Just like many other domestic workers across India, Rukhsana (not her real name) used to be able to count on steady work, servicing a good number of households at a time. But when the Indian government announced a lockdown for 21 days in late March last year, she was suddenly without a job and therefore also no income for the first time in years. She found some short-term employment before the second wave of COVID-19 infections swept through India beginning mid-February this year, but she worked for fewer households and at much-reduced wages. Now experts are talking of a possible third wave for India later in the year, and Rukhsana can only brace herself for more struggles ahead.
“Like you fear for your life, we also fear for ours,” she had told this writer during the first lockdown, explaining why she was still keen on venturing out despite the danger of being exposed to coronavirus. “But we cannot separate life from livelihoods.”
She did find work later on but only for a couple of months as the country hit another round of work suspensions during a second wave. Frustrated by her very limited success in finding work again, Rukhsana says, “Why are we the first ones to be discarded? Do we have a special blood that contracts and spreads corona faster? Just two months of a little regularized work and once again, I am here being told ‘we’ll let you know when you can come back’.”
Domestic workers in India are estimated to reach more than four million in total, with most of them women. Even in “normal” times, domestic work has been primarily a feminized form of occupation, mostly undertaken by poor women from disadvantaged caste and religious groups. It is traditionally assigned low social as well as material value, even as domestic workers are in essence the facilitators that enable working members of middle-class households to continue their jobs.
Widespread poverty, resultant increased supply of domestic workers, and the notion of domestic work being an unskilled job have all but ensured that there are little efforts to address the underpayment and undervaluation of domestic work in India. Still, the fact that female domestic workers (FDWs) could work outside their own homes and earn money—albeit paltry sums—had helped reduce gendered gaps in access patterns in productive and reproductive spaces. Then came COVID-19, and many of the advances made by FDWs have now come undone. Indeed, the loss of jobs due to lockdowns enforced to curb the spread of the virus has altered women’s experiences within the productive and reproductive spaces, as manifested in three sites: household, work, and city.
With no adequate laws to protect them, India’s female domestic workers remain vulnerable to abuse and unfair labor practices.
No legal protection
It has not helped that domestic workers do not only face socio-economic devaluation, but also lack adequate legal protection in India. India has been hesitant to provide a legal framework that would regulate households as worksites and families as employers. It has not yet ratified the Domestic Workers Convention (C189) adopted by the International Labor Organization that came into force in September 2013. Ratifying the Convention would have required India to ensure minimum wage protection and the social security of domestic workers.
The country does not have a national law to protect domestic workers. Although some states have passed laws for minimum wage and social security for domestic workers, their implementation seems to remain lax, if not inexistent. Lacking legal protection and unionization, domestic workers are often left to the mercy of their employers and are routinely denied fair wages, decent working hours, and rights to health care, leaves, training, dignity, and social justice—even in the best of times. It was therefore no surprise that FDWs have become one of the most affected classes of workers during the pandemic.
The most direct and primary impacts of the current health crisis on FDWs have been increased uncertainty and irregularity of work and income, if not outright job termination. While some FDWs had been able to get some of their work back in between India’s two COVID-19 waves, many had fewer households employing them; some, like Rukhsana, have had to agree to reduced wages just to get re-employed. The FWDs’ other family members (most in unorganized work) usually also face similarly uncertain work conditions. All these leave them with severely decreased food security and wellbeing, and they struggle to meet their everyday food, health, and shelter needs.
State governments tried to provide free ration to all in need and had also expanded the eligibility of certain poor to bigger amounts of grain per family per month for months following first lockdown. But the provisions proved highly inadequate. Meanwhile, despite the traversing of gender roles to work outside to support their family, FDWs’ primary socially prescribed gender role of ensuring food in their own kitchen and caring for the sick in the family has remained the same. To take care of their families in times of increased prices of essential goods, FDWs have been forced to take loans from relatives and/ or local financiers on steep interest rates.
People in queue for subsidized grains from the government in India. Many domestic workers fear they may soon join their ranks as the prospect of losing their jobs looms.
Little gains now lost
FDWs are not only seeing worsened economic challenges during the pandemic. They are also experiencing the undoing of whatever little transformation of intra-household gender relationship they had been able to achieve. Stuck at home, the women’s primary role as caregiver in the family became more intense even as their husbands’ primary role as breadwinner got completely abandoned. Working outside their homes had meant a liberating experience for these women as they could be away from their ‘primary’ roles in their families. But now even their access to transportation has gone missing, and they cannot go to visit their friends or family if they want to give themselves some space and seek emotional comfort, away from the pressures of family life, and stresses brought by COVID-19.
Some FDWs have also experienced increased instances of domestic violence. While verbal and physical abuse were not uncommon earlier, the frequency and intensity of such abuse have increased during lockdown. With no access to help from neighbors or employers, FDWs are stuck with their exploiters at home. Another manifestation of domestic violence shared by some FDWs is that the unmarried young women among them are now being forced into marriage while mothers are being forced by their husbands to produce more children. Participating in paid work and bringing relatively regular income had been a good way for these women to have a say in decisions on these matters.
As they struggle with deteriorating inter-personal relations with their family members, FDWs have also experienced severing of relations within FDW community. Increased competition for scant re-employment opportunities has created feelings of jealousy, distrust, and resentment among them.
For many FDWs, their female employers had been a source of support in times of economic or emotional distress. But this is no longer the case as well. Since FDWs did not receive salaries or some other financial support they thought they would get during lockdown, they have been feeling sudden alienation from their employers with whom they had formed relationships that go back as long as 10 to 15 years. The alienation has been the strongest for Muslim FDWs who suddenly found themselves being blamed by some of their employers as being spreaders of coronavirus, following the widespread coverage of communalization of COVID-19 in local media.
Even with the easing of the latest lockdown, FDWs continue to face decreased status in society. New barriers based on stereotypes have also been put up, limiting their mobility in the market space and therefore also their ability to do paid work outside of their home. For example, according to many FDWs, they are being required by would-be employers to undergo RT-PCR (Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests or present medical certificates, both of which cost money that they do not have.
Domestic work is decent, stable employment for women. Once the government recognizes this, perhaps it will finally expedite the process of passing of a national legislation to protect FDW rights against labor exploitation, especially during disasters like the current pandemic. ●
Dr. Neha Nimble is Manager for Research at the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University in Haryana, India.
