Worse Working Conditions of Domestic Workers

Domestic work has become an important sector of female employment the world over, though it remains the least regulated globally. Estimates of the number of paid domestic workers in India have shown a huge increase over the last decade with a clear trend towards feminization. These estimates have been highly contested. The NSSO data for 2004- 05 showed a dramatic increase in the number of women engaged in domestic service, but in the context of reported anomalies in this round, it could be faulty. However, even if the comparison is made between 1999-2000 and 2009-10, it is clear that, especially in urban India, domestic work accounts for a growing and increasingly significant share of total female employment. The number of women employed in the sub categories of the industrial category ‘private households with employed persons’ as per the’2009- 1 0 employment data, (which itself is a huge under representation due to definitional ambiguities and invisibility issues), is 1.83 million. This shows more than four-fold increase over the 10-year period from 1999-2000. The share of female workers in this category has also remained as high at 68 per cent. Unlike many other countries, this upsurge has been driven by a;l increase in ‘part time’ workers in India, though the number (and demand) for full time workers is also on th~ rise. Most urban middle class households prefer part- timers due to a variety of reasons; the most important being the possibility of engaging cheap labour with no responsibility, easy hire and fire. This system frees the employer from the responsibility of boarding and lodging. It enables the employer to keep an array of workers if required to carry out different tasks, which are fragmented. The workers undertake diverse tasks, including housecleaning, laundry, cooking, dishwashing, care of children and the elderly, shopping, fetching and dropping children from/to school, and other activities associated with the regular and smooth functioning of a family-household. The part time system allows employers to hire according to their budget and to employ suitable workers for each task, where caste and other demogra characteristics are also considerations. Thus, often workers from lower castes are employed in cleaning tasks, while workers from upper castes are hired for cooking. Because of the limited data sets that are available for intense enquiry and due to the highly informal nature of employment relations, it is difficult to arrive at a definite macro profile of workers in the sector. However, the available data provides broad contours, which offer useful insights into the emerging social and demographic characteristics of these workers. While the increase in the number of domestic workers across all sub- categories — housemaid/ servant, cook, and governess/babysitter -is noteworthy, it is the all encompassing housemaid/ servant that shows the maximum increase, accounting for 92 per cent of all female domestic workers. This reflects the nature of tasks often assigned to these \\’orkers such as sweeping, mopping and other cleaning tasks. Child care and assistance in cooking and other odd chores are often subsidiary tasks which are expected from every domestic worker when demanded. Such tasks never form part of the negotiation, though multi-tasking is expected from every worker to meet any contingency. The assumption that all house work tasks flow naturally from any women governs these generalisations to a great extent. The current terminology —’maid’ —has thus come to denote an omnipresent all- in-all entity, who is expected to possess all the ‘natural’ skills including high levels of social competence. An Overview of Workers and Work Relations The macro data for 2009-10 shows that a large proportion of domestic workers are between the ages of 31-40 (33.3 per cent) and 41-50 (22.6 per cent). The share of those above 50 years also stood higher at 17 per cent. Currently, married women account for 55 per cent of domestic workers, followed by widowed or divorced/separated women (30.4 per cent). The age and marital profile highlight that more than the unmarried an~ younger age cohorts it is older women (for whom possibly other employment opportunities are few) who take up domestic work. The naturalisation of house work in a women’s life by marriage is also another factor that would explain the increased presence of older women in this sector. Most domestic workers have little formal education. In 2009-10, 54 per cent were “illiterate,” and 83 per cent had less than middle level schooling, an indication of their poor socio- economic backgrounds. The most interesting pattern, evident in many studies, is the presence of high proportions of women from all social groups, clearly bringing out the gendered understanding of this work more sharply than any other occupation. The category of OBC accounted for the highest proportion (32.4 per cent) followed by SC workers (31.2 per cent) and upper castes (28.4 pr cent). Across all castes, migrants account for the largest share of domestic workers, with the supply of workers maintained through a regular flow of distress migrants from varied and shifting rural origins (Neetha & Palriwala, 2011). In this context, the migration of tribal women to urban centres to take up domestic work is an important development that needs special mention. One of the preferences for tribal girls for domestic work, as established by many field studies, is the absence of caste informed notions of household work (Kasturi, 1990, Neetha, 2004). Micro level studies show that irrespective of the profile of workers and nature of domestic work, the employment and conditions of work in paid domestic work are highly informal with low wages. The details of work, the wage structure and service packages are very complex and variable, making it problematic to arrive at a uniform wage rate for domestic work even for a specific locality (Neetha, 2009). Wages and other conditions of work vary across region and even by locality in the same town/ city. Apart from the variation across larger divisions (such as cook, cleaner, and baby-sitter), wage rates vary within categories depending or~ the nature of contract and other specificities of work and the worker. Further, personal relations are crucial in setting the terms of the contract -be it is wages, leave or other entitlements. Paid domestic work is different from other forms of paid work with very specific workplace characteristics, the content of which is both historically and culturally embedded. It undermines the notion of a division between the domestic spheres as private, separate from the public sphere. For example, the usual labour market distinction of part-time and full-time, which is purely based on daily working time, is often used to analyse employment relationships in domestic work resulting in ambiguities in legislative entitlements governing this sector. Part time domestic workers are distinct from part time workers in any other informal sector of employment. Most ‘part- timers’ undertake same or multiple/heterogeneous tasks in different households. While ‘part- time’ from the point of view of the employer, their aggregate daily hours of work across all the households across all employerhouseholdstend to be equal to or greater than that of a ‘full time’ worker in a factory or construction site (as defined by ‘normal working hours’ under labour law). Yet another specificity of the sector is that of live- in and live-out workers, which falls outside of any informal sector framework. Personal relations govern entry into work and conditions of work, and the contours of the workplace being the four walls of the house makes this sector qualitatively different. One could add further dimensions that complicate the sector calling for a separate framework of analysis. The social characteristics and work related commonalities shared between paid and unpaid domestic workers on the one hand and paid domestic workers and informal workers in other sectors on the other hand underscore the inextricable entanglement of gender with other axes of stratification, particularly class. State regulation has been almost absent in this sector. However, there have been intensified efforts by activists and unions to introduce legislation at the state and national levels. The debates around legislation or recognise the need to coyer various labour rights of domestic workers, but the pathway to achieve this is highly contested. While to some legal protection can be achieved through a mere extension of existing labour laws, many activists have demanded a separate legislation. The demand for separate legislation is rooted in the specificities of the sector and its workers. Accordingly, a national policy on domestic work was drafted in 2012, pending approval of Parliament, the fate of which is yet unclear. Of late, some state governments have opted to Include domestic workers under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. After much lobbying, domestic workers were brought within the ambit of the Unorganised Workers Social Security Act, 2008 and Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace Act, 2013. Welfare boards exist in a few states that partly address some of the social security dimensions though actual operation and coverage is an issue. The recent and most acclaimed inclusion of domestic workers under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) clearly symbolises the state’s approach to this sector. To register as a domestic worker under the scheme, verification is required from two out of the four authorised agencies such as the police, employers’ resident’s welfare associations, the employer and unions. No other worker in the country is at the mercy of so many diverse interests groups in order to claim their eligible entitlement, which only reaffirms the states’ apathy and neglect, deliberate or otherwise, rooted in the patriarchal and gendered conceptualisations of domestic work. (The paper was presented at a seminar organized in Delhi by All India Working Women Forum. The author is with the Centre for Women Development Studies, New Delhi)