Domestic Help - BPS
Posted by urufish on March 22, 2008
When you hire a person to work for you your household, you are supposed to subscribe them into the BPS (Social Insurance) scheme in Uruguay. The heading for cleaning staff is ‘Servicio Domestico’.
The fees have changed in the past several months–upwards. Our cleaning lady works for us 3 days a week. We listed her total monthly income from working for us as UYP5300/month. We pay her contributions to the BPS. They’re UYP2600/month - about half of her salary again.
It’s very important that you do this for 2 reasons. The first is an ethical one. These people make very little money, even by Uruguayan standards. Paying for their BPS entitles them to a better health program (well, it used to before the reform - not sure what it means now), and to a pension when they retire. Many Uruguyan domestics aren’t enrolled and when they’re old and cant work any more, they wont have this pension. The 2nd reason is CYA. If your employee reports you, especially after years of neglect, you’ll be backbilled, with fines. No matter how wonderful the relationship is with your employee, times change. In this case, not subscribing an employee really is a fool’s game.
This is a copy of what the monthly bill looks like, complete with all the various deductions and what they’re for. Double click to be able to read the details.
March 22, 2008 at 2:22 pm
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
March 22, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[...] Danny wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt When you hire a person to work for you your household, you are supposed to subscribe them into the BPS (Social Insurance) scheme in Uruguay. The heading for cleaning staff is ‘Servicio Domestico’. The fees have changed in the past several months–upwards. Our cleaning lady works for us 3 days a week. We listed her total monthly income from working for us as UYP5300/month. We pay her contributions to the BPS. They’re UYP2600/month - about half of her salary again. It’s very important that you do this for 2 reasons. The first is an ethical one. These people make very little money, even by Uruguayan standards. Paying for their BPS entitles them to a better health program (well, it used to before the reform - not sure what it means now), and to a pension when they retire. Many Uruguyan domestics aren’t enrolled and when they’re old and cant work any more, […] [...]
May 27, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Thanks for this info.
Just few calculations:
Here in Italy I’m paying a live-in domestic / maid (6 days) 1,000 euro, all included.
5,300 UYP /month for 3 day a week means at least 10,000 for 6 days.
Plus BPS : 15,000 UYP = 480 euro.
Taking into account that here (North Italy) bread is 4 euro/kg, this seems to imply that everywhere being poor is not a good idea