Distinctions and hierarchies: Paid domestic work in Jaipur
Päivi Mattila, PhD. Student ()
Institute of Development Studies, University of Helsinki
Work Matters – 27th International Labour Process Conference
6th-8th April 2009, Apex International Hotel, Edinburgh, UK
This is a draft paper. Please do not cite.
1. Introduction
It is peaceful in the dormant middle-class neighbourhood in Jaipur. A few dogs slouch around the quiet streets in the morning sun. There is no sight of the inhabitants of the houses behind the walls. But all the while one woman or a girl enters a house here, another comes out of a house there, starting her route towards a new house. It is easy for the local inhabitants to recognise the only walkers of the forenoon as domestic workers, the necessary bearers of their neat homes. Almost every Indian middle class home employs domestic workers to perform defined tasks. Thus, it is estimated that the paid employees of the Indian homes are one of the largest, if not the largest groups of workers in the informal sector.
The study of paid domestic work has produced rich information about labour relations within care and domestic work, particularly in a transnational context (see, e.g., Anderson 2000; Hochshild 2000; Parreñas 2001; Romero 2002). As these studies show structural hierarchies based on class, race, gender, caste, and citizenship are embedded within and define the relationships between domestic workers and employers. (See, e.g., Anderson 2000; Hochshild 2000; Parreñas 2001; Raghuram 2001; Romero 2002). In India, too, the ideologies and practices of gender, caste, and religion both shape the contours of the workplace and the trajectory of class identities (Ray, 2000, 692). Previous studies on paid domestic work in India have provided insights into the meaning of the caste (see, e.g. Raghuram 2001; Froystad 2003); the gendered division of labour (Ray 2000); and the knowledge transfers between domestic workers and their employers (Tolen 2000). Other studies have looked at domestic work from a migration perspective, focusing on the social networks among in-country female migrants. (Neetha N. 2002, 2003; Raghuram 1999). This paper draws in particular upon the works of Sara Dickey (2000a, 2000b) on the meaning of class within the domestic work system in South India; and the study by Kathinka Froystad (2003, 2005) on the importance of the caste in the reproduction of the master-servant relations in North India.
My aim in this paper is to show that the system of paid domestic work in India is organised by the intersecting, hierarchical categories of class, caste, gender, age, ethnicity and religion.[1] I argue that since domestic work operates in the informal sector without common regulation, the individualised needs, preferences, and perceptions of the employers have a central role in how this sector is organised. Consequently, it is the social and hierarchical categories which shape and structure the employer-worker relationships and the multi-layered system of paid domestic work. Which hierarchies are foregrounded in each employer-employee relationship depends on questions such as whether the workers are live-in or part-time workers, and on whether there are sons or daughters in the house. It is particularly in the process of recruiting a new domestic worker where the employer attitudes are most clearly expressed and acted out.
Where as class, caste, and gender have been thoroughly discussed in the previous studies on domestic work in India, the meaning of age as a hierarchical category in has received little scholarly attention. I argue that it is necessary to include the hierarchical category of age to the analysis of hierarchies in paid domestic work in India. Moreover, this paper brings a new geographical window to the existing research by looking at city of Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan in Northern India.
The paper will proceed as follows. In chapter two and three I will discuss the methodological approaches and contextualise domestic work in India. Then, I will explore the main hierarchies and categories that are in place and the ways in which they influence both the division of labour and the recruitment criteria of employers. Firstly, I will take class as a kind of starting point since class as a hierarchical category tends to foreground other categories. I will discuss it only briefly, but will then look more carefully at caste. Secondly, I will look at gender and age and life stage as organisers of the sector and see how they are played out in the recruitment of workers. Thirdly, through the employers’ discourses on ethnicity I will come to the employer discourse on clean and dirty. I argue that the other hierarchies and categories ultimately merge into the dichotomy of being clean or being dirty in the employers’ perception. This dichotomy may also work as a kind of metaphor for all the other hierarchical identities. I conclude by noting that since the sector of domestic work in Jaipur is unorganised and unregularised, it is the highly individualised preferences of the employers based on the intersecting, hierarchical identity categories that largely define and determine how the paid domestic work in Jaipur is organised.
2. Methodological approaches
This paper is based on an ethnographically oriented field research which I have carried out in India for my PhD research in three different periods in 2004-2007. I have stayed in India for six months altogether, mainly in the city of Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan in Northern India. The methods I used during the field work were qualitative interviews and observation.[2] Although the data for my PhD consists of more than 80 interviews, in this paper I focus on the individual and pair interviews and group discussions with 19 employers and 18 workers in Jaipur. I have interviewed nearly all of them at least twice.[3] Most of the workers and the employers were interviewed both in 2006 and in 2007 which enabled me to observe changes that had taken place within in a one-year period. I have chosen to take a relational approach to the domestic labour relationship which means that I have interviewed both employers and workers. (see also Dickey, 2000a, 32, Dickey 2000b, 464). Although there is more focus on the employers in this paper, my aim is to give equal weight to the perspectives of employers and workers in my PhD research. For ethical reasons, I have interviewed workers and employers from different geographical areas to ensure the safety and integrity of everybody involved[4]. Since half of the workers in my data are children and young persons I decided to talk with them first in a group to make them feel more comfortable. The existing ethical codes for researchers underline the specific features of studying children and young people and the need to recognise and take into account their vulnerability.[5]
The employers and workers are from different caste, religious and ethnic backgrounds. Half of the workers whom I interviewed are local Rajasthanis, others are migrant workers from the state of West-Bengal. Since organising and managing domestic work is largely a women’s world, 17 out of 19 employers in my data are women. The employers are both working women and so called housewives. The workers whom I interviewed in Jaipur are all women and girls. This reflects my decision not to interview live-in workers but only to observe their work in the employers’ homes, and to get information on live-in work through the employers. This is a choice informed by the ethical principles of ensuring the safety and integrity of the workers. Given my focus on part-time (or live-out) workers, I choice to concentrate on the largest group of all domestic workers, the maids who clean the houses and wash the dishes. In this group, workers are female.
