Around 4,429 migrant domestic workers suffer labor irregularities in the Canary Islands

The Observatory of Social Rights of the Canary Islands (Odesocan) estimates 4,429 the number of migrant domestic workers who suffer some type of labor irregularity on the islands, which places this region among those most affected by this situation.

This foundation, established in October 2023 with the aim of "monitoring, analyzing, evaluating, informing, and defending the social rights of the citizens of the Canary Islands," as stated on its website, has reached this calculation after analyzing data from Social Security and related research, as reported this Wednesday in a statement.

The entity highlights the difficulty involved in investigating the conditions of undocumented migrant workers because "there is usually no data or the little that exists is presented in a fragmented way through qualitative research at specific times and geographies," which prevents reaching "a precise estimate of the people in this situation, even less so if we go into detail."

Although domestic work is one of the most invisible sectors, according to data from the University of A Coruña and the Platform for Home and Care Employment with Full Rights, one in four migrant women employed in it is in an irregular situation.

Odesocan warns that "being a foreign woman without a regulated administrative status in the Canary Islands means exposure to a degree of violence incompatible with a model of government legally bound to defend a social, democratic, and rule-of-law State," which contravenes what is established in Article 14 of the Spanish Constitution.

To quantify the number of migrant women working in domestic employment in the Canary Islands without a contract or registration with Social Security, this observatory resorted to "three methods that operate as complementary approximations to the phenomenon, given that labor irregularity is, by definition, opaque to administrative records and conventional statistical sources do not allow its measurement," it emphasizes in its note.

The analysis of the consulted information yielded an estimated range of between 718 and 4,506 migrant women in a situation of labor irregularity in domestic employment in the Canary Islands.

The lower limit (718) is the result of applying the only sectoral irregularity ratio available in Spanish literature, and the upper limit (4,506) is the affiliation deficit with respect to what would correspond to the Canary Islands due to its demographic weight, and it interprets this deficit as an expression of the structural irregularity of the archipelago.

The real figure is predictably located in the upper half of the range, given that the available evidence—the Canarian productive profile, the higher proportional incidence of irregular non-EU employment documented by Fedea and BBVA Research, and the affiliation deficit observed in Social Security records—converges towards structural informality that clearly exceeds the conservative scenario.

"In no case should they be interpreted as point estimates, but as the interval within which the phenomenon moves with the currently available public sources. Additional precision would require access to the Continuous Sample of Working Lives of the Ministry of Inclusion, which combines for the same person the CNO occupation, the affiliation regime, and nationality, and whose exploitation is proposed as a future research line," the entity states.