Brazil - Repository of Actions on Paid Domestic Work

Yes.   

Complementary Law No. 150 (June 1, 2025) Domestic Work Contract. Consult here.

Workers:  

The trainings provided by the Ministry and by the Labor Inspection Undersecretariat (SIT) are mainly focused on workers and employers understanding all aspects of domestic work legislation. Consult here.   

Employers:  

The Ministry has created an instruction manual for employers on their reporting and monitoring responsibilities within the term of the domestic employment relationship. The manual can be found here.  

Also, the SIT has held events on domestic work for employers where doubts about the rights of workers, decent work, and how to navigate eSocial are clarified.

In 2022, the Ministry launched a decent domestic work campaign where informative materials, courses and conversation roundtables were disseminated in order to inform workers, employers, and society in general about rights, legislation, and possible situations of discrimination, harassment, and violence within domestic work. Consult here.

The campaign sought to value work and domestic workers, which were demands presented by the national federation of domestic workers. It also had the objective of making the category of domestic workers visible and bringing it to public and institutional debate. The idea was to provide society with information on the legislation applicable to domestic work, raising awareness of the importance of complying with labor legislation, encouraging the filing of complaints for irregularities and preventing situations of exploitation, human trafficking and discrimination.  

Faced with the various forms of exploitation of domestic work, an attempt was made to address the issues of child labor, human trafficking, harassment, violence and discrimination, reporting on the characterizing elements and complaint channels. Emphasis was placed on the defense of fundamental human and labor rights, in addition to the fundamental rights of children and adolescents, pointing out the harmful effects of domestic child labor and its relationship with slave labor in this economic segment.   

The Ministry launched an application, Laudelina, so that domestic workers can find out about their rights, calculate their salaries, find the telephone number, address and email address of the organizations and unions in their cities, and denounce abuses, among other things. The complaint of abuse can be made through the application where the worker is indicated on the steps to follow. Consult here.  

In 2022, the Labor Inspectorate developed the “National Domestic Work Inspection Operation” providing guidance on the applicable legislation and notifying more than 5,500 domestic employers to submit documents providing the salary regularization of domestic workers. The National Operation had the participation of around 70 inspectors from 17 Brazilian states.  

It was an unprecedented initiative in the Brazilian Labor Inspectorate.  

In the Complementary Law No. 150, Article 44, states that “the verification by the Labor Inspector of compliance with the regulations governing the work of the domestic employee, in the area of the employer’s domicile, will depend on the prior programming and understanding between the inspector and the employer.” Within the same Article, other criteria and considerations in relation to inspection are indicated. Consult the Article here.  

Throughout 2022, the Labour Inspectorate held several social dialogue meetings with domestic worker unions and with housing and condominium unions from all over Brazil, with the aim of learning about the demands of the categories and informing them about the actions carried out by the Inspectorate and clarifying doubts about the applicable legislation and tax procedures.  

This demonstrates that the Government has a great interest in creating an alliance with the unions to disseminate information on the importance of joining and paying social security contributions.  

Dialogues outside the Labor Inspectorate were also developed significantly with other institutions such as the Labor Court and Higher Education Institutions, through conferences. Inter-institutional alliances were established with the Unified Social Assistance System, the Labour Inspectorate of Uruguay and Spain, and the Ministry of Justice.  

The application, Laudelina, contains a feature for domestic workers to be able to connect with unions where they live. This application was created in collaboration with the Ministry.  

Currently, Congress is in the process of ratifying ILO Convention 190.  

As of 2022, the issue of domestic work began to be widely discussed at the national level in the Labor Tax Audit, in a systematic and proactive manner, including aspects related to facing the submission of workers to conditions analogous to those of slaves, including the organization of frequent technical meetings between Labor Inspectors who deal more frequently with inspections related to domestic work. Dialogue roundtables were held in various regions of Brazil, with the participation of inspectors, chiefs of inspection, and administrative officials, seeking to disseminate the proper approach to domestic work throughout the administrative sphere of the Labor Inspectorate structure.  

The main results obtained with the implementation of the National Campaign for Decent Domestic Work was to initiate the implementation of the determination contained in ILO Convention No. 189, which establishes that member countries must establish complaint mechanisms and effective and accessible means to ensure compliance with national legislation on the protection of domestic workers. It also provides that they must formulate and put into practice measures related to labor inspection, the application of standards and sanctions, with due attention to the specific characteristics of domestic work, in accordance with national legislation.  

More specifically, the issue was presented for discussion within the tax agency and with society, as well as methodologies for the inspection of domestic work, initiating a long process of dissolving internal and external barriers in addressing the issue.  

The expectation is that the systematic confrontation of existing exploitations in the domestic work segment by the Labor Inspectorate will contribute to the reduction of informality, discrimination, harassment and violence at work.