The Peninsula Foundation

Tag: exploitation

  • Colonial exploitation included heritage theft, and that continues to this day

    Colonial exploitation included heritage theft, and that continues to this day

    Museums and private collectors in the West have prided themselves on the vast collections of heritage treasures, antiquities, and archaeological and epigraphic treasures from across the world. In truth, these are stolen treasures from the non-western world enabled by colonialism and imperialism. It is time the victim nations work towards global policies to ensure these treasures are returned to their original owners. This is truly a massive public policy challenge in global governance and for a fair, equitable, multi-polar world. Professor M A Kalam looks at the continuing theft of India’s heritage treasures.

     

     

     

    The whole idea of establishing a colony was to exploit the resources there and enrich the home coffers. And all colonials—irrespective of whether they were British, Danes, Dutch, Italians, Belgians, Portuguese, Spanish, or American—indulged in this exercise and over a period turned it into a fine art. As ill luck would have it, a host of countries in many parts of the world were less developed than these colonials, particularly in terms of technology, but were very rich and well-endowed in terms of resources of various kinds. Though they possessed natural wealth, they lacked adequate technology and hence were not in a position to resist the onslaught and machinations of different kinds of the technologically-advanced colonials. The resource-rich countries were, in the main, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Highly developed naval vessels and a state-driven overpowering desire to explore resources in different regions of the world enabled the colonials to adopt different strategies for befriending and subsequently subjugating the peoples of the resource-rich areas.

    Genesis Of Exploitation

    Because of her tremendous naval power, Britain spread its net of exploration quite wide in South Asia and Africa. In India, the British came in as traders established the East India Company and then gradually started flexing their arms and took control of administration and became the rulers of the country. Though they allowed some pockets to be “ruled” by rajas, maharajas, nizams and nawabs, these provinces were not independent in the real sense of the term but were virtually servile to the British, if not their minions, in many ways. That is how the genesis of exploitation took shape in India. Subsequently, there were myriad ways in which colonial exploitation occurred—physical exploitation of the people including sexual abuse and exploitation of labour was one of the forms of that

    Other ways of exploitation were the draining of different kinds of agricultural and forest resources; these included: jute, cotton, sugar, tea, coffee and wheat. The goods developed in British factories were sold back in India for rich benefits. Also, commercial crops like tea, coffee, indigo, opium, cotton, jute, sugarcane and oilseed were introduced and these had impacted their profits tremendously but had different environmental implications in different regions of the country, as plantations always do, due the exercise of clear felling of the forests in almost all cases of extensive plantation activities.

    Repatriating The Kohinoor

    To top it all, regarding exploitation, was the brazen way in which India’s heritage wealth, antiquities and artefacts, were exported to their home bases, by the colonials, to unabashedly adorn their own museums and galleries. Many of these artefacts were stolen without any hesitation. Today it is being argued that one of the most famous diamonds in the world, the Kohinoor, was not necessarily snatched from the people of India but was offered on a platter to the British as part of the peace treaty of Lahore by the king of Punjab Maharaja Dalip Singh. Arm-twisting gets another name in diplomatic parlance—offer. And the British have the temerity to continue to adorn their crown with the Kohinoor though they refrained from its display on the head of the recently crowned queen, the wife of King Charles III during the latter’s coronation, in a rare diplomatic courtesy, apparently not to provoke the sensibility of the Indian delegation attending the coronation.

    As Rishi Sunak is more loyal than the queen, there is no chance of him taking the initiative in repatriating to India the Kohinoor or the innumerable other artefacts that were stolen/snatched from India and today adorn the British Museum and many other of their galleries.

    Last week the Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture headed by YSR Congress MP Vijay Sai Reddy, adopted the Report ‘Heritage Theft – The Illegal Trade in Indian Antiquities and the Challenges of Retrieving and Safeguarding Our Tangible Cultural Heritage’. The Committee conferred with the Culture Ministry officials who apparently think that while efforts were being made to bring back the stolen antiquities from different foreign locations, the case of Kohinoor diamond is “contentious since it was surrendered by Maharaja Dalip Singh as part of the 1849 peace treaty with the British”.

    Reversing Colonial Exploitation

    To recapitulate and also to highlight the way in which different forms of exploitation occurred, we can argue that in the first instance, it was human exploitation wherein there was sexual abuse, killings and decimation of populations. The second way was the exploitation of the agricultural and natural resources which can be conceived of as resources that were “consumables” and “non-durables”. The third was the exploitation of the heritage wealth that falls in the realm of non-consumables and durables.

