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Overworked, underpaid, abused: The world of India's domestic workers
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Alison Saldanha | 20 Aug, 2017
In the decade after liberalisation, there was a nearly 120 per cent rise
in the number of domestic workers in India, says author Tripti Lahiri
in her recently released book, "Maid In India". Women constitute over
two-thirds of the workforce in this unorganised sector. They usually
come from backward regions such as Jharkhand, West Bengal and Assam, are
often barely of legal working age, their wages less than the minimum
fixed by the government. Their employers range from Indias elite to its
nouveau riche, many of who still believe in the traditional divide
between servants and masters. Abuse, mental, physical or sexual, of
these women is not uncommon. One such dispute between a family and their
Muslim domestic worker led to a riot-like situation in a gated
community in Noida on July 12.
Through anecdotal evidence, Lahiri
-- Asia Bureau Chief of Quartz, a digital media news organisation --
charts the sector's trajectory and details the business of brokers and
agents and exposes the workers' limited access to justice and
formalisation. She also draws from her own personal experiences of
engaging domestic help. Excerpts from an interview:
Q: "India has
always had servants in some form or the other," you write. What have
been the trends over the last century in the sector?
A: In 1931,
the Census classified 2.7 million people as "servants". By 1971, the
Census found just around 67,000 people doing that work. A lot of that
had to do with changes like the departure of a large class of people
able to hire help -- British colonial administrators, for example -- and
the fact that in the first decades after independence people weren't so
well-off and almost all women who stayed home did their own work.
But
suddenly, between 1991 and 2001 there was a 120 per cent increase in
the numbers of domestic help. It's true that India has seen stagnation,
even a shrinking, in female labour participation rates long-term. But
because of the immense growth of the population, the absolute numbers of
women working outside the home have gone up.
The Census shows
the numbers of female workers aged 15-59 went up 17 per cent between
2001 and 2011. In cities, it went up over 70 per cent from around 14.7
million in 2001 to 25 million in 2011. That trend is driving a demand
for help. Again, more people are prosperous, so even when women in
affluent households stay home, those homes can still afford -- and want
to -- hire help.
Q: Indian women do about 35 hours of
housekeeping chores a week while Indian men do two -- the worst country
ratio. What does this tell you about the country's domestic-service
sector?
A: For me, those numbers really highlighted the
difference between women and men in India, and the amount of time that
women spend waiting upon men. In the period in the 2000s when official
statistics noted the numbers of women in the workforce fell, other
official studies found that women were doing more unpaid housework. That
means if you move out of the paid workforce, you take on more unpaid
work at home, which is just considered a part of normal familial duties.
Whether you are a professional domestic worker, a housewife, or a
white-collar professional, chances are that you are doing a whole lot
more cleaning, cooking and childcare than your equivalent Indian man.
Q:
More people are educated today than in the 1980s. In 1981 the literacy
rate was 43.5 per cent -- as of 2011 it was 74.04. The trend is
particularly pronounced for women. Despite this, why is the domestic
service sector growing at an accelerated pace?
A: I think this
has to do with the same trends that I mentioned earlier, relating to
greater urban affluence and more women working in cities. There are also
more young women enrolled in school than ever before. If they go on to
college and work in the future, they are also likely to want to hire
domestic help.
Q: Startups and other organisations attempt to
bring these informal workers into the formal space, but your book tells
us the formalisation process has not been as successful. What are the
obstacles?
A: I'd say there are two big obstacles. What people
think they should pay is really set by what people around them are
paying -- basically by the micro-economy they live in. So it can be
really hard to convince people to pay more and if they agree to pay a
lot more than their peers, they might end up expecting a lot more in
return and being less flexible with their workers. Conversely, even
though workers might be open to banding together and demanding that
wages be at a certain level, they can't control an influx of migrants
willing to undercut them and work for less. But if there were more
states with a law specifying a minimum wage for these workers, it would
help.
Q: In your research how often did you find maids
approaching the courts for justice against abuse? What are the
challenges they face?
A: Anecdotally I'd say that it's certainly
not a first-resort option for women who aren't able to collect pay or
who are facing other problems. I'd also say there's a real feeling that
the employers are "big people", and it's going to be difficult to get
police to take their complaints seriously. Most often women want to
leave a bad situation, rather than file a complaint.
Q: What did your research tell you about the social mobility of this class of labourers?
A:
There definitely is mobility but it can take more than one generation
to happen. So the child of a young woman who comes to the city as a
"24-hour" worker is probably not going to jump into the white-collared
classes. But the child of a woman who has been working in Delhi for
decades might well be able to. I met a woman in her 50s who started out
as a cleaner in her teens and was a housekeeper in central Delhi when we
met; her son worked at a top think-tank and, to my mind, is part of the
Indian elite.
Q: Why did you focus your research on the Delhi-NCR region?
A:
India is a really varied country and people's relations with the help
are pretty different, west to east, north to south. But Delhi/NCR is the
capital, where its wealthiest and most powerful reside, which is why it
seemed to me that looking at how well Delhi handles this relationship
was really important, and maybe was a proxy for how India as a whole
handles inequality and class.
Q: Which regions of India serve as the main sources of domestic labour and why?
A:
The reasons that some states are "maid-sending" regions and others are
not is down to the weakness of the economies of those areas. In the same
way that there are multitudes of micro-economies in the capital, the
country is a collection of pretty different economies -- compare the
minimum wages of Maharashtra and Jharkhand. It wouldn't be unfair to
compare the wealth of Delhi and its pull on the people of Jharkhand or
other eastern states to the dynamic between the United States and Mexico
in the 1990s and early 2000s. For the same reason, you might hear
people say that there are no Punjabi maids because the state is too
rich. That's not entirely true. But because the state is wealthier,
their domestic workers are of a more advanced level: They have the
knowledge and the connections to find work in Singapore, rather than
Delhi. But that's a topic for another book.
(In arrangement with
IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism
platform, with whom Alison Saldanha is an assistant editor. The views
expressed are those of IndiaSpend. Feedback at respond@indiaspend.org)
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