Domestic Workers, the ‘Family Worker’ Exemption from Minimum Wage, and Gendered Devaluation of Women’s Work

Abstract

Domestic workers, who work in private households carrying out tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and care for children and the elderly, are overwhelmingly women and often from migrant and/ or ethnic minority backgrounds. This article examines a stark example of domestic workers’ exclusion from labour law protection, regulation 57(3) of the National Minimum Wage Regulations, which exempts employers from paying the minimum wage where a worker lives in their employer’s family home and is treated ‘as a member of the family’ in relation to accommodation, meals, tasks and leisure activities. Drawing on feminist theory on the divisions between ‘productive’ work outside the home versus ‘reproductive’ work within it, it argues that the exemption’s application has reflected gendered devaluation of domestic labour, stemming from its conflation with work normally performed for free by women in the ‘private sphere’ of the home. Focusing on the December 2020 Employment Tribunal (ET) judgment in Puthenveettil v Alexander & ors, which held that the exemption was unlawful and indirectly discriminatory on the grounds of sex, the article provides timely and in-depth analysis of the prospects for challenging the devaluation of domestic work in light of the limitations of legal protections for domestic workers in the UK.