Negotiating responsibilities and relationships: Power, conflict, and decision-making in households of informal women workers

Abstract

In the South Asian context, the importance of male protection and provision lead women to comply with, rather than challenge, male dominance. Yet, even as social structures constrain the actions of women more so than those of men, they allow spaces where women can fulfill their own and their families’ needs. Based on case studies of different groups of women engaged in the garment and construction sectors and those who had given up wage work, I argue in this paper that women's ability to shift power relations at home depended on the kind of paid employment they were engaged in and its social recognition. The agency of women who had given up wage work and those in independent paid employment was shaped by different factors. The differences in their familial and kinship roles, stage-of-life identities, the class position of their households, the ability to mobilize their social networks and access to earnings impacted intra- and extra-household relations and women's ability to shift these relations.

Abstract in Hindi

Keywords:

• informal women workers
• paid and unpaid work
• agency
• migration
• intra-household relations

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Ph.D. supervisors, Prof. Rajni Palriwala and Prof. Amita Baviskar, for their constant encouragement and guidance in this research. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of AJWS and the Co-Editor, Dr. Mala Khullar, for their constructive feedback on several drafts of this paper.

Notes on contributor

Sakshi KHURANA completed her Ph.D. in 2015 from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. She received the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) Ph.D. fellowship from the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University between 2011-2014. She presently works as a Research Associate at V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, NOIDA, India. Her other published articles include “Learning Skills, Negotiating Identities in the Informal Labour Market: Experiences of Women Construction Workers,” published in Labour and Development in 2014, and “Capturing Unpaid Work: Labour Statistics and Time Use Surveys,” co-authored with Ellina Samantroy and published in 2015 in the edited book Gender Issues and Challenges in the Twenty First Century by Uttam Kumar Panda (Ed.).

Notes

1. According to residents, in the latter half of the 1970s, many weavers and their families were displaced from their homes in North and North-West Delhi and resettled on land located across the Yamuna River, in North-East Delhi, where they were allocated plots of land for housing.

2. Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which was active in both the colonies where fieldwork was carried out, has been considered a pioneer in organizing informal women workers in India. For construction workers, apart from offering schemes for savings, credit, pension, etc., SEWA played the role of a trade union that could attest applications for their registration with the welfare board of Delhi government. In the garment workers’ housing colony, the “SEWA Embroidery Centre” provided employment to garment workers, particularly to home-based embroidery workers, by acting as an important link between the garment manufacturing companies and workers.

3. Whitehead (1981) uses the term ‘conjugal contract’ to refer to the manner in which men and women ‘exchange goods, incomes and services, including labor, within the household’ from a starting point of unequal power.

4. Safa (1995) describes how men waited on Fridays outside the gate of the free trade zone in the Dominican Republic to collect the paychecks of their wives or girlfriends, implying that they lived off women's wages.

5. Many life insurance schemes in India give payouts before the end of a person's life. If the insurance policy ‘matures’ before a person's death, s/he is eligible to receive the amount saved along with interest on the deposits.