Jean-Pierre Garbade. Claim your rights – A legal guide for household employees in Switzerland (2013)

Présentation

If you work in a private household in Switzerland as domestic helper, driver, nurse, cook, gardener, if you have to take care of an elderly person or of children (“nanny”), you are what is referred to as a household employee. This booklet attempts to explain in simple language your rights, privileges and obligations as a foreign household employee in Switzerland. This means that if they are your rights, then your employer has obligations to ensure that you enjoy them. With this legal guide, we want to help you to know your rights and find the proper way to fully enjoy them.
Although it is mainly addressed to foreign household employees, it is also useful in fostering a deeper understanding among employers of the rights of their home workers. In this way it hopes to promote healthier employer helper relations.

A special chapter has been dedicated to the undocumented migrant workers. In this booklet we point out the special labour conditions for household employees in the four main Swiss cantons where most of you will be working, namely: Geneva, Vaud, Bern and Zurich.

Special attention has been given to the working conditions of household employees working in the home of a diplomat or an agent of an international organization.
Jean-Pierre Garbade is a lawyer with a wide experience in Human right matters and in the field of labour law – especially in relation with the status of employees of diplomats and foreign Missions. He has travelled many times to the Philippines.