The president of the Management Confederation of the Dominican Republic (Copardom), Jaime O. Gonzalez, has called on the Chamber of Deputies to reject the ratification of Convention 189 of the International Labor Organization that deals with domestic workers. He said that this convention contradicts the Constitution of the Republic and that it would not achieve its objective of guaranteeing social security for this segment of workers. He complained that rigid regulations, inappropriate and inapplicable, like this convention, could lead people to stop hiring domestic workers, when this type of work is a source of employment for thousands of Dominican men and women.
Gonzalez pointed out that Convention 189 of the ILO assigns Ministry of Labor inspectors the task of visiting and inspecting the family home in order to ensure the fulfillment of the domestic workers’ labor requirements, a situation that is totally opposite to section A of Article 44 of the Constitution of the Republic that establishes the Right to Privacy and Personal Honor. He said that this contradiction will make it impossible to comply with the international regulation’s dispositions and for this reason, the same union organizations that are pushing for its approval as well as the ILO officials, will file complaints because of failures to comply in foreign forums and United Nations system agencies like the ILO itself.
“Given our position as the representatives of the employment sector before the talks on social and labor issues, we believe that in order to ratify the International Convention 189 without it becoming a source of international complaints for non-compliance, it is absolutely necessary to talk about aspects of the Dominican labor market, domestic work, laws related or tied to the Convention and the possibility of complying with the obligations that the country acquires if it adopts such a regulation,” says Gonzalez.