WOMEN DOMESTIC WORKERS
Pranjali Bandhu
Place of Domestic Workers in the Indian Economy
Every year there is a large-scale exodus from the crisis-ridden rural areas of India to its urban centres. These migrants come from the sections of marginal farmers, sharecroppers, landless agricultural workers, service and artisan castes, and in a very large proportion belong to the scheduled and lower castes. Domestic servants in Delhi are part of this migrant flow looking for employment in the cities. They are drawn from UP, particularly from its backward Eastern districts; from the Garhwal region and from Nepal, where the economy has been disrupted due to large-scale deforestation and soil erosion, and from the backward State of Bihar. A section also comes from the southern State of Tamil Nadu, from the famine and drought prone Salem and Thiruchirapalli districts, from the textile centres of Madurai and Chinnalapatti districts and from the ‘Green revolution’ area of Thanjavur.
Dependent capitalist development in India tailored towards the exploitative and rapacious needs of imperialist capital has resulted in a distorted and uneven development of the various national formations in India where rural-urban linkages are dislocated. On the one hand, there is an almost obscene expansion of a few metropolitan cities that are the centres of commerce, administration, services and industry. They are the exploitation points for international metropolitan capital of raw materials, agricultural and forest products from the rural hinterlands. A multifaceted agrarian crisis is precipitated by this raw materials’ and primary products’ plunder as well as by the imperialist imposed ‘development’ of the productive forces in agriculture and industry. The development of productive forces in agriculture through ‘Green revolution technology’ was sectoral and extremely selective leaving vast rural areas neglected, unirrigated and undeveloped. Coupled with merciless exploitation of forest wealth it led to increasing numbers of chronically famine and drought prone areas. Introduction of capitalist relations in ‘green revolution’ areas is leading to the proletarianisation of the poor peasantry and unemployment of agricultural labour due to mechanisation. ‘Modernisation’ of certain industrial sectors, like the textile industry, with the help of imperialist capital and technology, is hitting at the market of the handloom weavers and pauperising them in their millions. In the absence and insufficiency of local-level industrialisation the labour markets in big urban centres offer the marginalised and poor peasantry, landless agricultural labourers and artisan castes a way out of a situation of destitution, hunger and starvation.
In the cities, however, only a miniscule section (about 3% of the annual addition to the labour force), most of it male, gets absorbed into organised industry. The large majority gets pushed into unskilled and semi-skilled, labour-intensive jobs in the informal sector; as construction workers, petty traders, traditional artisan trades and sills, porters, cooks, waiters, unskilled office workers, workers in transport and repair shops, rickshaw pullers, watchmen, scooter and taxi drivers, as well as in various small-scale and household industries. Many, due to lack of other opportunities, lead a life of vagrancy, fall into alcoholism, become petty thieves, pimps, the hired hoodlums of ruling class parties and industrialists, or engage in other ‘unlawful’ activity like illicit liquor distillation—in short, they become what is called the lumpen proletariat. Many a youth falls into delinquency and drug addiction. Women migrating to cities in family units, or sometimes also alone, due to divorce, desertion or other family conflicts or economic problems, have a much smaller choice of occupations open to them. These are generally jobs, which are identified with the ‘domestic’ role of women, are low paid, low status, unskilled jobs involving hard manual labour and offering almost no mobility. Women are engaged largely in the construction industry, where they do the unskilled coolie work, in domestic service, as self-employed petty traders, particularly in food items, in traditional artisan occupations within a family unit, as piece workers in cottage industry, and as prostitutes. In fact, an abnormally large informal sector is a characteristic phenomenon of dependent countries. Industrialisation that takes place here is based largely on imported technology and capital, has the objective of producing mainly consumer goods for a fairly limited market, and tends to be labour-saving, capital intensive and creating unemployment. The crisis-ridden agrarian situation creating its own large-scale unemployment and underemployment coupled with this kind of stunted industrial ‘development’ gives rise to a relatively large surplus labour population as compared to the capitalist-imperialist countries. This creates a labour pool base for its super-exploitation in a “low productivity, small-scale sector” and in the proliferation of services. Domestic workers are a part of this.
Under the British Raj, Delhi was largely the bureaucratic capital city. After the post-’47 transformation of the country into a neo-colony it began its rapid expansion as an administrative, commercial, industrial and institutional area. Delhi, particularly New Delhi, became the locus of the various layers of the expanding bureaucracy and defence services, diplomatic corps, foreign and Indian business, financial agencies, research and other educational institutions.
