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ABSTRACT
Using class as the key analytical category, I examine domestic workers’ struggle for legal recognition as workers in India since national independence. Drawing from a review of Indian parliamentary debates and discussions on the issue, I explore how the ‘idea’ of paid domestic labour is framed and contested in the legislative discourse of post-colonial India, and how that framing changes over time. Specifically, I use Marxist cultural theory to analyse the ideological trajectory and the fate of the domestic workers’ struggles to gain labour rights. Building on scholars who argue that domestic workers’ exclusion from the sphere of labour rights is due to their weak political organization, I find that domestic workers’ failures to attain rights are the result of ideological manoeuvring by the Indian state and its players in addition to workers’ relatively weak power. In addition to the literature on domestic labour in south Asia, the insights from the article contribute to the scholarship on informal labour and political sociology.
Acknowledgments
I presented a preliminary version of this article, titled ‘Class and Classification: Rethinking history and politics of paid domestic labour in India’ at the 2nd International Conference Servants’ Pasts, Berlin, April 11-13th 2018. I later presented a modified version of the same paper at Publics@IIHS at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bengaluru and Ambedkar University Delhi. The paper benefitted immensely from the comments of the participants and organizers at these events. In addition, I also submitted this paper as a Trial Research Paper in partial fulfillment of my Ph.D. requirements to the Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. I acknowledge the editors of the special issue, Nitin Sinha and Pankaj Jha, for their encouraging and constructive comments. I am extremely grateful to Rina Agarwala, Michael Levien, Saumyajit Bhattacharya, and Radhika Saraf, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful feedback on the article. I am responsible for any errors in the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The workers who work in or for households for cash and/or kind.
2. National Planning Committee, Series Report on Labour, 115.
3. Armacost, ‘Domestic Workers in India’; Neetha and Palriwala, ‘The absence of state law’; Agarwala and Saha, ‘Domestic Workers in India’.
4. Author’s calculation based on NSSO survey data from 2004–05, 2008–09, and 2011–12. The statutory categories for these caste groups are Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) respectively.
5. Wright, ‘Working Class Power’.
6. Ibid, 962.
7. Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work; Devika et. al, A Tactful Union; Ray and Qayum, Cultures of Servitude; Fish, Domestic Workers of the World Unite.
8. Devika, Nisha and Rajasree, ‘“A Tactful Union”’.
9. Ray, ‘Masculinity, Femininity, and Servitude’.
10. Armacost, ‘Domestic Workers in India’.
11. Bonacich, ‘A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism’.
12. See Wright, ‘Working-Class Power,’ 962.
13. Neetha, ‘Contours of Domestic Service’.
14. Ray and Qayum, Cultures of Servitude.
15. Ibid, 19.
16. Cf. Dicky, ‘Permeable Homes’; Dicky, ‘Mutual Exclusions’.
17. Grover, ‘Female Domestic Workers’.
18. Also see, for instance, Barua, Waldrop and Haukanes, ‘Benevolent Maternalism’.
19. See, for instance, ibid.
20. Kumar, Ramendra (Delhi Gharelu Kamgar Sangathan). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 8 July 2018; Selvi, Sr. Kalai (National Domestic Workers Movement, Delhi Chapter). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 1 September 2017.
21. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
22. Acts such as Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act 2008 and Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act 2013, for instance, extend their coverage to domestic workers.
23. The domestic workers’ union organize workers on the ground but getting a formal status of a union is a challenge for many of them. Most groups are not granted the formal recognition of the workers’ union by the state alluding to the fact that they do not fit into the definition of workers.
24. Abram, Historical Sociology; Stryker, ‘Beyond History versus Theory’.
25. Stryker, ‘Beyond History versus Theory’.
26. In this article, I use the word ‘middle-class’ to refer to largely ‘professional classes’ (e.g. doctors, managers, bureaucrats, etc.) of wage-workers who usually cannot be considered, what Marx referred to as, ‘proletariat’ or ‘working-class’ in the strict sense of the words. I also use the word ‘middle-class’ to refer to the employers of domestic workers, as it is commonly used in the scholarship. See, for instance, Ray and Qayum, Cultures of Servitude. To be middle-class in India, various social groups have relied on caste privilege and therefore in addition to ‘economic capital’, it is also ‘social capital’ and ‘cultural capital’ that define middle class in India. See Baviskar and Ray, ‘Introduction’.
27. Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, 25–26.
28. Hall, Cultural Studies 1983; Althusser, For Marx; Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.
29. See above 21.
30. Ibid.; Hall, Cultural Studies 1983.
31. Bourdieu, ‘The Social Space’.
32. Bourdieu, ‘Lecture of 18 January 1990,’ in On the State, 9.
33. Ibid., (my italics).
34. Hall, ‘Ideology and Ideological Struggle,’ in Cultural Studies 1983.
35. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ 7.
36. However, a Marxist-feminist perspective suggests that this absence of class-exploitation in paid and unpaid domestic labour is only a matter of appearance, and the reality is that it is closely tied to circuits of exploitation. I consider a long discussion on this issue beyond the scope of this paper.
37. Williams, ‘Marxist Cultural Theory,’ 11.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Chibber also shows why some of these laws, embodying the new social-compact between capital-labour, did not deliver what they promised to and only ended up weakening the working class in the subcontinent.
41. Agarwala, ‘Informal Work’.
42. Chibber, ‘Class Compromise’.
43. Chun, Organizing at the Margins.
44. National Planning Committee, Series Report on Labour, 115; The Deputy Minister of Labour and Employment, ‘Demands of Domestic Workers,’ 6382–83.