    So, today, when we explore measures that could be thought of in terms of “getting back” things and reversing the impact that colonial exploitation had on India, we can think of some strategies: in the case of the first two, that is human exploitation and the draining of consumables, there can only be reparations if the Britishers’ conscience pricks them enough; or at least unqualified apologies. But in the case of the third, that is the loss of heritage wealth, there can, and should indeed be repatriation of the stolen antiquities.

    A host of “art dealers” in different parts of the country are smuggling out artefacts and antiquities from India, particularly from ancient temples, and at times from museums, on a large scale. Only a fraction of this comes to light.

    Now, talking about the loss of heritage wealth, we also have to bring into the picture the fact that it is happening, quite rampantly, even today though the colonials left the shores years back on India becoming independent. A host of “art dealers” (read thieves) in different parts of the country are smuggling out artefacts and antiquities from India, particularly from ancient temples, and at times from museums, on a large scale. Only a fraction of this comes to light when these items are exhibited in galleries and museums in different parts of the world; often times these are hidden in private collections. India is trying to regain some of this heritage wealth but there seem to be obstacles, at times quite unsurmountable, of the diplomatic and other kinds. Let us hope the Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture succeeds in its exertions.

     

    A version of this article was published earlier in moneycontrol.com

    Feature Image Credit: Kohinoor Diamond in Queen’s Crown, now safely kept in the Tower of London. smithsonianmag.com 

    Picture of Idols: The three 15th century ‘panchaloga’ idols of Shri Rama, Sita, and Laxman were stolen in 1978 from a Vijaynagara era temple (15th Century) in Anandamangalam village in Tamilnadu, India. These were identified and finally restored to India by the UK government in 2020. www.bbc.com

     

  • Colonial taxes built Britain. That must be taught in lessons on Empire

    Colonial taxes built Britain. That must be taught in lessons on Empire

    UK government ministers want the British Empire’s benefits taught in schools. Don’t let them ignore the death and destruction it inflicted says Professor Gurminder K Bhambra. Her observation is equally if not more important for India and other erstwhile colonies. Britain and other European colonial powers not only looted and decimated Indian economy over three centuries of colonial interaction but their ruthless exploitation led to much of the poverty that has afflicted the global south ever since. This fact of history must be taught extensively in Indian schools. There are many who propagate the fallacy that the British empire was beneficial but the truth that it was ruthlessly exploitative must be taught and researched in a big way. The wealth of the West was built on built on exploitation of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The West continues to dominate the global economic system and it is inherently exploitative. History teaching and research, from policy and science perspectives, are in dire need for elimination of Western bias.

     

    Recent weeks have seen a variety of UK government ministers – fromOliver Dowden to Kemi Badenoch to, most recently, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi – both extol the benefits of British Empire and urge the teaching of those benefits. This follows on from the government’s response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which set out the need for a new model curriculum for history which would advise schools on how best to teach these issues. This is all part of the government’s Inclusive Britain strategy which calls on us to acknowledge the rich and complex history of ‘global Britain’.

    In the spirit of this call, I offer one account of the complex, entangled histories of colonial taxation and national welfare that continue to shape modern Britain. Few people know that colonial subjects from the Indian subcontinent paid taxation, including income tax, to the British government in Westminster. Or that that taxation was used to alleviate the conditions of poorer people within Britain at a time when the working class and middle class here were exempt from paying income tax.

    Taxation – and the ways in which it is returned to citizens through welfare – is one of the main ways in which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation comes into being. That is, the relationship between taxes and welfare is part of the process of constructing institutions and the idea of the nation. If we were to recognise that this ‘imagined community’ was built not only through national taxes, but also colonial ones, then how might that change our understanding of what it is to be British today?

    My grandfather, Mohan Singh, was born in 1913 in a small village in the Punjab, in what was then British India. He was four years old when his father, Gurdit Singh, died and 17 when his uncle, Harnam Singh, who had been supporting him, also passed away. My grandfather had planned on attending the Government College in Lahore, but – needing to support his mother and younger sister – he instead spent six months training as a boilermaker. He then got married to Pritam Kaur and travelled to Calcutta to work in a variety of factories, engineering works and rolling mills.

