The union says that unless the government enforces the new law, employers will find employees who will work for less than the legal wage. At the very least, a minimum wage might remind employers that they need domestics' labor as much as domestics need their money. In the past, many South African whites expected maids, cooks and housekeepers as perquisites of the good life. Thanks to apartheid laws that made it difficult for black women to get anything but menial jobs, domestic servants were cheap, readily available and easily dismissed. That was the traditional South African way of life.
Domestic workers remain a ubiquitous part of the white world, and yet they never fully belong to it.
They spend their days taking care of their employers' homes and families, but they are held at arm's length and sometimes viewed with distrust. South Africans joke about employers who don't know their domestics' last names, even after a lifetime of service. An urban myth that circulated before the first democratic elections in 1994 warned that maids were making secret inventories of their employers' homes in preparation for the anarchy that would follow the change to majority rule. The rumor, of course, was untrue. The strip, which has been running in South African newspapers since 1993, is a national hit, and plans for a sit-com are in the works.