". . . all household or other domestic servants": The Law and Domestic Service in Jamaica, 1838-1980

With the end of the legal enslavement of Africans and their descendants in Jamaica in 1834, a period of semi-slavery and ‘full freedom’ in 1838, there emerged the question of what was to be done to direct the tens of thousands of workers who were defined as “servants”, including domestic servants. Within four years of full emancipation, the colonial authorities passed the Masters and Servants Act which guided the expanding sector well into the twentieth century. Harsh in its conception of the connections between domestic (and other) servants and their employers, the law criminalized several aspects of the labour relationship, until its amendment in 1940. While the most onerous aspects of the law were repealed in 1940, workers in the sector remained excluded from the protections offered to most workers, including clearly defined working conditions and the minimum wage. Only with the revocation of the law in 1974, and the extension of the minimum wage to domestic workers in 1975 did the conditions of work for persons within the sector begin to take on properties of ‘modernity’, including clearly defined hours, wages and, sometimes, expectations. This paper examines the reasons for and the consequences of the laws which framed domestic service in Jamaica from the moment of full emancipation to the period immediately after the revocation of the Masters and Servants Law, placing the sector within the island’s movement from British colony to independent nation-state in 1962, and the emergence of a ‘democratic socialist’ government (1972-1980).