    In 1942, he travelled to the British colony of Kenya – bringing his family over later – and worked for 18 years at the East African Railways and Harbour Company. He spent the last two decades of his life in the UK, working at Chalvey Engineering in Slough as a sheet metal worker before retiring at the age of 65 in Southall, west London.

    Calls to ‘go home’ have been the refrain of right-wing opponents of immigration from at least the 1970s

    Mohan Singh criss-crossed three continents during his lifetime, but he never left the jurisdiction of the British Empire. In his application for registration as a citizen of the UK and Colonies – in the aftermath of the British Nationality Act of 1948 – he wrote: “I was born in British India.” He further noted that he lived and worked in India and Kenya, two countries that were colonies of Britain. It was these connections that confirmed his citizenship and gave him the right to travel to and live in Britain. He duly exercised those rights but, on arrival, he had them called into question by the local population, who were either unaware of them or indifferent.

    Calls to ‘go home’ have been the refrain of right-wing opponents of immigration from at least the 1970s – as well as having been plastered on the sides of vans as part of the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’policies of recent years. They are also implicit in an influential body of scholarly work oriented to questions of belonging and entitlement that argue for priority in public policy to be given to the ‘white working class.’ This is on the basis of them being ‘insiders’ who have contributed through their taxes to the wealth that is disbursed through welfare.

    Former colonial subjects, like my grandfather, are regarded as immigrant outsiders even when they come to the metropole carrying passports of British citizenship. They are not seen to have contributed to the wealth of Britain by paying taxes and they are regarded as unfairly gaining access to the national patrimony. As Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Youngwrite in ‘The new East End’: “As newcomers, their families cannot have put much into the system, so they should not be expecting yet to take so much out.”

    Britain established direct rule over India after suppressing the 1857 Indian Mutiny (also known as the First War of Independence). In 1860, it implemented an income tax upon colonial subjects, in part to pay for the costs associated with those revolts. Initially, a 2% rate was imposed on those earning between 200 rupees and 500 rupees a year and a 4% rate on those earning above 500 rupees annually.

    Famine Genocide 1876-1879 in British Raj Madras, India. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

    The arrival of the British in India – first via the English East India Company and then through direct rule – had brought endemic famine across the subcontinent

    When my grandfather started work in the 1930s, the average wage for a skilled worker in British India was about 40 rupees a month. He was very unlikely to have paid income tax, however, as he would not have earned enough to meet the threshold, which by then was 2,000 rupees a year. Of the amount that was collected, around three-quarters went to the imperial treasury, with only one rupee in a hundred for local purposes. Local purposes included the building of canals and roads, but not the alleviation of poverty, not even in times of catastrophic famine.

    The arrival of the British in India – first via the English East India Company and then through direct rule – had brought endemic famine across the subcontinent. The 50 years after the implementation of the income tax saw one of the most intense such periods of famine, in which it is estimated over 14 million people died of starvation. This was in the context of grain being exported by rail from the famine regions (including to Britain) and colonial taxes continuing to be collected even in the worst-affected areas.

    In all cases, the demands of ‘sound finance’ trumped those of public health and the primary thing to be avoided was any idea that the poor in India should be maintained at public expense. Ensuring sufficient funds for the ensuing military campaign in Afghanistan – from the taxes paid by colonial subjects for local purposes – was of more importance than using those taxes to alleviate severe hunger and avert the deaths of millions.

    Here, we see quite clearly that the idea of the ‘imagined community’ created through taxation and its redistribution did not include colonial subjects. The taxes that Indians paid to the imperial treasury and to local provinces did not give them any entitlement to the redistribution of that income. Worse, any relief provided during famines was often dependent on undertaking hard labour in camps at a distance from a claimant’s locality.

    The most extreme instance was where the rations provided in return for heavy labour were scarcely above the level required for basic subsistence. The ‘Temple wage’ – named after the lieutenant-governor, Richard Temple, who brought it in – produced lethal results and, as Mike Davis notes in ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, turned the work camps into extermination camps.

    The death and destruction brought about by the Empire were known at the time. In 1925, Harry Pollitt, the leader of the Boilermakers Union in the UK, stated that the British Empire was drenched in blood. This was in the context of debates at the Trades Union Congress in Scarborough, where a resolution was eventually adopted – by three million votes to 79,000 – against imperialism and in support of the right of self-determination of those who were colonised.

