Invisible, unenumerated and exploited: the informal workers of India

"I worked as a cook in nine houses and earned around Rs 40,000 per month before the lockdown. My husband was a daily wage labourer at a construction site. Suddenly, all our income stopped. We’re a family of five and used to live in a rented room.

Unable to sustain ourselves, we went back to our village in West Bengal and lived there for 18 months," says Seema (name changed), a domestic help in Thane, Maharashtra.

"I have been working in most of these houses for many years. One family gave me a three-month salary; another gave me Rs 9,000; and one gave me Rs 5,000. We incurred a debt of Rs 65,000 just to get by those months. If we get work, we eat. No work, no support," adds Seema.

Seema is part of 81% of India’s workforce, which is employed in the informal sector and receives no protection from labour laws. Between 2019 and 2020, the Parliament passed four labour codes, calling them ‘historic, spurring ‘ease of doing business’ while also benefiting workers; none benefitted Seema or her husband. Dutifully, many states in India are drafting and publishing rules for the implementation of these codes, even as trade unions have deemed them ‘anti-worker’.

The proponents of ‘ease of doing business’ disregard Seema and other informal workers’ contribution to economic growth, when in fact casualization and informalization of workers are the headlining peg of India’s development story. Unlike the popular narrative, the casualization of workers began much before the pandemic.

According to a study that surveyed 198,628 organised factories, 98.4% of them employed contract workers in 2019–20, significantly up from around 71% in the previous year. In 2011, only 28.3% of factories employed contract workers. The number of contract workers in the total workforce of the organised sector swelled to 5.02 million in 2019-20 from 3.61 million in 2011-12.’

The share of factories paying workers with social security benefits like provident fund and bonus has reduced between 2011 and 2020: in 2019–20, only 67% of factories paid provident fund and only 55% paid bonus, down from 73% and 64%, respectively, in 2010–11. This is just a glimpse of how, in the era of ‘booming economic growth’, the social protection has thinned down, rendering workers increasingly vulnerable. The existing development pathways in India prioritise the rich at the expense of the poor, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Indian cities.

Our urban growth appears to be resting on the architecture of inequality and unfair labour practices. The latter is entangled in a maze of socio-cultural relations, like gender and caste. Data from the World Inequality Lab shows that the richest 70 lakh people in India earn as much as the poorest 80 crore. Not just that, but the richest 0.5% of Indians are as rich as the top 10% of people in the US, the biggest economy in the world.

Let’s look at the following scenarios: The construction industry, expected to reach $1.4 trillion by 2025, is the kernel of India’s urban growth. The urban population is expected to contribute 75% of the GDP (63% at present). By 2030, more than 40% of the population is expected to live in urban India (33% today). Construction employs 20% SC and 24% ST, a much higher share than their population. Among brick kiln workers, 49% of all migrant workers are Dalits, and 16% are Adivasis. Even of the remaining 35%, an overwhelming 30% are OBCs (consisting of middle-rung castes; NSS 2007–08).

Marked by a high amount of real estate speculation, homes in Indian cities are not only built by severely underpaid and exploited brick kiln workers, who are preponderantly Dalit and Adivasi, but also run by an equally exploited urban workforce: domestic workers. Unorganised, they remain invisible and unaccounted for.

While many Indian homes cannot run without the labour of domestic workers, there is an appalling lack of data on their numbers and needs. One estimate pegs them at 50 million, 75% of whom are women who perform ‘a distress-livelihood option that does not guarantee a basic minimum sustenance’. When the rest of the world mulls over the living wage (reflective of the cost of living), domestic workers do not even receive the minimum wage, let alone income security in India.

Their wages are subject to the whims of the employer, who seldom hesitates to keep the wages low by reminding the domestic worker about the oversupply of domestic labour. While wages might vary, and some might be marginally better than others, what is universally absent is the presence of contracts or social security benefits. Seema has not even heard of domestic worker registration schemes or programmes. The perpetuity of domestic workers’ servitude is inconceivable without patriarchy and the caste system, which assume ‘services’ as the unpaid duty of women and lower castes.

Despite their presence in millions of homes, domestic workers remain invisible. The state appears complicit in their invisibility. Just like millions of uncounted seasonal migrants, most domestic workers remain quasi-disenfranchised, living in informal settlements called slums. These slums are invariably declared ‘unauthorised’, rendering their residents ‘illegal’ and furthering a cycle of poverty and marginalisation. Evidence around the globe suggests that residential segregation itself is a cause of poverty, impairing the chances of education and employment for marginalised groups. Thanks to the prevalent idea of sedentary citizenship, migrant workers are not allowed to vote at their destination. This denies them any possibility of influencing local policies and practices. Given the limited collectivization among domestic workers, it creates for them a condition of perennial precarity.

Recent research on domestic workers in India also shows that the Indian dominant-caste, upper-class urban elite dismisses protests by domestic workers as ‘riots’, and labels them infiltrators, especially if they are Muslim and/or Dalit’. The same middle class, however, will laud entrepreneurship without recognising or remedying ‘the historically situated inequalities in access to economic and cultural capital’.

Anecdotally as well as analytically, it’s evident that few other professions might be as outside the ambit of the law and as tightly clenched by elites as domestic workers. There is an urgent need to focus on the economic insecurity and subjugation of India’s vast informal workers, who are the true linchpins of economic growth.

(Arun Kumar is a social change consultant and researcher based in London. Apekshita Varshney is an independent journalist)