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The Department of Employment and Labour’s National Minimum Wage Commission is suggesting a pay boost for the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in 2024, which they recommend needs to be higher than the inflation rate.

They’re also proposing that by law South Africans are required to pay their hired help no less than the recommended minimum for 2024.

That means domestic workers in South Africa could receive a significant and mandatory pay hike.

The wage is currently set at R25.42 per hour as implemented in 2023, revised from the R23.19 per hour set in 2022 and the R21.69 per hour set for 2021.

If the Commission follows its recommendation, the minimum wage would increase by another 9% in 2024 – meaning the wage could be revised to R27.71 per hour in 2024, BusinessTech notes.

A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration employers can legally pay their employees for each ordinary hour worked. It is illegal for an employer to pay employees less than this minimum floor.

If hired help works for more than 24 hours a month, they are considered full-time employees:

If your domestic worker works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, they should be paid at least R4,433.60 a month – this up from R4,067.20 a month in 2023.

Later this month, the Employment and Labour Minister will announce the new rate of adjustment, which will come into operation on 1 March 2024.

Again, this is all on the floor of what you should be forking out for your household helpers. If you have more, you should be able to pay them more. Fair is fair. Work is work.

It is understandable, however, that the reality for households in South Africa is indeed much harsher these days – with many suffering great financial pressure over the last few years amid high levels of inflation, restrictive interest rates, and many socioeconomic ills brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and load-shedding – which means many middle-class households can no longer afford to employ domestic workers.

The pandemic really exasperated things for our domestic workers, with around 250,000 domestic workers losing their jobs at the time. As of the third quarter of the year, only 100,000 of those jobs have been recovered.

The good news is that this is improving some. The latest employment data from Stats SA shows that there was a slight improvement in the number of domestic workers employed in South Africa at the end of September 2023.

It can only get better, right?

[source:businesstech]