Articles by Sujata Gothoskar

Rethinking Unequal Exchange: The Global Integration of Nursing Labour Markets by Valiani Salimah (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2012; pp 197 +xviii, $27.95.

While the union government announced its plan to extend the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana to the unorganised working class poor like rickshaw-pullers, ragpickers, mineworkers, sanitation workers, etc, the Government of Maharashtra has decided to scrap RSBY and replace it with the Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana. This article analyses the conditions of waste pickers and argues not to pit one type of healthcare against another and not to scrap schemes like the RSBY that have come anyway too late.

Domestic work has increasingly become part of the global division of labour and inextricably integrated within it. While migration for domestic work is an opportunity, in the absence of social protection, it also renders such workers more vulnerable. This essay takes its cue from how the feminist movement has approached the contradictions within domestic work and the various problems that domestic workers face. It throws light on the multiple hierarchies that the domestic worker is confronted with, as also the peculiar problems that the Indian domestic worker confronts. It explores a whole lot of different aspects of the domestic employer-employee relation within the context of the near absence of state intervention and the lack of legal protection. It also delves into the attempts that some trade unions, NGOs and church-affiliated organisations have made to bring protective measures and organise domestic workers to win labour rights.

The global structure of "rewards" in the tea industry is so severely skewed in favour of the multinational retailers and blenders that, after the plantations, processing units and the buying agents get their shares, the tea-picking workers' lot is one of pittance. This article speaks of across-the-board violations of the rights of workers, mostly women tea-pickers, in the tea gardens in India in the age of globalisation.

This article reports on the first ever base-line survey of the characteristics and nature of telework and the potential for its growth in Mumbai touching upon the methodological issues in conducting such a survey of the prevalence of new technologies in the various sectors.