India’s invisible army

21st October 2009

Simon Harding

Image@ Simon Harding

‘What did you do?’, exclaimed my host, staring in disbelief at the sparklingly clean crockery stacked neatly on the rack. Scrubbing the last few stubborn streaks of dal off the bottom of lasts night’s plates, pots and pans was supposed to be my way of making myself useful around the flat. It had taken me twenty minutes, half a bottle of radioactively red ‘Vim’ and a couple of sore fingers. ‘You should have put it in the sink. The maid comes tomorrow morning’, explained my long suffering host, ‘she could have done that’. The maid comes five times a week to this small flat in Malviya Nagar a modest middle class suburb of south Delhi. She sweeps and mops the floors and washes the dishes and the clothes, all for a few hundred rupees a week. She works for about a dozen houses in the area, filling her day with sweeping, scrubbing, rinsing and generally cleaning up after other people. Some domestic workers, like her, work in several households earning a small amount in each, whilst some more wealthy families may employ half a dozen and house them in special quarters in their sprawling properties.

I had come to India to work with an organisation which champions the rights of informal workers and within 24 hours of arriving I had already deprived a poor migrant worker, most likely a mother with children to support, of a few extra rupees. However, my little domestic blunder pales in comparison to the hardships faced by India’s army of domestic workers: trafficking, financial exploitation and physical, emotional and often sexual abuse.

As it becomes increasingly acceptable for middle class women to go out to work and pursue careers:  maids, cooks and cleaners are becoming a more common sight in India’s major cities. Withdrawing from everyday household chores has also become a badge of upward mobility, transforming domestic workers into valuable status symbols. The ILO estimates that there are around 100,000 such workers in Delhi alone, although coming up with accurate numbers is impossible because domestic workers are unregistered: they arrive, depart and work on an informal basis. But for these people, the ILO’s vision of ‘decent work’ for all – work which fulfils  ‘aspirations for opportunity and income; rights, voice and recognition; family stability and personal development; fairness and gender equality’ - is a long way off.

A large number of Delhi’s domestic workers are poor women who have moved to the capital from impoverished areas of northern India, such as Bihar, which have not only been largely excluded from the nation’s decade long economic boom but have also been ravaged by flooding and drought in recent years. Many domestic workers are driven from their villages by poor harvests, family tragedies and unemployment. Illiterate, disadvantaged and often widowed, they have few sellable skills other than cooking, cleaning and doing household chores. The promise of earning a decent wage in Delhi prompts many rural women and girls to sign up to one of the city’s one hundred or so agencies which operate in rural areas. However, these promises are seldom kept.

The National Domestic Workers Movement, a Mumbai based NGO, calls these domestic labour agencies ‘well organised rackets’. The agencies cream off a large percentage of the domestic worker’s daily wage, or take the entire wage direct from the client, until the exorbitant ‘agency fees’ have been paid-off. Even if women travel independently they often fall prey to predatory recruiting agents who roam Delhi’s main stations, looking for girls to hand over to local labour agencies for a commission. Wages are typically Rs.1,500-2,000 a month (£18-£25) before hefty deductions: nowhere near a living wage in on of India’s most expensive cities.

Once a migrant worker has been placed in a rich household and the ‘placement fee’ has been paid, the agency loses interest. With no formal registration procedure, hardly any organisations or unions, domestic workers have few options when facing exploitation and physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of the families employing them. The NDWM says it deals with 15-20 cases of abuse a month in Delhi alone. The Human Rights Law Network has documented harrowing accounts of domestic workers, some as young as ten, being beaten, given ragged clothes to wear and stale food, forced to sleep without bedclothes on chilly winter nights, falsely accused of pretty crimes and subsequently abused by the local police. One disturbing tale is that of Sunita, a maid in a Delhi home, who was raped by the man of the house and fell pregnant. The family stopped her from going to the police and forced her to return to her return to her village with Rs 50,000 compensation (£625).   

The biggest problem facing domestic workers claims Teresa Barat, a writer on women’s issues based in Delhi, is that they are not recognised as ‘workers’. Domestic workers are not covered by national labour laws which govern pay, conditions, compensation and holidays: even the Child Labour Act of 1986 does not include child domestic workers. In the households themselves, the ‘master-servant’ attitude frequently holds sway over the ‘employer-employee’ approach. They remain invisible and under-valued.

But all this could be about to change. Last year an alliance of the Construction Workers Union & Car Cleaners Union and the fledgling Delhi Domestic Workers Union called upon the National Commission for Women (NCW) to raise the plight of domestic workers at the national level. In consultation with the unions, the NCW has drafted a proposal for the creation of a board to register all employers, agencies and domestic workers. Funded by contributions from all parties, the board would provide domestic workers with identification cards, bank accounts and medical services. It would also monitor working conditions, the practices of agencies and oversee collective bargaining.

In July this year a joint venture between the ILO, India’s Ministry for Labour and Employment and the Delhi government was unveiled. The scheme aims to enhance the incomes, skills and upward mobility of domestic workers by providing them with formal education and training. It is estimated that 90% of domestic workers have had no formal education.

Participants in the scheme will study personal hygiene, communication skills, kitchen management, first aid and basic electronics. Certificates and ID cards mentioning their new skills will be issued to all those successfully completing the initiative. “The employability of workers is enhanced as they have better skills to offer and employers too get trained assistants”, said Sharada Prashad, Director General of Employment and Training at the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The plan represents a small but significant step towards organising and professionalizing the sector.

Promoting the scheme, Delhi Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit said, “these workers do the most menial and arduous tasks, have impossible long hours with no benefits of social security, security of employment, wage raises, paid leave or medical facilities. I would request all to refer to them as didi (sister) in recognition of their contribution to the well-being of the family.” She also advocated the inclusion of domestic workers under minimum wage legislation.

Whilst efforts to train domestic workers are laudable, they are not sufficiently large scale to impact on the lives of the majority of domestic workers. The NCW proposals hold more promise as they are to be funded by contributions from within the sector making them more financially sustainable and less vulnerable to political mood changes. These developments are encouraging and will improve many lives, but in order to have the large national impact required, the full weight of Indian government legislation is needed to formalise the domestic sector and given the constant stalling on the issue over the past two decades. Domestic workers and their unions have taken the first steps in a long uphill struggle.