Maids in India

Domestic worker is a person who is employed in any household on a temporary or permanent basis to do the household work.According to estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), there are at least four million domestic servants in India.

Neither the Maternity Benefits Act nor the Minimum Wages Act or any of the scores of other labour laws apply to domestic work. Domestic workers can be hired and fired at will. The employer has no legally binding obligations.Most of the domestic workers are barely of legal working age and their wages less than the minimum fixed by the government.In a country where 93% of the workforce is in the unorganised sector and therefore beyond the purview of most labour laws, domestic workers represent a new low in terms of disempowerment: they are not even recognised as workers. Their work — cooking, cleaning, dish-washing, baby-sitting — is not recognised as work by the state. (Lack of recognition).Their employers range from Indias elite to its nouveau riche, many of who still believe in the traditional divide between servants and masters. Abuse, mental, physical or sexual, of these women is not uncommon.Cases of torture, beatings, sexual assault, and incarceration are common. Indeed, hardly a week goes by without some news report about a domestic help being abused by her employer.

Way forward: To view domestic workers as a security threat is another way of denying them the status of workers. The policy mindset regarding domestic workers must shift from a law-and-order paradigm to one about workers’ rights. A good place to start would be to consider enacting a Domestic Workers Regulation of Work and Social Security Act. Such a law will, above all, recognise domestic work as labour, partly addressing society’s devaluation of housework. A national law also needs to oversee workers’ safety, provide for health emergencies and their children’s education, among other things. Some have attempted to justify the government’s reluctance to regulate domestic work on the grounds that the workplace is a private household which should not be encroached upon by the state. But this argument does not hold since the anti-sexual harassment law recognizes the private household as a workplace.