    Such sentiments, however, came up against more hard-nosed understandings concerning the utility of the Empire to those in Britain. As Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin proclaimed in Parliament in 1946, “I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, because I know that if the British Empire fell … it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”

    Here, Bevin acknowledged that the life of all within Britain was enhanced as a consequence of Empire. However, Empire was overwhelmingly disastrous for the majority of people subject to it. Their standard of life fell considerably as a consequence of colonialism and the famines it produced and, in many, many cases, they lost their lives to it.

    One mode of survival was to move. This is why my grandfather moved from a village in the Punjab to train as a boilermaker in Lahore, before working in Calcutta, Nairobi and London. This is likely why his grandfather before him moved from famine-struck Orissa to Rajasthan to Punjab. These movements tend not to be seen to be part of the histories of Britain, global or otherwise, or of any consequence to understanding Britain or Britishness in the present.

    The forgetting of the Empire involves also the forgetting of the political community – colonial and postcolonial – that was constructed through taxation. Few in Britain today understand the extent to which national projects – from social welfare to cultural institutions such as country houses, museums, and galleries – have been enabled through the taxes paid by former colonial subjects. There is an urgent need for us to recognise our shared histories and account for them.

    One aspect of the ‘culture wars’ is the call to take the views of taxpayers into account when discussing ‘contested histories’. Samir Shah, the chair of London’s Museum of the Home, for example, argued that as heritage bodies are funded by taxpayers’ money, then the views of taxpayers – those he considers the silent majority – ought to be taken more explicitly into account. Given that both colonial subjects and their descendants paid taxes to the government in Westminster, then they/we also have a legitimate stake, in the government’s own terms, in how our shared history is represented. There is a benefit to the teaching of British Empire, but the reality is different from what these ministers suppose.

     

    This essay was published earlier in openDemocracy and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial 4.0 International License.

     

    Feature Image Credit: The Irish Times

     

     

  • Marginalised among the invisible: The case of female migrant domestic workers

    Marginalised among the invisible: The case of female migrant domestic workers

    The Pandemic, lockdown, and the chain of events that followed made the country wake up to the state of the most unfortunate group of the labour force; the migrant workers. They have always remained invisible to the development agenda of the government and only the catastrophe of a pandemic could shed light on their woes. Among this invisible workforce, there remains yet another marginalised group of female migrants.

    In India, female migration was initially considered insignificant by equating their movement merely as associational or followers of men.  However, this has certainly changed in the last decade. Marriage was seen as the central motive behind female migration, though lately more women are seen to enter the labour market post-migration as their labour demand rose in sectors of so-called “female occupations” of domestic work, care-work and certain informal labour requirements in sectors such as in construction, garment work, food services and as coolies and vendors.  As family migration from rural to urban abodes saw a rise in the country, both male and female migrants were required to join the labour force to meet their mere subsistence needs. Lack of employment, low income and other economic reasons pushed females, especially from rural areas, to migrate to urban zones of the country (Singh et al., 2015). While in urban areas, the migrants especially females and children are exposed to extreme vulnerabilities with regard to their dismal conditions of work in the informal sector, urban policies are deeply flawed in omitting migrant welfare and the sheer denial of their civil rights and entitlements.

    Precarious domestic work and female migrants

    Domestic work is often regarded as an invisible and insignificant addition to the social and economic values of a country. The work is increasingly feminised with over 80% of the world’s domestic work occupied by women (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2013a). And this mirrors the traditional notions of domestic work being a woman’s task. These tasks include traditional housework such as cleaning, cooking, washing clothes or utensils etc. or care-work such as a child or elderly care. Female migrants with low skills, low levels of education and migrating from rural abodes in search of employment form a predominant part of the labour pool. With no recognition and regulation of work, the female domestic workers are subject to unequal power dynamics at the workplace, making their lives precarious in terms of wages, security and wellbeing.

