA), Sectoral Determination 7 (effective September 2002), the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 (LRA), the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act 130 of 1993 (COIDA), and the Unemployment Insurance Act 63 of 2001 (UIA).
The brief shows how little of these protections reach daily life. Wages are set by the employer and accepted out of fear. Contracts, where they exist at all, were described by workers as a toothless tiger. Claiming from the UIF means losing a day’s pay to queue at a Labour Centre. Fewer than 40 COIDA claims have been filed, and sexual harassment and verbal abuse were described as normalised, with the private nature of the home making it almost impossible to report. Migrant domestic workers carry all of this and more, often shut out of both formal protection and union membership.
Workers are anti-exploitation, not anti-technology
Domestic workers welcome the safety of digital job records and access to more employers. What they reject is the investor-owned model, where load shedding cuts the connection, data is expensive, transport is unreliable, and waiting time goes unpaid. Their objection is a business model that keeps the risk on the worker and the reward somewhere else. All of this is happening as the sector shrinks. Drawing on Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Surveys, the brief tracks domestic work employment falling from around 1,2 million before the Covid pandemic to roughly 839 000 by mid-2025. When the work itself is disappearing, the question of what kind of work remains becomes urgent.
Can a platform cooperative do better?
The WeCare cooperative, developed through UWC’s Centre for the Transformative Regulation of Work (CENTROW), treats workers as co-owners with a say in how the platform runs. It runs evening workshops on digital skills and opens routes into fast growing areas like elderly care, childcare and health work. It is, in principle, the decent-work alternative the sector has been waiting for. The market is dominated by SweepSouth, an investor-backed platform with a loyal customer base and the network effects that lock newcomers out. The Cleaning Fix, a non-profit that passed every cent of its fees to workers, has paused operations, a sign that good principles alone do not pay the bills.
The cooperative sector carries an 88% failure rate. Add expensive data and a workforce that is often unbanked or undocumented, and the obstacles are plain. Viable in principle is not the same as sustainable in practice.
Worker representation in policy design and decision making
The brief’s case is that worker-owned platforms can deliver decent work, but not on their own. Worker platforms need seed funding, public procurement, and infrastructure, including reliable power, affordable data, working transport, and childcare. They need a COIDA and UIF awareness drive run with trade unions, and pay for the waiting time the gig model currently ignores. And they need reform that builds on Sectoral Determination 7 rather than importing gig-economy labels workers neither want nor recognise.
Running through all of it is one demand that should be familiar to every LRS reader. Workers must help write the law that governs them. The evidence in this brief came from domestic workers as authors, not subjects. The reforms it proposes put trade unions like SADSAWU where they belong, at the centre.
Can worker-owned platforms deliver decent work where investor-owned models have not? The honest answer is yes, if we choose to make them work. The full brief sets out how.
Read the full policy brief: Domestic Work, Digital Platforms and Labour Policy in South Africa.
RELATED ARTICLES
Are we ready for platform co-operatives in South Africa?
How this worker co-operative made it in South Africa
