Decent Work for Domestic Workers. The case of Migrant Domestic Workers from Romania to Italy: a gender approach as a strategy fostering human rights protection.

Abstract

This thesis aims at analyzing the effectiveness of the Italian legislative framework in preventing, combatting and protecting victims of forced labour and trafficking in human beings through the lenses of a gender perspective in relation to the category of migrant domestic workers, drawing from the experience of Romanian domestic workers in Italy. The first chapter explores the existing international legal instruments, first concerning the establishment of global minimum standards for domestic workers, and then the ones related to modern slavery, namely forced labour and trafficking in human beings. The second chapter, on the other hand, deals with the evolution of the case law of Regional Human Rights Courts concerning the prohibition of slavery, servitude, forced labor and trafficking in human beings and the relative states’ obligations. The third chapter focuses on the case study of Romanian women, analyzing the underlying causes of vulnerability, in particular all the push factors that increase their risks of exposure to forced labor and trafficking in persons for the purpose of labour exploitation. The fourth and final chapter seeks to describe the Italian government’s legislation on domestic work as well as its welfare system and the role of migration policies in acting as a pull factor for migrant domestic workers. Furthermore, this chapter considers Italy’s transposition of international law provisions into its domestic law in an attempt to analyze its efforts in preventing these offences, identifying adequately victims among the category of domestic workers, and in providing effective protection to them by taking into account a gender perspective, which is argued in this thesis to be essential in the elimination of exploitation and in fostering human rights protection.