EMPOWERMENT: THE JOURNEY SO FAR
Geeta Menon*
Voices of “Workers in the shadow” are slowly being heard on the canvas of employed, productive workforce. Today the voices may be not so loud, but they are surely emerging on the socio-political landscape of India. The journey so far has been long and arduous no doubt. From the days of bonded labour, part of the feudal Jajmani system, to the modern capitalist wage system, and from the days of slavery —where no wages were paid, but payment was in kind — to the modern slavery of the wage system.
Apparently, the domestic workers of today, in the urban and district towns, are in a different work system, than their sisters, of yesteryears. They (especially the part time, and full-day workers) live in their own homes, and go as regular workers to their workplace, which is the employer’s house. At present, we in the union are enabling the workers, that the employer’s home is not their “home” but their “workplace”, their “factory!” However, a large number of migrants, who work as live-in domestic workers, are still in the shadows, invisible behind the curtains of trafficking. This sordid world reveals a mafia of placement agencies who are blatantly involved in the trafficking of girls and women for forced labour trafficking, servitude and slavery.
Thousands of girls all over the country fall prey to trafficking, placement agencies or in search of livelihoods, and enter into the urban upper middle class, and elite households. They work long hours, with no rest or free time, suffer from all kinds of indignities, not given their salary, sexual harassment and face severe isolation, and ill-health. The girls, many times trust them, and even believe they will give them their salary when they leave, or even help settle them in life. However, it must be understood, as it is being increasingly recognised internationally, that domestic workers are neither servants nor machines. They are workers, part of a productive economy, and their identity as workers must be recognised and respected. In keeping with the vulnerable, invisible scenario in which the domestic worker works, with no definition of workplace, with different employers, with the scattered nature of her work, with the subtle physical, emotional verbal, abuse that takes place in the privacy of the home, it is extremely difficult and challenging to build up the domestic workers collectives. It is a challenge as most of the women themselves believe that they, as workers, are devalued. They themselves value the nuances of loyalty, gratitude, flexibility in this unique employer- employee relationship.
The Domestic Workers Rights Union, supported by the women’s organisation Stree Jagruti Samiti (SJS), began to collectivise the domestic workers, to raise awareness and bring about a leadership among the domestic workers themselves. We had to categorise the domestic workers, define their employment situation.
Employment Situation of Domestic Workers
Live-in, full-time workers are the ones that are most likely to be in bonded labour situations, to be trafficked and be most vulnerable to sexual abuse. It is very difficult to protect them because very little is known about what happens inside households. These workers work in the households all through the day and every day; it is, therefore, often difficult for anybody to contact them or for them to get the time to leave the household for meetings.
Full-time workers, who do not live in, usually work from 7 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. Other workers, especially parttime workers, may be employed to perform only one kind of task, such as only cooking, only cleaning or
[29]
only child care. Often the task allocation has a caste basis. In other situations, the tasks for which the worker is responsible may not be properly defined in the beginning, making it easy for the employer to allocate extra tasks, usually with no gratitude or recognition.
Part-time workers, often work in several houses every day to make a minimal living. Their wages are as low as around Rs 300–500 a month for a basic task. This includes four categories of work— sweeping, mopping, cleaning utensils and washing clothes. There is no regulation of their work. They get no holidays, support or recognition. They are entitled to no leave, not even sick leave. If they do get sick, their pay is usually deducted for the time taken off or the work just piles up for the next day.
Piece rate workers work on particular tasks, and get paid by the task, for example, clothes washers or dhobis, in Bidar charge a rate of Rs 50 per person for washing clothes. This is a monthly rate! In urban areas, it varies. Monthly rates are fixed at, say, Rs 200–250 per task. Most payments are in cash; in some areas, cheque payments are made. Usually, in Bangalore, domestic workers are not paid in kind. But a large number of live-in domestic workers, including the child domestic workers brought in from outside Bangalore city, are paid in kind. Paying in kind means providing them with a place to stay, food, electricity and water. The demand is to get payment in cash, even if the amount is meagre.
