Domestic servants - The powerless, misunderstood group

It’s tragic that even 69 years after India's Independence, domestic servants in the country continue to be in a most dismal situation - of vulnerability and exploitation, who too frequently pay a high price in their life for the service they render. They are a powerless, misunderstood group and are often victims of verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Moreover, they have no job security and are not recognized as workers at all and, as a result, they are completely at the mercy of their employers. 

Indeed, domestic servants are an unattended sector of India's workforce and, hidden as they are within the confines of four walls, their plight does not hit the public eye. Though a few cases, particularly sensational ones, do receive sympathy, the daily plight of the domestic laborers - which is deeply exploitative, meets with complete indifference. NGOs working with domestic workers have in their files horrific cases of sexual abuse, besides cases of physical and mental torture. 

Washing dirty utensils and clothes is not the easiest of jobs, and yet people who earn thousands of rupees begrudge their domestic servants a few hundreds. People who are so conscious of their own labor rights, medical allowance, provident fund and leave, think nothing of denying their domestics these basic human rights. No law is ever enforced to protect them from the so-called educated and well-to-do citizens who  have little or, rather no, compunction in exploiting their 'menials' to  the hilt, paying them a mere pittance for work that goes on throughout the day, letting them sleep only except in the kitchen, giving them only food that is leftover, if not stale, and clothes which are discards. Even that, people deem, is charity - for household help are less than equal, belonging to a strata that deserves nothing better, or are criminals against whom society must be on guard. They can be totally ignored except when they commit a crime. 

What people refuse to understand is that, those domestic servants who indeed turn out to be criminals, do not start as such. They simply belong  to the lowest strata of the society - the poorest among the poor, particularly from tribal villages, who drift in to cities and other urban areas in search of work which they hope will give them a place to stay, food to eat, clothes to wear - something they cannot have back home. They may get all that here, provided they are prepared to literally sell themselves. These hapless people eventually end up slogging in somebody else's house from dawn to dusk and even beyond - cooking, washing clothes and utensils, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets, gardening, sweeping drive-aways, marketing, running errands or looking after children. The returns are paltry part of the meagre pay is usually sent to those left behind in villages. 

The real bane of domestic service is not so much the nature of the work itself but a total absence of long- or short-term security relating to wages, or casual, sick, medical or annual and earned leave. Provision for provident fund or gratuity is simply unheard of. It is as if the Minimum Wages Act does not apply to household help. Indeed, even on paper, domestic  workers do not exist. They are outside the purview of the minimum wages list. In short, they are not considered workers. There are more women among them than men, since in India, the role of women, almost by definition, is domestic. Domestic servants could be full-time or, as a sector in a floating population, also part-time, temporarily taking up other jobs. Many of them, especially women, remain household servants throughout their lives. 

There is no machinery that can intervene on their behalf, so that they get reasonably paid, have fixed hours of work or overtime payment for extra time put in, or weekly and other statutory leaves. Law enforcement authorities cannot help since it is thought impractical to do house-to-house checks, though the police occasionally think of making rounds in colonies to alert citizens against ‘undesirables’, a term which has come to include also domestic servants. 

This is precisely one of the main reasons those who are employed as domestic workers know they are used and exploited, and so they can never feel sense of belonging, something every individual longs for. The relationship between the employer and employee is commercial, often impersonal, with little place for a human element, though some people do claim that they treat their servants like their own children or members of the family - an euphemism, perhaps, for extracting more work, using the odd kind word. Made to realise where their place really is, domestic servants suffer from a rejection syndrome in the affluent setting within which they work, an affluence that is in stark contrast to their own poverty. 

They become aware that they are used, exploited and abused. And this breeds in them resentment and hostility. A domestic servant who turns criminal often does so to take it out on his employer. He/she too wants to possess, but cannot do so legally, so he/she steals, robs or even murders to avenge the wrong, intentionally or unintentionally. But all said and done, the servant is more sinned against than sinning. 

Significantly, civil society organisations and trade unions from across the country under the banner of National Platform for Domestic Workers (NPDW) recently demanded from the Union government a comprehensive legislation to regulate their working condition and provisions for social security benefits. The platform claims that it has already drafted a model Domestic Workers Regulation of Work and Social Security Bill, after consultation with various stakeholders, which is submitted to the government for consideration at the earliest.

(The writer is a freelance journalist)