Uruguay's Domestic Workers Law and First Ratification of ILO Convention 189

Domestic work - cooking, cleaning and caregiving in private homes - is one of the most female-dominated and historically unregulated occupations in the world. In 2006, Uruguay's Law No. 18.065 brought the country's domestic workers, overwhelmingly women, under the same core labour protections as other employees.

To extend standard labour and social-security protections - an eight-hour day and 44-hour week, weekly rest, a negotiated minimum wage, severance pay, protection against dismissal during pregnancy, and health coverage - to domestic workers.

The law established a tripartite wage council to negotiate sector-specific pay scales. In April 2012, building on this framework, Uruguay became the first country in the world to ratify the ILO's Domestic Workers Convention (No. 189), a treaty whose core protections its own 2006 law had already anticipated by five years.

The reform translated into measurable formalisation: registered domestic workers rose from roughly 38,500 in 2004 to 64,400 in 2012, a 67% increase, as workers moved from informal, unprotected arrangements into the social-security system.

The law's tripartite wage council continues to negotiate sector-specific pay scales, and Uruguay's model has been cited by the ILO as a reference point for other Latin American countries drafting their own domestic-work legislation. Coverage nonetheless remains partial: with roughly 120,000 domestic workers in a country of 3.4 million, a meaningful share still works outside the formal system.