The invisible female worker

My column for Mathrubhumi (translated into Malayalam)

They sweep, they swab, they cook, they clean.  Not once in awhile, but every single day.  This would be a fair description of the average woman in India. But amongst them are also those who repeat this daily routine in their own home in someone else's house. India's domestic workers, estimated to be more than 90 million and largely female, are the silent army that ease the lives of millions of women, and men, by relieving them of these thankless daily jobs.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many fault lines in our society.  One of them is the lack of appreciation for this silent army of women. Even as we know that many middle class households are now being compelled to do these jobs for which they paid others, and they are perhaps realising the thankless nature of such work, we hear little by way of appreciation for domestic workers.

Instead, what one is gathering from middle class and elite neighbourhoods in the big cities, including Mumbai where I live, is that employers are actually refusing to pay the women who have worked in their homes for years even though their absence from work is because of the national lockdown. These privileged families think nothing of depriving a poor household of one of the few sources of a regular income.

That so-called "regular income", of course, is itself a scandal. Most often, it falls well below the minimum wage.  There are families who will not give their domestic help even a weekly off.  If the woman falls ill and cannot come to work, her wage is cut.  Few bother to find out where the woman who slaves in their homes every day lives, whether she has access to water, to sanitation, who else is there in her family, how much do they earn and is it enough to cover their expenses including ill-health.

This lockdown is the equivalent of the majority of India's domestic help going on strike.  (Families who have full-time live-in staff are obviously not affected.) But a strike means that the people striking are in a position to negotiate because they are organised.  In the case of domestic workers, there are very few instances where they have been organised, and even these have not yielded results in favour of the women. The reason is that in a labour surplus market, there are always women ready to work at a lower wage.

There have been efforts since 2008 to draft a policy for domestic workers, one that will ensure that they come under the ambit of existing laws that relate to the rights of workers — such as the Minimum Wages Act, the Trade Union Act, Payment of Wages Act, Workers’ Compensation Act, Maternity Benefits Act, Contract Labour Act and Equal Remuneration Act.  But nothing has happened so far.

One reason for this failure I believe is because the burden of domestic work always falls on the woman. In poor households, women do the major part of such unpaid work, which includes fetching fuel and collecting water.  In better off households, even those with domestic help and some modern appliances that reduce the drudgery, these tasks still fall on the women. As a result, our male-dominated political sphere has never understood the urgency of recognising the value of domestic work.

My hope, perhaps unrealistic, is that when this crisis finally abates, households that have had to do their own cooking and cleaning because there is no help will appreciate the contribution of these women, pay them a fair wage and recognise, above all, that they also deserve paid time off.