Strategies for Organising
Keeping these facts in mind, it is obvious that strategies for organising will vary. The part-timers and fullday workers, living in the slums of Bangalore, are contacted directly through cultural programmes, awareness programmes, membership drives and through the existing NGOs and Community based Organizations (CBOs) in different residential areas. Public sittings, information surveys and street corner meetings are held in these areas. Some volunteers have been working in colleges to sensitise the students to their own domestic help. One of the important, but not necessarily easy, ways of reaching domestic workers in their residential colonies is through NGOs working in these areas. SJS has, through several meetings with NGO staff and with the Self Help Groups that they have helped form, spread awareness on issues faced by domestic workers, as well as held membership camps. Leadership committees in the slums, some affiliated to political parties and political groups such as youth clubs, are also potential contact points.
The strategies to organise residential or live-in domestic workers have been evolved by trial and error. These workers are the most difficult to organise, and getting information about their numbers or contacting them is sometimes impossible.
The impact of the effort to organise domestic workers is certainly being felt although it may not be clearly visible and defined. There are noticeable changes in the women between the time they joined the union and the today. This is evident in the small assertions made by the women and the recognition they have received. An example of this is that the women boldly raised the issue of caste at their workplace. In most households in India, women face discrimination because most of them belong to the dalit caste. Very often, employers give them food in a glass and plate (plastic) that is specially allocated for them. One domestic worker broached this issue with her employer saying, “I am not an outcaste. I clean and wash your house, vessels and clothes. We both have the same blood. I will not drink from a separate plastic cup.” Her assertion helped her to claim her dignity.
Similarly, other women have shared how their employers have begun to see them in a new light. Many of the domestic workers now have a weekly off, get some extra money as bonus and some have even got an increase in salary! The women too have realised the value of collective strength and have managed to
[30]
voice and take up issues collectively. Many a time, women have themselves handled issues of allegations of theft and have also negotiated for themselves. Many domestic workers have expressed how their being a member of a union has given them new respect in the police station. They have gained courage in their own lives.
Saraswati, talks about how, after her involvement with the union, she is able to state her own terms and conditions to potential employers before being hired, thus tilting the power dynamics more in her favour. The women tell the story of a fellow union member Shaila, who was wrongfully accused of theft. Shaila was thrown out of her employers’ house, and was standing at their gate, crying, when Vonamma, the president of the Executive Committee, and other members of the union came to support her.
Vonamma was able to articulate to the employers that if they were intent on firing Shaila, they would have to make an official police complaint and find some evidence of her guilt. The employers finally gave in, admitting that there had been no theft. Shaila was unable to keep the job, but she was able to retain her pride and her employer was made to apologize. It seems like the community that the union has helped build among these women has been a major driving force for their strength—both collectively and individually. The women have been inspired by one another, and are learning from each other’s experiences.
Vonamma was seven years old when she began domestic work. Born in Bangalore, her father died very soon after her birth. Her mother—also a domestic worker—was left with the task of raising eight children. None of them received an education, and as a result, they also joined the workforce. Vonamma toiled away in a kitchen, standing on a stool that would raise her small figure to the kitchen counter, and was beaten by her employers when she displayed tiredness. Now she is twenty-nine, is unmarried, and lives with her mother. On this afternoon, she is cheerful and animated, and leads the proceedings when the meeting commences.
The Executive Committee is elected during the union’s general body elections. Women are recruited to the union through intensive fieldwork: SJS goes directly to the places where they live and work. Oviously, the first step is to recognize that these places are no longer just slums, but labour colonies. Most of the women in the union live in slums, and SJS’s work involves recognizing that these urban spaces are not merely dwelling places, but sources of labour, and that these women are economic entities. Making an effort to move on from thinking of slums merely as the residences of these women is making the effort to recognize the work that these women do—including daily labour in their own homes, in their capacities as wives, mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law, caretakers, and as women living on the economic margins.
Hailing from various parts of South India, the shared characteristic among the women of SJS is a lack of education and skills. Most only went through a few years of school. For instance, Rajeshwari, the Secretary of the union, was pulled out of school at age fifteen. While this lack of education severely hampers the women’s social and economic mobility, Rajeshwari says that working with the unions has undone some of that for many of the women. They are in many ways more empowered to stand up for themselves and preserve their dignity. Saraswati, a member of the union, says that most of the women state their own terms and conditions to future employers, and inform them of their involvement with the union. It appears that being unionized has given these women a greater sense of self and belonging—some larger context and perspective from which to think about the work that they do and their legitimate, economic contributions to their communities.
