What happens when a previously uncovered labour market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages for domestic workers and find no statistically significant effects on the intensive or...

In South Africa social exclusion remains a problem due to the multiple and overlapping divisions in post-apartheid society and the lack of linking ties bridging the worlds of those who have plenty and those without. To quantify the potential benefit of such linking ties for socio-economic...

Recognizing that intrahousehold inequalities exist, this study focuses on the distribution of resources toward children across household types. A bargaining framework is used to test whether it matters who has control over resources. Results show that control over resources matters, as well as...

Les enfants employés en tant que domestiques constituent sans doute le groupe le plus important de toutes les catégories d'enfants au travail dans le monde. Pourtant, ce n'est que tout récemment que les milieux qui luttent contre le travail des enfants ont commencé à consacrer à ce...

El quinto Innocenti Digest se ocupa del grupo de trabajadores infantiles que probablemente sea el más numeroso y también el más desatendido: el de los trabajadores domésticos infantiles. Los escasos estudios disponibles relativos a esta 'mano de obra invisible' indican que en el 90% de los...

That 40,000 women work as household workers in Oaxaca City (population 450,000) is deemed “very high for a country as developed as Mexico” (Selby, Murphy and Lorenzon 1991:48; INEGI 2001). Ethnographic data collected among women currently and at one time working as either full-time or...

The fifth Innocenti Digest looks at what is probably the largest and most ignored group of child workers: child domestic workers. The limited research available on this 'invisible workforce' suggests that 90 per cent are girls, most are 12 to 17 years old, and some work 15-hour days. One of the...

This paper presents Filipino economic history as a way to provide a brief background to the events that precipitated one Filipino woman’s migration to the Middle East. Her story is not rare but shares in common patterns with the sto-ries of many other female contract workers, especially...

This paper examines and compares the occupational mobility of black and white women who worked in service occupations in the United States in their late teens and 20s. Rather than using a conventional methodology of hypothesis-testing based on a narrow set of variables, the study uses a...

What happens when a previously uncovered labor market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages for domestic workers and no statistically significant effects on employment on the intensive...