ABSTRACT
This chapter moves from an overview of domestic service in South Africa during apartheid to analysis of how domestic workers informed labor policy changes after 1994. Building upon the prominent national transition and its impact on domestic work it proposes an analysis of South Africa's involvement in the movement to globalize standards for care labor. The chapter suggests that South Africa's domestic work policies must be evaluated as part of a longer-term national transition. South Africa's transition to democracy led to major changes in state policies concerning domestic care labor. While social and labor policies emerged as defining features of the new nation, domestic workers' collective organization and transnational activism played a central role in establishing some of the world's most progressive protections on paper. The prevalence of domestic labor in contemporary South African society stems from the apartheid ideology of separateness through social relations of servitude in private households.