    In India, domestic work employment among females saw an upsurge, especially in urban areas. This surge is mainly accounted for by the increasing need for care work given the changing demography, lack of work opportunities in other sectors and the gender constructions moulded by the society (Chandrashekar & Ghosh, 2012). According to the National Sample Survey (NSSO-2011-2012, 68th round), 39 lakh (3.9 million) people are occupied in domestic work, among which 26 lakh (2.6 million) are females. Micro-level surveys suggest a predominant concentration of female migrants in domestic work, especially in urban areas (Mazumdar et al., 2013).  There are two forms of workers: live-in workers, who are accommodated in the household and live-out workers, who return to their respective houses after work and may be involved in work with multiple households. As there is no relevant national data on migrant workers involved in the sector, micro-level surveys or sector-based studies are the only sources in understanding the conditions of these migrants in domestic work. Studies have stated that migrants with low vocational qualifications and often seen as unregulated and undocumented cheap labour, work under low wages for long hours and in dismal working conditions affecting their health and safety. Live-in domestic workers are more prone to the dangers of sexual and physical abuse. Live-out domestic workers migrating to a new city, struggle with the inaccessibility of social security schemes and entitlements. Exploitation by private placement agencies in terms of wages and work conditions is another area among their hassles.

    The domestic work arena, already an unregulated and unorganised sector, puts female migrants with low bargaining power on a higher vulnerability scale. The task of identifying domestic work hinders the formulation of a sound regulatory mechanism to confront such vulnerabilities.

    Barriers to effective Regulation

    Regulating domestic work is impeded by cultural and structural barriers. The traditional notion and disregard of domestic work by women in households is extended to the understanding of paid domestic work as unproductive and hence, making it undervalued. The structural barriers relate to the unusual workplace in private spheres, which makes it difficult in enforcing labour laws and any form of scrutiny against the privacy norms of a household. The informality of work and its complexities aggravates the barriers in regulation. The employment relationship is uncertain as it is without any legal titles of employee and employer, making the relation very personalised and often not under any form of contract or agreement. Even if labour laws are made inclusive of domestic work, implementation and assurance of compliance of these laws in households are challenged until the household is recognised as a ‘workplace’ and the person hiring as an ‘employer’ in the legal framework (Chen, 2011).

    Even though these barriers existed, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention 2011 attempted in ensuring decent work to domestic workers and this is recognised as the most important landmark in identifying domestic work under a legal framework. ILO defines domestic work as “work performed in or for a household or households” and domestic worker as “any person engaged in a domestic work within an employment relationship”. The convention specified a comprehensive labour standard for domestic workers in areas of their wages, hours of work, occupational safety and health and social security. The convention addressed and standardized the various concerns in the sector regarding child labour, migrant workers, trafficking, live-in domestic labourers and private recruitment agencies (C189 – Domestic Workers Convention, 2011). Even after the completion of 10 years of the convention and 32 ILO member countries enforcing the landmark treaty, India is yet to ratify the convention.

    As domestic work remains undefined in the country, no significant statistical standard in estimating domestic workers exist. In the ILO policy brief on “Global and regional estimates of domestic workers” (ILO, 2013b), ambiguous nature of data on domestic workers were noticeable from the widely distributed figures, ranging from 2.5 million estimates from a household survey, 4.5 million workers estimated from official statistics (NSSO 2004-05) to an exaggerated figure of 90 million in news media. This difference in estimation is related to the difference in the identification of domestic work among different establishments (Mahanta & Gupta, 2015). With no clarity in identifying domestic workers inclusive of its peculiarities, these figures could be heavily underestimated too. Being a female migrant in the sector aggravates the problem of estimation as National statistics narrows down female migration patterns merely as associational. And thus failing to understand the true motives behind female migration and the subsequent scale of occupations they reside in (Indu et al, 2012).  Macro data narrows down domestic female labour into regular workers based on their duration in employment and disregarding the conditions of low wages and other insecurities, while the temporary and casual nature of work goes unrecognised (Neetha & Indrani, 2020). The informality of work is another area that India has failed to regulate. Labour laws for industrial labour often disregard informal workers. This is evident in the isolation of migrant workers, especially female migrants in domestic work (Poddar & Koshy, 2019).

     Lacunae in the legal framework

    Domestic work and most feminised occupations, in general, in unorganised sectors, are isolated from the legal framework given their unique characterisation of workplace and employment relationships and not to mention the challenges in recognising their work given the cultural and structural barriers. For female migrants in domestic work or any other informal activity, the situation is similar.

