Although Asia has the world’s largest concentration of domestic workers, it lacks efforts to protect them legally, the International Labor Organization said on Thursday.

In its Domestic Workers Across the World report, the Labor group said that there are some 21 million domestic workers, 80 percent of which were women, in the Asia- Pacific region.

“But although Asia Pacific has more domestic workers than any other part of the world, the report found that the region lags other regions in guaranteeing domestic workers the basic work-related rights and protections that other workers have,” the organization said, referring to working time, minimum wages and maternity protection.

“Only domestic workers in the Middle East [many of whom are migrants from Asia] have weaker legal entitlements,” it added.

It said that some 52.6 million people worldwide are employed as domestic workers.

Of these, 21.5 million (41 percent) domestic workers are in Asia Pacific and 19.6 million (37 percent) work in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Asia-Pacific, one in 13 (7.8 percent) of all women with a waged job were domestic workers in 2010.

“Despite the significant numbers of people involved, the report found large differences between the rights and conditions experienced by domestic employees and other waged workers, particularly in Asia,” the organization said.

It said that only 3 percent of Asia’s domestic workers are entitled to a weekly day of rest, whereas over half of domestic workers have this right globally.

Also, 76 percent of domestic workers in Asia Pacific do not enjoy maternity benefits.

By contrast, Latin America provides maternity leave and other related benefits to their women workers.

“Excluding domestic workers from basic labor protection reflects an out-dated view that domestic work is somehow not real work,” Malte Luebker, a senior specialist at the Labor organization’s regional office for Asia and the Pacific and a principal author of the report, said.

“We must recognize that domestic workers don’t just care for families, but create value for the economy by allowing more workers, often with valuable skills, to leave the house and take up paid work. Domestic workers clearly deserve a better deal.”

Long work hours
The organization said that the average actual hours of work of the general employed population in Nepal is 39 hours a week, but domestic workers worked an average 52 hours. In Indonesia, the average working period of domestic workers is 51.6 hours; Malaysia, 65.9 hours; the Philippines, 52 hours; and Thailand 58.3 hours.

In 2010, some 96,500 workers from the Philippines went to work overseas, higher than the 63,000 in 1995.

Overall, the Labor association said that the Philippines ranked third among countries with the highest number of domestic workers in Asia, following India with 4.2 The Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia are the top three countries that deploy domestic workers to Hong Kong, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“Filipino migrant domestic workers are typically better educated, have a better knowledge of English and enjoy greater support from the sending country than migrant domestic workers from other sending countries and therefore command somewhat higher wages,” the ILO said.

It added that the Philippines showed great concern in protecting its domestic workers by ratifying the Domestic Workers Convention of 2011 of the Labor organization. It was the second country to ratify the treaty after Uruguay.

WITH A REPORT FROM BERNICE CAMILLE V. BAUZON