Invisible labour, visible resistance: Domestic workers fight for rights

On Labour Day, we commemorate the historical struggles of workers' movements in a world and country where labour rights are increasingly ceded to the interests of capital, writes Amala Dasarathi.

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DOMESTIC labour is an inseparable part of every person's life. While women perform both paid and unpaid domestic work, paid domestic work resides squarely in the informal economy, being performed by poorer, more socially marginalised women.

Paid domestic work constitutes one of the largest informal employment sectors for women in India. The domestic work sector is often overlooked and undervalued, being a form of reproductive labour.

The devaluation of paid domestic work is produced at the intersection of labour relations determined by caste, class and gender inequalities, in addition to a lack of formal or social recognition as a productive workforce.

It is imbued with characteristics of informal labour such as low pay, extended working hours, low status, and a lack of laws that ensure decent working conditions, fair employment terms and social security.

As a result, domestic workers do not receive work-related benefits such as maternity leave and social security. They are not uniformly legally entitled to decent working conditions, minimum wages, weekly holidays, paid leaves or reasonable working hours. Long working hours, physical and verbal abuse, sexual harassment and meagre wages are all prevalent in the sector.

During the Covid pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, paid domestic workers were amongst the first class of workers to lose their jobs without any means of seeking recourse.

Loss of employment in other informal sectors following the pandemic has resulted in an influx of women seeking employment in domestic work, severely driving down wages in the industry.

The four 2020 labour codes, which will subsume and replace existing labour laws once they come into force, do not include domestic workers within their ambit by explicitly leaving out private households as workplaces, continuing to leave domestic workers without legal protection.

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Against this backdrop of persistent marginalisation of domestic workers and lack of State support and recognition of their rights, domestic workers' unions show us the power of organising and building political and worker consciousness through the strategies they deploy to improve their working conditions.

Domestic workers tend to have multiple employers, in addition to being physically and otherwise invisible. They also do not have a formal employer–employee relationship with their employers, and no formal documentation ties them to their employment.

Their work is fragmented and dispersed, often taking place across multiple private homes, as opposed to conventional settings of formal employment where groups of workers gather.

As a result, domestic workers have been perceived as difficult to organise as a class of workers in a traditional trade union format. However, despite these challenges, domestic workers have been unionising globally and in India, raising class consciousness amongst domestic workers as a labouring force and finding unique ways to assert this consciousness as active actors in the labour market.

They resist being invisibilised and disenfranchised through mobilisation and unionisation. Through our conversations and work with domestic workers' unions, we have observed several unique ways in which they insert themselves into the labour market as active agents.

They use State machinery and develop their own strategies to find ways to create better working conditions and bargaining power for themselves, thereby resisting being subjects of State and social apathy and oppression.

Wage cards and wage setting by domestic workers' unions

While some states have recognised domestic workers as being covered by minimum wage law as a category of workers, implementation of the law for them is non-existent, mired in apathy from State authorities and historical caste and gender relations.

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In addition, unions find that the minimum wage for domestic work is too low and does not amount to a living wage. How states calculate it also does not consider many of the lived realities of domestic work, such as time and money spent travelling between jobs by domestic workers and factors unique to realistic wage-setting in domestic work, such as the number of family members or rooms in a house.

To address these inadequacies, domestic work unions such as the All Meghalaya Domestic Workers Union and Gharelu Kamgar Sanghatan, Gurgaon, have been developing and deploying their own wage cards or rate cards for their members to use in wage negotiations with employers.

The National Domestic Workers' Movement notes that domestic workers utilise rate cards in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. These cards function as an alternative to the minimum wage.

The All Meghalaya Domestic Workers Union uses strategies similar to the government's in publicising their wage card, such as sending press releases to the media and holding press conferences.

Like the State's minimum wage notifications, unions' wage cards are also typically divided into distinct categories of work, with a separate wage set for each category of tasks and whether the work is part-time or full-time.

The wages set out in the wage cards are calculated based on union members' average monthly expenditure on necessities such as rent, school fees for their children, groceries, travel expenses and household utilities.

Through wage cards, unions keep up-to-date with their members' needs, revising the wage cards every few years and accounting for disparities and the changing expenses of their members.

For instance, the All Meghalaya Domestic Workers Union has recognised that their members spend prohibitively high amounts on travelling to work. It intends to account for this in the next revision of its wage card in 2025.

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While the use of wage cards has been met with both resistance and acceptance by employers, the All Meghalaya Domestic Workers Union, for instance, says that it has increased wages for workers across the board, including migrant domestic workers who were earlier paid the most poorly.

The wage cards of unions function as a form of resistance to employers' groups setting wages for domestic work both formally, in the form of resident welfare associations that establish uniform wages for categories of domestic work tasks, and informally, in the form of employers who meet and discuss that they will not pay above a specific wage for a particular category of task. 

