The bleak reality of domestic helpers

 The answer is none of the above, not when they have domestic help to worry about. Earlier, I used to think that employers were at fault for cribbing about their domestic help. But once I became an employer myself, I saw a different face of the problem.

These women often lie, often ineptly, and don’t do the tasks they take on properly. They spread gossip about their employers, and sometimes cause trouble among neighbours this way. Since they live from paycheck to paycheck, they often ask for loans or advances, and it is a chore to act as a moneylender to them. The worst is that some of them steal, and this destroys the basic human trust one person feels to another.

However, what we fail to think about is that the lot of the domestic help in India is really abysmally bleak. Abject poverty and the lack of education among the poorer sections of society have combined to make this the only profession that a lot of women can aspire to.  Women with children, whose husbands have abandoned them, have no other way to an honourable livelihood.

No savings

In some households, the husbands have abandoned working, since their wives bring in enough to eat off of. These women work hard at menial jobs, often enduring abusive conditions, and make very low amounts of money that simply evaporate under today’s inflationary conditions. They have no savings put by for a rainy day; no provident fund or retirement pensions. They have no paid sick leave for when they are ill, or casual leave when they have to take care of their kids who fall ill. And since most don’t get paid if they don’t work, they can’t afford to get sick.

Meanwhile, they have to rent to live, and a rented accommodation means paying a big fat advance as well. They also have to send their children to school, and even in government schools, there is an amount to be shelled out.

Small wonder that they are easy prey to anyone and everyone who offers them loans at 10, 15 or even 20 per cent, and are invariably caught in debt traps for life. To top it off, they see affluence and wastage on a scale that they will never be able to afford, every day they go to work.  But the worst is that they are treated without dignity or respect, which they totally don’t deserve.

If you think that it cannot get worse, think of the fate of live-in maids, especially underage girls. Subject to overwork, abuse and neglect, servility is their lot without even the balm of a family to go home to. They don’t see any money except their employers’ since their pay is sent to their homes. They experience life second-hand as it were. There are laws to help them, but without enforcement, they are not worth the ink they’re written with.

Quite often, employers are afraid to show empathy, fearing that they may be taken advantage of. Yes, some maids are dishonest, but most of them are good, hardworking women just like those that employ them.

If ever one wants an example to show how life is unfair, all one has to do is to look at the lives of these maid-servants.  There are many affluent people who think that these women live the way they do because they are capable of only that much. But every time I look at a housemaid working hard and trying to make ends meet, I really feel sorry for her plight.

Born into poor, illiterate families who send children out to work to be able to afford to keep skin and bone together, these women have no other way to eat. Let us remember this when we are tempted to abuse the woman who works for us. After all, behind every successful family, there is a servant, a maid or a bhai.