Rajeshwari works for two families in Mantri Elegance, one of many colossal high-rise apartment buildings that have sprouted in Bangalore in the past two decades. These high rises house Bangalore’s ever
[31]
expanding upper-middle class—a generation of young software professionals nurtured and supported by Bangalore’s IT-dominated economy and representative of India’s growing neoliberal practices of largescale consumerism and capitalism. The great influx of money that this economy has created has given this professional middle class that much more spending potential, leading to a greater demand for domestic help.
While most of the women have resigned themselves to lives in the informal sector—lives that, in all probability, will continue to be on the margins of Bangalore’s society and economy, they seem determined to fight for the rights and dignities they deserve, and more so, for happier lives for their children. The most difficult step in this movement appears to be the translation of these dreams of respectable wages, regular bonuses, and workplace dignity into reality. Two factors stand out more clearly than others as hindrances to the fulfillment of these dreams: firstly, the oppression and mistreatment of domestic workers is firmly embedded in Indian middle-class society’s psyche, and much of the struggle for these women’s rights depends on some level of malleability on the part of their employers. Secondly, there is a sense of inertia among the women when it comes to taking larger steps forward, especially with regard to their own literacy and education. Solving these problems—for example, mobilizing these women to participate in adult education programs of some sort—however, is an expensive, resource-consuming endeavor.
Hanifa and her family ,migrated to North Bangalore from neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh two generations previously. Hanifa worked in the garments industry until twenty years ago, after which she has been working for various families on the campus of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. She is now very much an establishment on the campus—her face and family are familiar to most, and she has close personal relationships with many members of the community. As a child, she attended school until she was fifteen, and is literate in English. Not one of her five children, however, has been educated. Her daughters are also domestic workers and her sons are partially unemployed. “My husband wasn’t present,” she says, “I had no choice but to move around. I couldn’t give them an education.
”Hanifa’s situation highlights two points: one, the vulnerability of women like her, who can be dismissed at the employer’s whim. Several of her long-term employers fired her after her daughter was found stealing jewelry from a household in the neighborhood. Now, with a much-reduced income, Hanifa struggles to support her adult children, who have no work.
Second, that a lifetime of work has not enabled her to educate her children, who therefore remain a part of the same low income, informal workforce, thus repeating the cycle of deprivation and marginality.
Hanifa is an example of a member of the informal workforce who would greatly benefit from being organized by unions like SJS. The resources, independence, and community that working with a union would provide her with could perhaps enable her to step out of this cycle–It is the most vulnerable women that continue to be unreachable to unions and activists, despite the fact that they are most often in need of rehabilitation and empowerment. For example, fifty-five-year-old Hanifa, a domestic worker who is not a member of Stree Jagruti Samiti, and who has never been a part of a collective or union, fits the demographic for the kind of woman that organizations like SJS are trying very hard to reach out to—but are hindered in their attempts by centuries of caste, class, and communal barriers. She belongs to a Muslim family that as a Muslim woman, she is already a member of a disempowered minority group, and as a single mother in a lowincome household, she is particularly vulnerable, but it is also these factors that leave her still out of reach of unions like SJS.
[32]
Women’s rights are at such a premium in our country that even a few hundred individuals raising their voice and trying to break the culture of silence is of immeasurable value. Every voice counts because women have to surpass class, caste and patriarchy controls to gain visibility and dignity.
Recognising Domestic Work
It is heartening to see that the ILO, decades after its birth, is willing to recognise domestic work as decent work. This gives the invisible nature of domestic work a visibility and, therefore, the push for all of society to take the notion of domestic work and the workers seriously. The setting up of a Convention will help to establish the notion of domestic work as productive work and, therefore, to be regulated, recognised and protected. It will also push the governments to sit up and pay attention to the plight of domestic workers, who have so far been ignored and treated as though they do not exist and are not human beings.
The proposed Convention will also be of help in pushing for a national legislation, which is needed because the working conditions and realities of domestic workers are very different from that of other unorganised sector workers. The employer-employee relationship and the nature of employment too are very different and are grounded in social realities. Domestic workers are a huge, neglected workforce, comprising mainly women, who are an invisible, productive part of the economy. The nature of the workplace, the lack of access to the households for negotiations and the non-worker identity of domestic workers require not only separate laws but also very different implementation mechanisms.
* Geeta Menon is co-founder of Stree Jagruti Samati, an organization fighting for the rights of domestic workers