    There were certain positive steps in attempting to recognise the domestic workforce in the country. First of such attempts were their inclusion in the Unorganised Workers Social Security Act 2008 which gave hope, but failed to be implemented across different states (Agrawal & Agarwal,2018). Subsequently, the government also set up a task force to recommend a framework for policymaking and after 10 years, in 2019, we see a draft on National policy on domestic work formulated by the government covering their recognition, access to civil rights and social security schemes, skill development, regulating private placement agencies and a grievance redressal system (“National Policy for Domestic Workers”, 2019). Upon the recommendations of the task force, the domestic workers were to be included under the National Health insurance scheme – Rashtriya Bhima Yojana (RSBY). But the limited awareness of the scheme, its functioning and benefits, coupled with corruption reduced the domestic worker’s accessibility of the same (Mahanta & Gupta, 2015). The suggestion of the task force to include domestic worker rights in existing legislations, pertaining to industrial or organised labourers, was widely criticised because it does not adapt to the peculiarities of the feminised domestic work (Poddar & Koshy, 2019). Ensuring minimum wages to the domestic worker through the Minimum Wages Act 1948 with a task-based approach, while ignoring the aspect of personalised nature of employment completely, puts the live-in workers whose tasks are not quantifiable, out of the ambit of the act’s provisions. Similarly, the inclusion of domestic workers in the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act (2013), Employees’ State Insurance Act (1948) and Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act 2008 is considered inadequate. Even though such inclusion is appreciated, these legislations fail to cater to the rights of a domestic worker if they are based on organised sector labour standards and without understanding the complexities of the domestic work (Poddar & Koshy, 2019).

    Private placement agencies, one of the main recruitment channels of domestic work, remain unregulated. This has led to the rise in exploitation in terms of payment and working conditions. The Delhi government drafted a Delhi Private Placement Agencies (Regulation) Bill in 2012 which was widely rejected by the domestic workers’ unions and groups. The proposed bill was criticised to be ineffective as it does not include the registration of the employers and lacks clarity in the process of inspection of these agencies (Chigateri et al., 2016). A study on one of the frequently travelled migrant routes, which is from Jharkhand to Delhi, reveals that migrants were subjected to conditions of exploitation and forced labour under such placement agencies. Conditions of forced labour are witnessed mainly among live-in domestic workers, who have to work under the agent for the stipulated period. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen’s (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1978 fails to address this issue as placement agencies relating to domestic work do not come under the ambit of the act. The act considers only those labour contractors who are registered at the origin state. Placement agencies involved in domestic work function through several sub-agents and mostly are unregistered (ILO, 2015)

    There were some positive responses from state governments. The state of Tamil Nadu set up the Tamil Nadu domestic workers welfare board.  Similarly, Maharashtra set up a domestic worker welfare board under Maharashtra Act (Agrawal & Agarwal, 2018) in 2008 while Kerala adopted a domestic worker bill in 2009. States like Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Rajasthan have set the minimum wage rate (Madhav, 2010). Neetha and Palriwala (2011) analysed the state legal framework on domestic workers and pointed out the same inadequacies noted over and over again, that is of not recognising the intricacies of domestic work, workplace, its several sub-categories, unregulated placement agencies and its unique employment relation. With no data on domestic workers and at the same time their numbers continuing to increase, these loose legislations and provisions go unnoticed by the workers.

    In 2019, with the view to improving compliance and bringing about uniformity of laws, 29 labour laws were consolidated into 4 labour codes: a) code on wages, b) code on industrial relation c) code on social security and d) code on occupational health and working conditions (“Overview of Labour Law Reforms”, n.d.). While the notion was to make the labour laws more transparent and such consolidation was expected to increase the coverage of different workers under the law, these codes remain ambiguous when it comes to certain sectors of informal work. Neetha and Indrani (2020) analyse these codes through a gender lens focusing on domestic and migrant workers. Code on wages does not incorporate private households as an entity hiring employees and thus domestic workers who struggled to attain minimum wages under the previous Minimum wages act (1948) have no mention, leaving them ambiguous. Code on industrial relations dealing with collective bargaining and industrial disputes, do not mention freedom of association in unorganised sectors and curbs the right to strike which has serious implications of registration of domestic workers under trade unions and their right to collective bargaining. Code on social security (CSS) has consolidated the unorganised workers’ social security act 2008, which was the first attempt towards the recognition of domestic workers and the new code puts the functioning of such acts and provisions for the unorganised sector under the discretion of the government, leaving out legislative scrutiny. Hence, there is uncertainty of the efficient functioning of these acts under CSS. Under the code, maternity benefits were applied only to the registered establishment of work. And domestic workers with no recognition of the workplace become ineligible for the same. Code on occupational health and working conditions is also seen to have not recognised the need for laws based on different sectors of work. It has again failed to include private households as a workplace, leaving the conditions of domestic work unregulated. Another failure relates to ignoring the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) 2013, which further leaves out the scrutiny of abuse or exploitation of domestic workers. The fact of being migrants among domestic workers isolates them even further from these labour codes.