The service of a host of domestic servants, ayahs, cooks etc. is essential to the upper caste ethos, Indian and foreign. The ‘ladies’ of these households lead a life of parasitical ease and empty amusements, spend their time in ‘socialising’ and carrying out such other tasks requisite to maintaining their status. The growth of a middle class imitative of upper class values creates a further demand for hardworking and docile house servants who know their place and acknowledge their betters. These sections tend to engage domestic servants, cooks, etc. on a full-time basis and house them in servant quarters, which are there in almost every upper class villa and in the government housing of the upper layers of the bureaucracy, as a legacy of the colonial past. Giving the servants housing, which in the case of government and defence personnel may have cost them nothing, can become an excuse to pay a smaller wage and sometimes no wage at all. At the same time, the servants work under serf-like conditions and have to be at the beck and call of their ‘overladies’ and their spoilt children, who often are brought up to be so effete that they are incapable of fetching a glass of water for themselves, but have to ring for the servant. Their domestic drudgery taken care of, these ladies use their leisure for kitty parties, gossip sessions and parties, where contacts are made for getting things done, for arranging admissions and suitable ‘matches’ for their offspring, keeping in touch with the latest consumer items, fashions etc; not to speak of whoring themselves for better career opportunities, contracts and trips abroad for their husbands. Cheap domestic labour being available in plenty, it also becomes affordable on a part-time basis to married working women with children in the professions and white collar occupations. This enables them to carry their hard double, nay triple burden of outside work, home making and child care under conditions of scarce social amenities and little husband help.
Working Conditions of Part-time Domestic Servants in Delhi
Domestic servants working on a part-time basis in a few households at a time earn Rs. 150/- to a maximum of Rs. 300 per month. This forms an essential steady income for their household, for generally their husbands are employed in irregular jobs. Their day begins very early in the morning because they are required to be present at their place of work between 6 and 7.30 am. Many jhuggi jhopris built in the vicinity of residential areas were demolished in the Emergency period in 1975-76. Now most have to spend a considerable amount of time and money commuting from resettlement colonies on the city outskirts or in the trans-Yamuna area. It is a hangover of the colonial mentality that Delhi’s elite want to live in a myopic, clean and green world away from the filth and subhuman living conditions of slums, which they themselves created and live parasitically upon.
The work of a domestic servant entails doing the same hard, repetitive, dehumanising menial tasks performed at home—washing utensils, sweeping and scrubbing floors, washing clothes—all of which involve dealing with the dirt and leavings of others with the most primitive tools. They are generally subject to inhuman treatment by their women employers, who are often unkind, impolite, abusive, and suspicious and torment them with their petty tyranny. The nature of the work is such that their hands and feet are quite constantly in water. The cleaning materials, ash, sand, washing powder, surf, erode the skin in such a way that they get deep cuts and wounds in the joints of their toes and fingers. The palms and soles of their feet can become so raw that it becomes difficult to go near fire or touch any spice without feeling terrible burning and pain. They tend to suffer from backache, leg ache, arthritis, fever, frequent colds and coughs, headache, giddiness and exhaustion. All this work for many hours at a time is done on a diet much poorer than that of their employers and leads to their premature aging.
Since their pay, hours and amount of work, number of paid holidays are not regularised, they get exploited on all these counts. Apart from the daily chores, they may be asked to do any extra unpaid odd jobs, given extra work at the time of festivals, parties, arrival of guests, illness of employer. If a worker falls ill and absents herself for a day or so, the work is generally all piled up for her; if she is absent for a longer period due to her own illness or that of her children or other family members her wage may be cut for those days. Due to lack of paid holidays, health problems, particularly gynaecological ones cannot be attended to because there is no time to go to hospitals and stand in queues. In the absence of maternity leave they are forced to work up to very close to the delivery.
Though domestic servants contribute to the fact that middle class children are better looked after and educated and thus are better equipped and have better chances for occupational mobility, their own children are completely neglected. In many bastis it is a common sight to see small children of working parents in dirty clothes or even nude passing the day with dogs, pigs, goats and other children of their own age. Leftovers are eaten. Slightly older children (generally girls) look after younger ones. Occasionally a child can get hurt, mislaid, lost or drowned by the time the mother gets back from work. Because of the cost of books, uniforms, conditions adverse to serious study (absence of electricity in the bastis), remote chances of upward mobility, the need for children to earn for themselves as early as possible, they, particularly the girls, are rarely educated. By the time they are 8 years or so they accompany their mother to the place of work, help her out and get initiated into the job. Little boys can also be sent out to work as domestic servants to add to the family income.
