Domestic workers

This paper analyses the comparative political economy of overseas recruitment policy towards nurses and women domestic workers by examining the disproportionate influence of specific interest groups. Shocking irregularities in private recruitment of nurses forced government intervention in 2015, but subsequent interventions and failure to empower state-run agencies to compete on even terms underline the power of private recruiters. Even as the government yields to demand from destination countries and business lobbies for migrant domestic workers, it fails to hear workers’ concerns about their rights. Thus, migrant workers continue to pay the price of systemic problems that plague overseas recruitment.

Poorly paid and with no employment benefits, female domestic workers are becoming the sole breadwinners of their families.

The precarious nature of employment of women informal workers is examined using data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2018–19). To capture the gendered experiences of informal workers during the lockdown period, data from a series of rapid assessment studies is used. It was found that the unequal gendered division of domestic chores existed even before the onset of the pandemic, but the COVID-19- induced lockdowns have further worsened the situation. In terms of paid employment, women tend to work in risky, hazardous and stigmatised jobs as front-line health workers, waste-pickers, domestic workers, but do not receive the minimum wages as specified by the government.

How is class experienced by domestic workers when they come together for collective action? Using ethnographic data, this paper argues that the collective action efforts by some unions of domestic workers in Bengaluru to demand “bonus” reveals the struggles over class that they engage in, struggles that make them conscious of their in-between class status as self-employed workers in a precarious informal economy. The collective action of demanding bonus in Bengaluru entails a cultural–political struggle away from a gift economy relationship and towards a more commodified economy under conditions of precarity in the informal economy.