THE ILO CONVENTION ON DOMESTIC WORKERS (C189) was adopted in 2011 with India supporting it. Over a decade later, India continues to debate ratifying the convention despite being the largest employer of domestic workers across the world. Estimates vary that there are as many as between twenty-five and eighty million domestic workers in India. The main reason for non-ratification, as cited by the government of India, is that our existing legal framework does not provide the protections required under C189, particularly regarding the equal treatment of domestic workers with other workers in the country.
Since then, the political dispensation that was in power in 2011 has changed. The NDA government that came to power in 2014 promised labour law reform in their first and subsequent two manifestos for election. The BJP government, since 2014, has presented labour law reform as a top agenda and successfully passed all four Labour Codes by 2020. Still, the government has neither ratified C189 nor are there any discussions regarding it. In fact, the Codes take us further away from being able to meet the requisites of the convention.
Domestic work in the Labour Codes
Out of the four Codes, the Code on Wages is the only one that recognises domestic workers as a category of workers. But even there, the Code clearly mentions that its provisions (that includes application of minimum wage, payment of wages, payment of bonus as well as equal remuneration) would only apply to domestic workers if five or more of them are employed at an establishment. This, simply put, implies that if I am a domestic worker, I can only be covered under the minimum wage law, the equal remuneration law, the bonus law as well as the law on payment of wages that will ensure my basic right to receive my wages on time, if and only if I can ensure there are at least four other domestic workers working with me in the same household where I am employed!
