An International Research Project on the Social Co-Operative Model for Underserved Female Domestic Workers' Empowerment

Background and Purpose: According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), currently there are at least 53 million domestic workers worldwide and 83% of domestic workers are women. Around the world, female domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses with respect to their working conditions. They often work for excessively long hours, with little to no pay, and with almost no access to social protections. While most advocacy movement organizations for domestic workers are focusing on acquiring legal rights for domestic workers, a unique social co-operative model for underserved female domestic workers based on the feminist perspective is recognized in South Korea. The National Cooperative of House Managers (NCHM) was established in 2007. Social co-operatives developed to furnish welfare services to the “economically weaker layers of society” and “create employment for certain disadvantaged groups” (Vanek, 2001, p. 1 and 2). As a social cooperative, NCHM provides employment for underserved female domestic workers, provides structured empowerment training programs, and awards a certification of house/caring manager for domestic workers (NCHM, 2013). This research intends to investigate the mechanism through which NCHM members improve job performance by testing the mediation model of psychological empowerment of female domestic workers between their participation in decision-making process of NCHM and job performance. 

Methods: A written survey form was administered to 200 NCHM members from seven branches of the NCHM in South Korea. In this analysis, psychological empowerment (goal internalization, perceived control, received competences) was regarded as a potential mediation variable between participation in decision-making process (participation in organizational management, participation in strategic-making process, participation in measurement of organizational performance, etc.) and job performance (income, regularity of employment, and job satisfaction). Collected survey forms from 200 NCHM members were immediately codified to assure confidentiality. The structural equation model (SEM) was used to analyze and examine the roles and impact of independent variables (participation in decision-making process) and the potential mediation variable (psychological empowerment) to the dependent variable (job performance).

Results: Preliminary results suggested that participation in decision-making process of NCHM had significantly increase psychological empowerment, and member’s psychological empowerment was positively associated with job performance. When all measures of psychological empowerment were controlled, the links between participation in decision-making process and job performance was significantly reduced. These results suggest that female domestic worker’s psychological empowerment might mediate the relationship between their participation in decision-making process and job performance.

Conclusions and Implications: This research provides implications that co-operative model for female domestic workers could be effective in terms of improving women’s empowerment and their job performance. Especially, one of the essential social co-operative management skills-participation in decision-making process-significantly increases women’s job performance through increasing women’s psychological empowerment. Therefore, social workers or activists who are working for female domestic workers need to actively implement social co-operative model in order to improve female domestic workers’ empowerment and job performance, and this strategy needs to focus on providing more democratic decision-making process to members of a social co-operative.