Glenda Daniels A Thokoza domestic worker who filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) is being sued in turn – for defamation – by her former employer. The domestic worker has received a lawyer’s letter from her former employer, a doctor, claiming R100 000 plus costs because she complained to his wife that he had made sexual advances.
It’s one of many stories of harassment beginning to surface involving these most vulnerable of South African workers – and an indication that sexual harassment in the workplace may well be increasing. The Thokoza domestic, Lizzie Setjeo, says the suit being filed by her former employer, whose identity is known to the Mail & Guardian, is an attempt to intimidate her into dropping her case, but she is going ahead. Now unemployed and a single mother of three children, Setjeo is awaiting a date for the CCMA hearing. When the M&G visited the doctor at his practice in Katlehong, he said he had spoken to his lawyers and had no comment to make. Since November 1996 the CCMA has heard about 19 600 cases from domestic workers, 17 800 of these have been unfair dismissals, says Nersan Govender, head of Case Management & Information Services. While only nine cases on the system show direct reference to violence/abuse/sexual harassment, within unfair dismissals many domestic workers have suffered sexual abuse and violence.
In another case, an HIV-positive domestic worker from Durban, Lindiwe Zama, says she was sexually harassed and then raped by her employer. Today she has an HIV-positive two-year-old daughter to support, the result of her rape. Zama never reported the alleged assaults because, she said, when she threatened to go to the police her employer – who had ignored her warnings that she was HIV- positive – said he would “just tell them that we were in love”.
Sexual harassment and ill-treatment of domestic and farm workers is rife, says the Sexual Harassment Education
Project’s Patricia Khumalo. They are the least protected workers in terms of unionisation and access to resources. Head of People Opposing Women Abuse Ntabiseng Mogale says domestic workers do not take up abuse cases because they feel powerless and, more often than not, there is collusion between the abuser and his wife or partner. “It’s often a class and race issue, but now it’s also happening between the same races. There is a lot of intimidation. They are told ‘if you leave your job no one will believe you; your children will starve; you won’t get another job’.” “The difficulty is that they can’t even get restraining
orders in terms of the Domestic Violence Act because the abuser is the employer, and not the partner,” says Michelle O’Sullivan, director of Women’s Legal Centre, which has handled a number of cases of sexual harassment.
“The reality is that the domestic workers’ sector is still very unorganised, so it’s difficult to obtain data. But there is a cycle of abuse.”