    The lacunae in existing legislation in recognising domestic work and migrant labour continues to be beset in ambiguities with the new labour reforms.

    Present scenario: Covid-19 adding to the vulnerabilities

    The onset of the Covid-19 and the resultant lockdowns have led to massive disruptions of normal life resulting in the shocks of sudden unemployment, financial strain and increased burden for workers in the unorganised sector. The migrant workers bore the highest brunt. In such a scenario, female migrants in an unregulated and isolated sphere of work such as domestic workers have been subject to severe distress. The lockdown and reduced mobility left the workers unemployed and without income. Live-in migrants faced increased workload but no change in wages. Even with the slow revival of the economy, they are under threat of being infected or being carriers, given their precarious work and living conditions. Sudden dismissals and financial strain have forced many to the situation of borrowing money for subsistence and eventually ending up in debt. Workers struggle to meet the basic needs of health, food, education of the family with lower income and savings (Sumalatha et al., 2021). With dismal employment relations and working conditions, coupled with the exclusion from the legal framework and social protection, Covid-19 has expanded the existing inequalities.

    Government intervention:  The need of the hour

    Government intervention both in ensuring basic rights and providing for the welfare of the domestic workers have been negligible. The cultural and structural barriers are not the only challenges in regulating domestic work. There is a lack of political will in acknowledging domestic workers and their woes. As they remain scattered and invisible, the domestic workers are not seen as potential vote banks and hence remain without any political influence. The sector which is comprised largely of female migrants is devoid of any political voice and agency in their origin or host states since there are barriers in pursuing their voting rights given the nature of their migration. Their interactions with civic authorities and politicians in the host state are marginal and hence, their issues do not come to the fore (Bureau, 2018). There is a lack of awareness among the migrant workers on their voting rights. They are largely unaware as to who should be approached in the host state to resolve their problems. Even a migrant worker, well aware of his/her political rights and agencies, refrain from pursuing any form of interaction as they have either lost faith in the system or are disillusioned by the long time and effort spent pursuing the cases with no results to show. This highlights the need for effective political inclusion of migrant workers and the generation of political and electoral awareness among them (Bureau, 2018).

    Further, identification and protection are the two essentials in creating an inclusive environment for female migrants in domestic work. The feminized nature of domestic work in the country, concentrated predominantly among poor and marginalised migrant workers, need to be recognised as dignified “work” and households they work in as “workplace”. Only separate comprehensive legislation on domestic work can incorporate the varied complexities of the sector, rather than a mere extension of organised sector legislations. Such separate legislation would provide the domestic worker with an identity that can ensure them their rights and entitlements (Sharma & Kunduri, 2015). The legislation should address the working conditions, violations and exploitations, provisions for mobilisation, illegal channels of private placement agencies and establishing basic civil rights from a gender perspective to incorporate the differential experience of females in the sector. Efficient implementation and scrutiny of the same require statistically significant data, the absence of which is another flaw in the system.

    Domestic worker’s inaccessibility of social protection is the result of the lack of recognition. Migrant workers in the sector without any identity proof or formal registration are excluded from social protection schemes. Agrawal and Agarwal (2018) suggest setting up an independent welfare board in every district responsible for registering, ensuring availability of social security benefits, conducting dispute resolution, dissemination of information and providing skill development and training for domestic workers. The provision of financial incentives can help in coping with sudden unemployment situations during any form of crisis such as the pandemic. Allowing for the organisation of domestic workers into unions and cooperatives can also be beneficial in attaining social and legal protection. Domestic worker groups such as SEWA and National Domestic Workers Movement (NDWM) in the country have been attending to the woes of the domestic workers by providing a platform for collective bargaining and assertion of rights.

    The introduction of the draft on National Policy on Domestic workers can be seen as a positive development, however, the policy still remains in consideration. Vulnerabilities of the domestic workers, exacerbated by the pandemic, highlight the urgent necessity for the ratification of the ILO convention on domestic workers. There is an urgent requirement in increasing the government’s sensitivity towards domestic workers and their precarious existence.

    References

    1. Agrawal, U., & Agarwal, S. (2018). Social Security for Domestic Workers in India. Socio-Legal Rev., 14, 30
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