45. See, for instance, The Hindu, 25 February 1930; The Bombay Chronicle, 4 June 1941.
46. Sources: National Domestic Servants’ Unions; ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1959,’ 1401–02.
47. Sharma, ‘Rasoi Ka Kaam’; Raghuram, ‘Organization of Paid Domestic Work’.
48. For details, see the profiles of both the MPs here: K.L. Balmiki: http://164.100.47.194/loksabha/writereaddata/biodata_1_12/604.htm, P.N. Rajabhoj: https://rajyasabha.nic.in/rsnew/pre_member/1952_2003/r.pdf. Dalit Movement refers to the anti-caste movement that started in the early twentieth century by the ‘outcastes’ of India’s oppressive caste system – ‘untouchables’. The term Dalit was coined by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar – the pioneering figure of the movement in twentieth century.
49. P.N. Rajabhoj on ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1959,’ 1401–02 (my italics).
50. ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1959,’ 3045–46.
51. It was contested, saying, ‘Today, the people you are referring to as naukar [domestic workers], it saddens me, they are children of brahmin and kshatriya people.’ Ibid., 3045.
52. ‘The Domestic Workers Bill, 1959,’ 1420 (my italics).
53. Guru, ‘Who are the country’s poor?’.
54. ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1959,’ 3036–46.
55. The Deputy Minister of Labour and Employment, ‘Written Answers to Questions,’ 2296–2297.
56. The Deputy Minister of Labour and Employment, ‘Demands of Domestic Workers,’ 6383.
57. Kumar, Naynesh (National Domestic Workers Movement, Mumbai Chapter). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 18 July 2018; Padwar, Dadu (Gharelu Kamgar Sangh, Mumbai). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 18 July 2018. Also see Armacost, ‘Domestic Workers in India,’ 59–60.
58. See above 9.
59. Kaldate, ‘Statement of object and reasons’.
60. ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1989,’ 257.
61. ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1989,’ 297 (my italics).
62. ‘Domestic Workers Bill 1989,’ 277.
63. Minister of Home Affairs, ‘Written Answers to Questions,’ 81–82; Minister of Home Affairs, ‘Written Answers to Unstarred Questions,’ 164.
64. Hacking, ‘Making Up People’.
65. Historically, the opponents of domestic workers’ rights in parliament challenged such proposals on the basis of the lack of ‘facts’ – statistics on domestic work, for instance. Ironically, in this period the ‘facts’ on domestic work did not exist because the occupation was not recognized in occupational classifications. On the other hand, crime statistics classified domestic workers as criminals, which produces ‘facts’ that were verifiable through quantifiable trends.
66. Furthermore, master-servant laws were designed to produce disciplined labourers for the masters by giving the latter disproportionate power to control the former. Originally, these laws were applicable to a much broader category of workers and not merely those employed in households. However, with the spread of workers’ struggles, the master-servant laws were replaced by the employment acts that treated the relationship as a ‘contract; between ‘equals’. While the master-servant relation disappeared from other more conventional forms of employment, it continued to shape domestic work relations in crucial ways.
67. Historically, the recognition of crimes by domestic workers as separate is neither specific to India nor the post-colonial state. Indian parliament is only one place where the estimates of crime by domestic workers are cited, there has been a long tradition of various police and administrative reports in colonial and post-colonial India listing the category of domestic workers in the crime statistics and particularly ‘theft by domestic servants’. The servant criminality in penal code is itself a product of original master-servant laws, which dealt with the issue of crime by the servants against their masters very systematically.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 305–307.
70. Ibid., 305–307.
71. Ibid., 277.
72. Ibid., 262.
73. ‘Domestic Workers Bill, 1989,’ 309–310.
74. The most prominent example was Bombay House-Workers Solidarity (BHS) group – an NGO originally founded by, as people commonly refer to her, a ‘Belgian nun’ who started working with working-poor in low income settlements of Bombay and got drawn to the issue of women domestic workers. Over the decades, BHS evolved into, what is currently known as, the National Domestic Workers Movement (NDWM). Currently, NDWM claims to have organized 2,00,000 domestic workers in 17 Indian states.
75. Agarwala and Saha, ‘Domestic Workers in India’.
76. Kumar, Ramendra (Delhi Gharelu Kamgar Sangathan). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 8 July 2018.
77. Ibid.
78. Selvi, Sr. Kalai (National Domestic Workers Movement, Delhi Chapter). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 1 September 2017.
79. Ibid.
80. Minister of Women and Child Development, ‘Unstarred Question no. 2419’. 3 November 2016.
81. See Agarwala, ‘Informal Work’.
82. See Coser, ‘Servants’.
83. Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, ‘Unstarred Question no. 6591’ (my italics).
84. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
85. Ibid., 2.
86. Kapoor, Anita (Shahari Gharelu Kamgaar Union, Delhi). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 10 January 2017.
87. Ghosh, Never Done and Poorly Paid; Sen, ‘Beyond the “working class”’.
88. Sen, ‘Beyond the “working class”,’ 104.
89. Government of India, Home Affairs, ‘Unstarred Question no. 948’; Government of India, Home Affairs, ‘Unstarred Question no. 3683’.
90. Kumar, Ramendra (Delhi Gharelu Kamgar Sangathan). Interview by Sonal Sharma. 8 July 2018.
91. See National Crime Records Bureau, ‘Crime in India’.
92. See above 41.