3. Contextualising domestic work in India
In India, domestic workers are usually called servants in English and naukar /naukarani for male and female workers in Hindi. This is a general expression for all people working for the household and it can refer to different professions such as the cleaners, the cooks, the gardeners and so on. As elsewhere, domestic workers can roughly be divided into two main groups: live-in workers who work and live at the employers’ house and live-out workers or part-time workers who live in their own homes. Since live-out worker is often used to imply that a worker works only for one employer, it does suit the situation in India very well. Here, most of the workers work for several houses and carry out specific in each household. Thus, the term part-time worker or task-based worker may be more appropriate in the Indian context, and I will use the term part-time worker in this paper to describe them. There are no reliable statistics on the number of domestic workers in India. Estimates range from 60 to 80 million domestic workers in the country with around 90 per cent of them women and girls. Around 20 to 25 % of the domestic workers in India are said to be children under the age of 14 years. (See, e.g., National Domestic Workers Movement 2009). Altogether, domestic workers form one of the largest groups of workers in the informal sector in India.
In the past decades, the work relationships have changed from a feudalistic to more contractual basis (Raghuram, 2001, 9). The existing research and my observations suggest that employing a part-time domestic worker is becoming increasingly common. (See, e.g., Raghuram, 1999). There could be several reasons for this. Educated women are increasingly working outside the home which increases the demand for domestic help. My study suggests that these employers usually do not want anybody to stay in their home whilst they are at work. At the same time, women are still mainly responsible for all household work inside the house while men have an important but less time-taking role in managing the outside space. In addition, middle-class houses and apartments in cities are nowadays smaller, making it more difficult to accommodate a live-in worker.
The middle class and upper middle class Indian families in my data usually employ at least two to three workers. Some of them have only part-time workers, others employ a combination of live-in worker(s) and part-time workers. The main categories of workers in Indian homes and their main tasks are:
- Maids Sweeping and mopping the floor and washing the dishes
- Washerwomen/men Washing and ironing of the laundry
- Cooks Cooking (and sometimes washing the dishes)
- Sweepers Taking out the garbage, sweeping the yard
+ (in some houses) cleaning the toilet
- Gardeners
- Drivers
- Child care takers
Thus, all the tasks can be performed by different workers. Whilst most employer two or three workers, there are also houses in my data who employ five or six different workers, most of whom visit the house everyday. However, if there is a live-in worker in the house, he or she may perform several of these tasks. Typically, though, the houses with live-in workers also employ part-time workers such as sweepers or maids to carry out specific tasks.
There are great variations also in the work conditions such as the salary, the working hours, and the right to a leave. Whilst this is informal work, the conditions of the part-time workers have come to look like a wage-labour relationship with more or less agreed working schedules, a monthly salary and other benefits such as clothes.[6] Some of the part-time workers also have two or three days leave per month although most of them work seven days a week. Here, there seem to be differences between different ethnic groups with the Bengali migrants regularly having leave days each month compared to the locals who may not have any agreed leave. The salary, although low, is negotiated on the basis of informal market rates which are based on certain criteria such as the number of rooms in the employer house, the number of family members, etc. Where as conditions vary also within part-time work, it is the live-in work where differences are the starkest. In my data there are ex-domestic workers who used to work in slavery-like conditions. These girls were unpaid and practically imprisoned in the employers’ house. What is common to most live-in workers is that they are on call twenty-four hours and expected to work whenever needed without set hours of time off.
The legal position of domestic workers in India is weak since this sector is not covered by the legislation. The biggest organization working for domestic workers rights is the National Domestic Workers Movement has worked on this issue for decades. Some states, mainly in South India, have enacted state-level regulation concerning the working conditions of domestic workers.[7] In 2006, the government of India amended the existing Child Labour Act from 1986. Previously, the Act did not include domestic work in the list of prohibited work for children, a reason for much lobbying. As of October 2006, no one is allowed to employ a child under 14 years of age in their homes.[8]
In terms of regulations, there is a recent regulation in Jaipur that all employers should register their workers at the nearest police station with a photograph. Somewhat ironically, this rule was mainly introduced to improve the safety of the employers, not the workers. Despite the fear the employers claim they have towards the workers, only one of the employers in my data in Jaipur had done so.
Since recruitment is the question where the intersectional hierarchies have most significance, I will conclude this chapter by describing briefly how they are recruited.
Whilst employers commonly use recruitment agencies in bigger cities such as in the capital Delhi (see Neetha, 2003, 9), this is not a practice in the recruitment of domestic workers in Jaipur. None of the employers I met were familiar with such agencies in Jaipur or had used their services. Here, the employers look for new part-time workers by asking from the neighbours or the workers of their neighbours if they could work for their house, too. It is quite common that when a part-time maid, for example, gets married, she will be replaced by a younger sister.