Proceedings of 11th International Business and Social Science Research Conference
8 - 9 January, 2015, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dubai, UAE. ISBN: 978-1-922069-70-2
Factors Affecting Domestic Worker Retention: A Binomial
Logit Model
Sonia N. Aziz1
While national Bangladeshi laws to uphold fundamental principles and protection of
rights at work exist, their implementation is virtually non-existent for domestic workers.
Challenges for workers engaged in the domestic sector remain despite the recently
enacted Bangladesh Labor Law of 2006 and subsequent amendments in 2013. These
laws have recently come under scrutiny due to international exposure of working
conditions for garments factory workers, and as currently written, do little to protect
domestic household workers. This is partly because “more than 87% of workers in
Bangladesh engage in informal economy where wages, legal and social protections
are inadequate or non-existent.”2 Domestic workers labor under similar working
conditions to garments factory workers (major cases of abuse are routine, a typical
day for a domestic worker involves working for 16 hours and earning less than $1 a
day). Domestic helpers in Dhaka, Bangladesh have begun to shift their focus from
household employers to office jobs despite the fact that job description and salaries
are roughly equivalent. Survey evidence suggests that office jobs offer better
treatment of domestic workers than household jobs. This study estimates the value of
the treatment workers receive in household jobs as a proxy for an implicit wage, and
regresses factors affecting domestic workers’ job choices. A model of stochastic
decision making within a binary logit framework models the switch between domestic
and household jobs, and estimates the effect (on the switch) of factors such as
gender, income, and employer characteristics. Regression results suggest that gender
and employer characteristics are significant in factors affecting job choice, and further
suggest that the presence of informal contracts significantly reduces the tendency to
switch. The results can help guide public labor policies, and examine whether factors
such as the presence of informal contracts have an effect on domestic worker
retention.
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1 Moravian College,210 Comenius Hall, Bethlehem, PA-18018 , USA, Email: aziz@moravian.edu,
2 International Labor Organizations, Decent Work Country Programme, 2012 – 2015
(http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/program/dwcp/download/bangladesh.pdf)