Unions skilling workers and acting as placement agencies

The exploitative practices of private placement agencies that place domestic workers in jobs with employers have been well documented. Groups, unions and organisations run and managed by domestic workers such as Nirmala Niketan also insert themselves into the labour market for domestic work as active agents by placing domestic workers in employment but in ways that seek to further their rights and access to good working conditions.

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Many such groups specifically try to place migrant domestic workers in full-time, live-in employment, an area where placement agencies primarily work, while ensuring they are paid fairer wages than they would otherwise receive.

Unions find that their placement work helps prevent unsafe migration and trafficking of domestic workers, as there is a paper trail and information on the employment of domestic workers readily available to the union.

Unions also find that domestic workers they place receive higher wages than domestic workers who approach employers as individuals and then get hired. By undertaking the placement of domestic workers, unions are challenging the functioning of placement agencies that take a commission from both the employer and domestic worker, with domestic workers continuing to earn low wages.

Recently and increasingly, the State's response to the issue of poor wages earned by domestic workers is to make workers more responsive to market forces. This is done through formal bodies such as the Domestic Workers' Sector Skill Council, which is set up by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

These initiatives are touted as a way for domestic workers to move from the 'unskilled' workers to the 'skilled' workers category, but without any of the necessary regulatory infrastructure for this to occur.

As Neetha N. observes, "It has been noted that the skill development programmes have a civilising mission rooted in an unequal power relationship. The focus on bringing in behavioural changes in workers whereby docility and submissiveness are furthered even in a market relationship underlines the approach of the skill development projects."

Domestic workers' collectives and unions are responding to this shift in the government's approach by also skilling domestic workers in ways that actually work for them.

SEWA and SEWA Delhi have provided skills training to domestic workers for several years, which helps them have skills and information to negotiate better wages.

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The National Domestic Workers Movement has also been skilling domestic workers so they can "learn a variety of new marketable skills". The All Meghalaya Domestic Workers Union provides domestic workers with training according to the distinct categories of work set out in their wage cards instead of following the State's skilling methods, which they find cater to domestic work taking place in establishments such as hotels and hospitals, not households.

Building class consciousness

Given the historic devaluation of domestic labour, whether within one's own home or another home, unions find that domestic workers also undervalue their work.

Additionally, given the flexible, dispersed nature of their jobs across multiple households, where they largely do not interact with other domestic workers, domestic workers find it hard to formally identify as part of a workforce outside the context of unionisation.

The lack of legal regulation and opportunities to redress grievances also exacerbates this.

General secretary of the Domestic Workers Rights Union, Geeta Menon elaborates: "Domestic workers do not understand that domestic work itself is demeaning, demeaned and devalued. So, once you are devalued as a person, once your work in your own house is devalued, being devalued outside in the place of work is always naturally linked.

"So, women must get out of this mentality that I, as a woman, in my house am respected, but in my workplace, I am not respected, or the other way around."

Constantly working, either in their own homes or at their workplaces, domestic workers also find it hard to find the time to engage actively in union activities.

Despite these challenges, with time and involvement with the union, domestic workers have begun to assert themselves as a workforce deserving of identity and rights.

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Through building class and political consciousness amongst their domestic worker members, unions dislodge this stereotyping of domestic work as unskilled and unproductive labour.

Unions observe that their members can be more assertive at work, with the support and solidarity of other union members, to ask for higher wages, take leave from work and seek better working conditions. They can also take on leadership roles within the union and assert their dignity as domestic workers without associating their jobs with shame.

Reshma Talwar, a domestic worker leader from Goa, described her experience with the Goa Domestic Workers Union thus, "When I would tell people that I do domestic work, then I used to feel ashamed that I was doing domestic work, and the person to whom our introduction was given would give us a cheap look.

"Once I registered in the union, I slowly learned the value of domestic work. Slowly, I attended meetings and worked with the union, and I realised that we do the work we do legally, and it is our right. Whatever work we do, we do it legally, and we want respect for that.

"I learnt that as we work in domestic spaces, we can say that we are domestic workers and work in domestic work. There is a name for this work. Domestic work is also decent work. When your house is clean, then your mind is peaceful. And we come to do your domestic work, leaving our own houses."

On Labour Day, we commemorate the historical struggles of workers' movements in a world and country where labour rights are increasingly ceded to the interests of capital. Domestic workers' struggles and assertions remind us of the quiet and constant power of labour struggle.

As Mangala Eknath Bhavaskar, president of the Maharashtra Rajya Ghar Kamgar Sangh, told me, "We believe that remaining silent will not get us anywhere, so we actively pursue our rights. Even if laws prevent us from sitting at the door, we assert our rights under the Constitution."