Innovative approaches to regulating decent work for domestic workers in Côte d'Ivoire: Labour administration and the judiciary under a general labour code

• Author: Adelle BLACKETT,Assata KONÉ‐SILUÉ
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12127
• Date: 01 March 2019

International Labour Review, Vol. 158 (2019), No. 1

Copyright © The authors 2019

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2019

Innovative approaches to regulating

decent work for domestic workers

in Côted’Ivoire: Labour administration

and the judiciary under a general

labour code

Adelle BLACKETT* and Assata KONÉ-SILUÉ**

Abstract. The authors offer a contextualized analysis of judicial decisions ren-

dered during 1971–2013 in Côte d’Ivoire, where domestic work is regulated by a

general labour code. Assessments of those decisions, alongside qualitative interviews

of institutional actors, elucidate how innovative practices were mainly derived from

the code by attentive inspectors and by jurisprudence evolving to treat domestic

work like any other. Yet limitations emanating from the inability to grapple with

the specicity of domestic work are also identied. Reafrming that the regulation

of domestic work must embrace its duality (work like any other and work like no

other), the authors conclude with a call for an international community of learn-

ing on decent work for domestic workers.

* Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law and Devel-

opment; Director, Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory, Faculty of Law, McGill

University, Montreal, email: adelle.blackett@mcgill.ca. ** Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University

Félix Houphouët-Boigny; Member of the High Authority for Good Governance, Abidjan, email:

astakone2a@yahoo.fr.

The research for this article was supported by an International Development Research Cen-

tre (IDRC) Small Grant for Research Innovation. The interviews were conducted by both authors,

and the article was written by the rst author in consultation with the second. The authors wish to

thank the interviewees for their generosity with their time, expertise and invaluable insights. They

would also like to thank Gabriela Medici; Aristide Nononsi; Claire Thompson; colleagues at the

Inaugural Conference of the African Labour Centre held in Cotonou, Benin, in December 2015;

colleagues at the symposium on Labour Law and Development held during the 85th annual con-

gress of the Francophone Association for Knowledge (ACFAS) at McGill University in Montreal,

Canada, in May 2017; and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. They are very

grateful to Marie-Alice Remarais, Marion Rebière, Marion Sandilands and Yéfoungnigui Silué for

their research assistance.

Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and

publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

International Labour Review38

Decent work for domestic workers has moved from the margins of trans-

national solidarity efforts to become a central priority for the inter-

national community. The International Labour Organization (ILO) built on

innovative regulatory practices in a growing number of countries worldwide

(ILO, 2 010; Blackett, 2012) to adopt the Domestic Workers Convention, 2011

(No.189), and its accompanying Recommendation No.201.1 No longer ser-

vants, or “like one of the family”, domestic workers have received international

validation of their status as workers. The adoption of these two international

labour standards is expected to galvanize actors locally and transnationally to

promote their implementation in a broad cross-section of States. However, al-

though the process of developing these standards has helped to uncover the

dynamics of domestic work and their adoption calls for a regulatory response,

there is a risk that they may simply create an additional layer of legislation

without reaching the places where the working conditions for domestic work-

ers are actually mediated.

The African continent is the third largest employer of domestic work-

ers worldwide (ILO, 2 013, pp. 21 and 33),2 yet there is an alarming gap in the

existing legal knowledge of the regulation of domestic work, especially in this

region. One of the premises of this article is that assessments of implemen-

tation must go far beyond compiling state laws, particularly those of general

application. This article presents a country-specic contribution that reects

a preoccupation with offering close, careful and contextualized analyses of

regulatory schemes emerging in the global South in which domestic workers

themselves are the catalysts.3

Côte d’Ivoire is a classic example of a country that has regulated decent

work for domestic workers through a general labour code (Koné-Silué, 2014).

4

Article2 of the 1995 Labour Code and article 2 of the 2015 Labour Code de-

ne a “worker” as any physical person, regardless of sex, race or nationality,

who works for remuneration under the direction and “authority” of another

physical or moral person, whether public or private (the “employer”).5

1 Both of these international labour standards were adopted on 16 June 2011 by the Inter-

national Labour Conference during its 100th Session. See the introductory note in Blackett (2014).

2 It is recognized that the statistical base is extremely low in both West and East Africa, to

the point where the ILO hypothesizes that domestic workers may not actually have been counted

as workers in labour force surveys (ibid., p.35).

3 Another relevant contribution (dealing with South Africa) is Blackett and Tiemeni (2018).

4 Act No. 95/15 of 12 January 1995, establishing the Labour Code of the Republic of Côte

d’Ivoire, was published in the Journal Ofciel de la République de Côte d’Ivoire (JORCI) on

23 February 1995; it was in force throughout the timeframe of this study. On 2 0 July 2015, Act

No.2015-532 , establishing a new Labour Code, was adopted; it was published on 14 September

2015 and is currently in force, subject to the adoption of the decrees that it foresees. This study fo-

cuses on the application of the 1995 Labour Code but includes occasional references to the 2015

Labour Code. An Interprofessional Collective Agreement of 19July19 77 is also still in force.

See Koné-Silué (2014, pp. 14–17).

5 Both the 1995 and the 2015 Labour Code use the term “employee” (salarié). Seven cat-

egories of domestic workers are set out in Circular No. 1258/EFPPS/DERT of 20 August 1998 on

the application of the salary scale for 1998.