Myrtle Witbooi, born in Genadendal on 31 August 1947, became one of the most influential organisers of domestic workers in South Africa and internationally.
She began working as a domestic worker in Cape Town as a teenager. The work was poorly protected, wages were low and domestic workers were largely isolated inside private homes. Witbooi helped turn that isolation into collective organisation.
In the early 1970s, she was among domestic workers who started meeting to discuss working conditions and legal protection. Apartheid restrictions made formal organising difficult, but the group continued building a network and pressing for recognition.
From local organising to a national union
Witbooi helped establish the South African Domestic Workers Union. After that organisation was dissolved during the 1990s, she became a leading figure in the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union.
Her organising focused on employment rights, fair treatment and the recognition of domestic work as work. It also helped bring the experiences of workers employed in private households into national labour debates.
A global campaign
Witbooi later played a central role in the international movement that campaigned for labour standards for domestic workers. The International Labour Organization adopted Convention 189 on decent work for domestic workers in 2011.
She became the founding president of the International Domestic Workers Federation, which brought worker organisations from different countries into a global federation. The organisation remembers her as a leader who combined direct experience of domestic work with decades of union organising.
Witbooi died on 16 January 2023. Tributes from labour organisations highlighted a career that began in the unequal conditions of apartheid-era domestic service and grew into a movement with international reach.
Her birthday is an opportunity to remember how workplace change can begin with workers meeting, documenting common problems and organising around them. Witbooi’s legacy remains closely tied to the continuing struggle for decent conditions, social protection and respect for domestic workers.
