Conference Agenda

This panel is organized by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), a national level research and teaching institution based in Bengaluru, India. It addresses cross-cutting issues of urbanization in India and the Global South with its globally benchmarked research and research-led practice that transverses scale from the local (informal settlements, membership-based organizations) and national (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development) to global (IPCC).

The employment relationship in domestic work presents a “messy intimacy” as workers and employers negotiate the two realms of home and work (Kabeer, 2018). However, to sustain the momentum in advocacy across diverse settings it is necessary to engage with all stakeholders. In this regard, as a way to achieve decent work, the ILO convention (no.189) places emphasis on social dialogue “to include all types of negotiation, consultation or simply exchange of information”. While much has been written from the workers’ standpoint, there is a significant gap in assessing the role of the employer even though they exercise disproportionate power in determining terms of employment, wages and working conditions. In this report, we thus turn our gaze to employers. IIHS with ILO’s Work in Freedom program conceptualized a three year study, expanding the scope of inquiry on the dynamics of both paid and unpaid care work in urban homes in India and to the employer’s perspective and practices in the sector. This is essential to understand the contours of the demand and working conditions of the sector, to draw out employers’ behavior, practices, and orientation that can be leveraged or at least need to be managed for regulation and policy for domestic work.

Following the declaration of ILO convention (no. 189) on decent work for domestic workers there has been a growing body of work on the working conditions of domestic workers and their role in the care economy. focusing on their challenges, vulnerabilities and the sense of isolation and injustice they experience at their site of work. Furthermore, our understanding of the sector has deepened from the work undertaken by workers’ organizations that have played an important role in mobilising workers in different parts of the world.

In particular, this scholarship points to the following features of domestic work: First, in the absence of clear legal recognition of domestic workers and regulation of domestic work, the sector continues to be informal. Second, the socio-cultural construction of housework is such that it is viewed as a natural function of “feminine domesticity” (Barua, 2021). Consequently, domestic work is considered to be unskilled work and the largely feminized workforce remains undervalued and invisible even when they offer a paid service. Third, alongside gender, caste is another reason for the undervaluation of the work and the worker. The nature of domestic work is such that it continues to reinforce caste-based divisions of labor. Fourth, urban geographies shape the sector in particular ways. A significant proportion of the total female employment in urban areas is engaged in domestic work. There is an increasing demand for domestic workers owing to a class of employers who are able to afford these services and a class of surplus workers who are looking for work

Without recognition of domestic work and regulating the workplace of domestic workers, decent work deficits will persist. The three papers in the panel will share insights, recommendations and possibilities identified from the empirical work, dwelling particularly on modes, spatiality, and scales of intervention.

Format of the panel: The two chairs of the panel have several years of experience in research and practice on labor issues. They will open the panel (10 minutes) with a presentation of the need for this research study and why the selected framework and design was chosen for it. They will set up the broader questions that each of the panelists will speak to. The presentations will be 12-15 minutes each, followed by the 5-8 minutes of discussion by the two discussants. The presenting authors have engaged with questions of gender and informality in work, housing, and health for over ten years. The rest of the time will be for open discussion.

Housework, as an expansive term, includes all the work required to reproduce the household – whether paid or unpaid. Domestic workers perform this work for remuneration, and that is commonly known as ‘paid domestic work’. Using a time-use survey, we try to measure both. We measure the time taken for 33 different tasks within activity clusters such as domestic services (cleaning, procurement, upkeep) and caregiving services (child and elderly care). Here, we assess both unpaid work done by members of the household, disaggregated by activities and gender; and paid work done by an externally engaged domestic worker. We surveyed 9,636households in two metropolitan Indian cities – Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, religion, neighborhood type and across households with and without women working for wages. It offers a complete picture of the demand for domestic work and rates of engagement of households as employers of domestic work in urban India, a statistic that is often missing.

What is the quality of employment of paid domestic work in urban India? We measured quality by looking at income security (wages, bonus, increments); employment and work security (terms of termination, terms of assistance in illness or injury); and social security (terms of paid leave, medical insurance, and maternity entitlements). We additionally assessed channels of recruitment of paid domestic workers. Throughout our inquiry we looked at employer’s perceptions and practices which has been a gap in knowledge on the working conditions in the sector. We surveyed 3,067 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities – Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, religion, neighborhood type and across households with and without women working for wages.

What are the beliefs, motivations, and perceptions of employers toward recruitment, employment conditions, and social security for domestic workers? We explore what are the demand side factors that influence how a worker is found and hired from the labour market. We examine the terms of employment to understand how working conditions (wage determination, employment security, workplace facilities, and non-wage support) vary across employer households and what are the subjective notions of employer responsibility towards their worker. Lastly, we probe employer perspectives and disposition to the notion of extending the legal ambit of labour laws and social security to domestic workers, including their willingness to contribute to any social security fund to this end. We draw from personal interviews with 403 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities.