Providing social protection to domestic workers for inequality reduction and poverty eradication
Ms Sophoan is a domestic worker from rural poor family who is now living in Phnom Penh. Her earnings from this work represent the main income in her family with three children. However, these earnings stopped when she forced herself to take a break from physically demanding work due to unbearable pain at her third child 8 months pregnancy. What should have been a joyful time turned her very vulnerable as she was unable to pay for essential food, housing or medical costs.
Under pressures, Sophoan moved in with her elderly mother, also a domestic worker, for support only to worsen the situation. After the delivery, Sophoan needed to go back to work prematurely as she had to care for her mother and newborn baby, while paying back the loan of her birth costs. Stories like Sophoan’s happen every day in Cambodia. In general, domestic workers, mostly women, are the most vulnerable among other workers in term of living and working conditions. They have limited freedom of movement and association, low wages, no definitive employment contracts, or face overtime, inadequate labour, physical and sexual abuses or trafficking risk, in the worst-case scenario.
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