Women’s domestic work shouldn’t remain a labour of love

Just saying women’s social reproductive work ought to be monetarily compensated isn’t enough; we need to think about how this will be decided

Covid-19 has undoubtedly transformed how we think about the social context of work and the norms which govern work. Recently, Kamal Hassan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam party has laid down a seven-point agenda in the run-up to the 2021 elections, proposing that homemakers should get “due recognition through payment for their work at home which hitherto has been unrecognized and unmonetized, thus raising the dignity of womenfolk.”

In an editorial for the Times of India, Professor Prabha Kotiswaran analysed the Indian Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in several Motor Vehicles Act claims to show that there exists some judicial willingness to recognise social reproductive labour performed by women within the home. Indeed, in January, the Supreme Court directed an insurance company to pay a higher claim amount by taking into account the unpaid work performed by a deceased homemaker.

Unsurprisingly, this has given rise to considerable debate. For one, critics point out that a lot of social reproductive work, a term coined to denote work that nurtures future workers (e.g. child care), regenerate the current workforce (eg. cooking, cleaning etc.) and maintain those who cannot work (eg. caring for the elderly), is relational and affective in nature, making it more than a task that can be performed in exchange for wages. Further, as middle-class norms of marriage and family have gained currency, the house is associated with love whereas the workplace is associated with money. Thus, housework ought to be treated as a labour of love.

However, this is problematic on several counts. First, this way of thinking obscures the extent to which marriage, in Indian society, is still an economic necessity for some women and the degree to which legal inequality was inscribed within marriage and the family. In fact, according to data collected by the National Sample Survey Office (2014), 60.1 per cent of rural women and 64.1 per cent of urban women reported that they took on domestic duties because no other family member was available to take up this work.

Moreover, the anxiety surrounding the idea of monetising care work is nothing new. In fact, it explains why the most marginalised members of society — migrant lower class, lower caste women — are employed as domestic workers who live beyond the imagination of labour law and social security schemes. Our labour laws effectively privilege workers in core industrial sectors over those in other sectors of the economy. This increases the vulnerability of women since it reduces their bargaining power in trying to get more protection. A study carried out in 2018 in South Delhi, published in EPW, showed how domestic workers did twice the work that they were contractually obligated to do because of the higher social standing, co-constituted by caste and class, of their employers.

There are diverse domestic constituents within the state that benefit from not recognising social reproductive work. Families of course benefit from the free labour. Employers benefit since employment in the formal labour market is based on the ideal male worker who is unencumbered by domestic responsibilities and can work long hours.

If this unpaid but socially necessary reproductive work is considered to be as valuable as paid labour, employers would not be able to design jobs based on the assumption that it is the worker’s private and individual responsibility to adapt their caring responsibilities to the temporal requirements of the job. Instead, working-time norms would be designed on the assumption that all workers engage in domestic labour for others and women would no longer be expected to shoulder the economic burden of unpaid care work.

Trade unions are also largely represented by workers in the primary labour market. Ironically, the same rules about the recognition of women’s work in monetary terms do not apply when men are the beneficiaries of such a claim.

For instance, men have been historically compensated for the loss in a consortium, defined by several Indian courts, most recently National Insurance Company Limited v. Pranay Sethi as the “loss of love, company, care, help, comfort, guidance, solace, affection and sexual relations,” upon their wife’s deaths.

Further, as the radical anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, in today’s economy, not all labour is geared towards the production of skill or service. Instead, a lot of it is relational in nature. Thus, it is not obvious why some relations are considered “social” and others are considered “market”. Feminists have made an ironclad case to show how productive work and reproductive work are intertwined and women’s disproportionate responsibility in social reproduction is actually a huge part of the reason why women disproportionately have precarious personal work profiles.

Admittedly, just saying women’s social reproductive work ought to be given monetary compensation is not enough. We need to decide how we are to construct the tools needed to navigate a working world in which key assumptions about the nature and operation of that world which have long informed our labour laws and grounded our theories no longer apply. We also need to go into the question of how this compensation is decided and we need to be able to assign appropriate values to reproductive work in a way that doesn’t exacerbate existing inequalities.

For instance, both the Opportunity Cost Model, which evaluates the salary paid to the homemaker by evaluating what she would have earned had she not remained at home, and the Replacement Model, which evaluates how much it would cost to replace the homemaker with paid workers, rely upon factors such as the woman’s existing accomplishments to be able to predict what she would have been able to achieve in the formal workforce and casteist ideas of what constitutes “good” values and who has the ability to impart them. For instance, part of the social reproductive labour that women do is childcare. Given that paid domestic help in Indian homes is not even allowed to use the same cutlery as the employers, it’s unlikely that they will be seen as imparting good values to children.

At any rate, these are the discussions we should be having. Otherwise, anthropologists in the future will have to explain how our performative love for women as mothers, wives and sisters relates to our relentless anxiety that they be rewarded in any tangible terms.

(Shubhangi is a final year law student at National Law University Delhi)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.