A woman domestic worker may return home by about 5 to 6 pm and has to attend to a myriad number of household tasks. To get water she has to queue up at the nearest water pump or stand pipe, where water being available only at rush hours, the crush is terrible and quarrels frequent. The daily shopping, cooking, feeding of family and washing up of utensils and clothes have to be done. In all this, depending on the individual cases, she may get more or very little help from her husband and other male family members. But in each case, the responsibility of running the household is hers, which she herself accepts as her duty and rarely puts into question. Many women, when they are younger and healthier, engage in piecework at night to generate an extra income.
Housemaids, particularly the young and pretty ones, become the objects of the lust of the middle aged husbands in the homes they work in, who feel completely within their rights to make sexual use of them. For the maturing young men in the house she can become the object for their sexual curiosity and desire. She may also strive to exploit this situation to her own benefit by seeking economic compensations for her ‘services’ in this sphere too. Organised prostitution among these workers as well as others is a fact of life because means of earning a decent livelihood are so limited, and most jobs in the informal sector so terribly low paid. Thievery, illicit distillation of liquor as a side business are other methods for them to raise a much needed cash income to make life a little less hard and depriving for them. This also makes them prey to police harassment.
Struggle Perspectives
Coming to the urban labour market under the given conditions and the place they occupy in it leads to the fact that many pre-capitalist structures such as caste and kinship structures are retained in modified forms. Caste and karma ideology help in justifying for exploiter and exploited the position of each. Occupational segregation is often on a caste and kinship basis. Solidarities, social life and relationships in a squatter settlement tend to built on these bases, though these can also break down when it comes to fighting against demolitions, and for better civic amenities and housing. In the case of domestic workers, unions can and have been formed on an area wise and city basis, breaking through their isolated conditions of working and scattered living spaces. For example, the “Pune Shahar Molakarni Sangathana”, a domestic workers union of Pune city, formed in 1982 made a fairly successful attempt to bring domestic workers together in their fight to regulate their conditions of work, for minimum wages, paid holidays (two a month), medical leave, bonus and humane treatment by their employers. (See the report by Abha Bhaiya in HOW, V5 (1), 1982, 15-19). In Ahmedabad, domestic workers organised on a citywide basis and resisted police harassments.
Unionisation and a solidarity front are essential to break through a pattern of patron-client relationships and paternalism, which is a hangover from a feudal past and which thwarts the emergence of a militant class consciousness of this section. It is particularly necessary to smash this attitude towards them by middle class ‘feminists’, who thus justify their relatively privileged position and relax back, their duty done by handing out a few clothes or other such ‘kindnesses,’ which really cost them nothing much but earn them the gratitude and slightly better work on the part of their domestic help, i.e., keep them better in line. It will mean an attack on the demeaning habit of begging or wheedling for small items, for clothes, depending on their employers for loans, and for other favours. Rather they should be organised to struggle for better conditions of work and wages as a matter of right. Direct and indirect prostitution, either due to their poverty or for some consumer and cosmetic items as part of absorbing the degenerate and debauched whorish comprador culture indulged in by the upper class elite and under the influence of commercial cinema should be struggled against by raising their self-esteem as working women. The tendency to compete with, identify with and try to imitate the lifestyles and manners of the upper and middle class they work for should be resisted. Their conditions of work and extreme degradation lie at the bottom of petty thievery to gain possession of goods they handle, clean and service on a daily basis but without owning them. It means giving up petty revengeful forms of protest against this kind of dehumanising work by breaking crockery and engaging in vicious slander of their employers behind their backs. It is essential that the building up of their self-esteem as workers should be linked up to organised protest actions in order to go beyond spontaneous individual ‘protest’ actions.
Though it is unlikely that this section of the working people will be at the forefront of any class and national struggles, the upsurge of these in their national homelands will attract their interest and solidarity and will awaken and enhance their anti-imperialist and class consciousness. Political awareness raising and activities in the areas where they live, such as the slums, will help much in mobilising them to get organised.
An economy being developed in a self-reliant way and serving the needs of its people, with an agriculture and industry developing in harmony with one another, would not have the labour force to spare for such wasteful, inefficient and demeaning professions like that of domestic service. Strongly developed women’s liberation consciousness and movement would gain political power for women. It would also help eliminate the fact that, as a carry-over from the past, women get concentrated in certain sectors of the economy. It would ensure a radical redivision of labour in private as well as public life. Abolition of the exploitation of man by man— the situation of a minority of men and women living in sumptuous unthinking luxury off and by means of the backbreaking toil of millions of brothers and sisters—mechanisation, collectivisation, a spirit of cooperation and respect for the human dignity of the other—all this would eliminate the need for such services and have each man or woman attending to his or her own personal dirt.
(Mass Line, June 1988, no. 27; vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 9-10)