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ABSTRACT (***Special Edition Gendered Pandemic)
In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers’ rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and degree of disunity among workers changed. Despite dwindling resources and a hostile political environment that offered paltry prospects for success, domestic workers persisted in protesting for improved conditions. We argue that while domestic workers’ organising prior to the pandemic may be accounted for by standard theoretical approaches, the onset of the pandemic presents challenges to these same theoretical approaches. The domestic workers’ movement in India has transitioned from its pre-pandemic opportunity-based activism to what might be better characterised as threat-based collective action. Further, an intersectional analysis of these threats suggests that domestic worker protests are driven not only by strategic considerations about how to craft alliances in a shifting political field, but also by a need to assert an identity and to demand inclusion in the category ‘worker,’ from which domestic workers are often excluded by gender and caste bias.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Although some domestic work-related activities are performed by male workers (gardeners, family drivers), paid domestic work as an employment sector remains traditionally feminised (ILO, 2015).
2. Space does not permit a full discussion of Scheduled Tribes (STs) except to note that their marginalisation is linked to their geographical isolation and belonging to indigenous groups (Chauhan, 2008; Gopinath, Citation2018).
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Notes on contributors
Srijani Datta
Srijani Datta completed her MA in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Simon Fraser University, specializing in comparative politics. Currently, she works at Simon Fraser University as a research associate and as an admissions associate involved in projects on equity, diversity, and inclusion in Beedie School of Business. Her research work focuses on marginal groups and gendered topics including the gendered pattern of voting, feminist mobilization across the global south, and the domestic workers' movement in India.
Summer Forester
Summer Forester is an assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota. Professor Forester's areas of research include feminist mobilization and economic empowerment, feminist analyses of militarism, gender justice, the continuum of violence, and gender policymaking in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan. Her work has been published in Security Dialogue, International Studies Quarterly, Politics & Gender, and elsewhere.
Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson
Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson (PHD 2020, Purdue University) is a lecturer at Tufts University. She is currently developing a book project based on her award-winning dissertation There is Power in a Plaza: Social Movements, Democracy, and Spatial Politics demonstrating how social movements create democratic spaces that advance inclusion and improve local democracy through the cases of the Gezi Park protests of 2012 and the 2017 Women’s Marches.
Amber Lusvardi
Amber Lusvardi is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Purdue University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her research centers on determinants of agenda setting and policy adoption for gender justice issues in state and comparative contexts.
Laurel Weldon
S. Laurel Weldon (University of Pittsburgh, 1999) is Distinguished Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada and co-editor of the American Political Science Review. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.