‘The backbone of this economy’: Fighting for maids’ rights in South Africa

In a thick blue notebook, in a neat round script, activist Pinky Mashiane keeps a list of women she has met.

There is Zodwa*, who told Ms. Mashiane that she was paid less than $5 a day to work full time as a maid in a suburban home; Thandi*, whose employer kept her ID as collateral so she wouldn’t steal; and Buhle*, whose boss once called her a baboon and told her to go back to her own country.

The notebook is a testament to an everyday form of injustice that pulses just beneath the surface of South African life. More than a million people here, most of them women, are domestic workers, a catch-all term for