No pride in being Maid in India

Informal surveys indicate 85 per cent of these workers found themselves unceremoniously thrown out of jobs or forced to accept pay cuts during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown

What is this love/hate relationship that middle class India has with domestic workers? When the lockdown was announced, people like us took to the social media to bemoan the fact that part-time helps could no longer ease their domestic load. However, informal surveys indicate that as many as 85 per cent of these workers — domestic helps, guards, drivers and attendants — found themselves unceremoniously thrown out of jobs or forced to accept pay cuts during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. Estimates suggest that over a million people are employed as domestic helps across the country, with women constituting over 75 per cent of this sector. The work is poorly paid, stigmatised and yet the source of their financial empowerment.

Poonam Mishra is one of them. Two days before the lockdown began and around the same time that she had had a baby, her employer of two years fired her without warning. “They gave me 15 days salary as severance pay and just let me go without any warning,” she recounts. “My husband, Sunil Mishra, who used to work as a guard, was also fired in the same fashion.” The employers offered no reason; the Mishras didn’t really bother asking. But the family of six (they have three daughters — 10, eight, and a year and a half — and a four-month-old son) has been brought to its knees by the callousness of their employers. “We managed to get free ration twice from the government ration shop and took a loan of Rs 15,000,” Mishra says. “As for our house rent of Rs 2,500, we haven’t paid it for four months and fear that the landlord will evict us soon.”

The couple is desperately looking for work right now. “But we’ve both not managed to find new jobs so far as no one wants to hire someone new right now,” she says. “We’re now willing to do any kind of work, anything at all just to survive this time.” The first two months of the lockdown were not too bad, Mishra says, as they could access government relief. Last month (ironically when the world observes International Domestic Workers Day on June 16) has been hard. They barely have money for food and daily expenses, their debt is mounting, their older daughters aren’t able to cope with their classes on WhatsApp and their newborn cries incessantly. Returning to their village in Darbhanga, Bihar, isn’t an option as there are no livelihood opportunities there either. “My husband has worked in Delhi for 17 year, I for nine,” she says. “We’d never imagined things would come to such a pass…”

Mishra’s experience illustrates the problems that arise when a sector which contributes significantly to the nation’s economy and enables financial empowerment particularly of women, isn’t regulated. The national policy on domestic work was first discussed in 2009, but is yet to see the light of day. In most states including Delhi, domestic workers aren’t included under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. So while people like Poonam Mishra continue to live and work as per their employers’ whims — their employers have no responsibility towards their welfare. Which is why the Covid-19 pandemic can’t be blamed for Mishra’s woes. It has only exposed the rot eroding the system for the last couple of decades.