It came to me on WhatsApp – a visiting card that had a lady’s name under which were listed rates for tasks: Roti-making Rs 1,000 per month; clothes-washing at Rs 800, and so on.
It had a phone number and her designation: Ghar Kaam Maushi (the aunt who does housework).
To me, it looked like a quick functional way to say about one’s work. Except that the forward had a mock-laugh symbol next to the words: Visiting card of a kaamwali baai (‘maid servant’).
What’s so funny about this, I asked the person who had sent the message on the group. Given the range of her work, isn’t it fitting that the lady finally has a professional card made? The comments that followed were telling. And showed how we look at those whose work are the very foundation of our daily lives.
Housework is honourable work, but being a house-help in India is particularly demeaning. To agree to do cleaning, cooking, washing every day on only an oral agreement with the owner, or often the lady of the house, on how much one will be paid or when; to do this in 6-7 houses and not have a weekly off or designated days of annual or sick leave unless she haggles for those or bunks work; to not have healthcare benefits, perks or pension; to be in danger of being dismissed anytime even after years of work; to be suspected the moment any object in the household goes missing; to not be allowed to use the toilet that the family uses; to be given water and food in separate utensils and not allowed to enter ‘pure’ areas of the house; to be made to use separate lifts and entrances in flats, to be given leftovers to take away after work; to be scolded if she says no to those.
We have practiced social distancing with those who serve us long before we heard the word during this pandemic. And we continue to call them ‘servants’, while the accepted term universally meant to give dignity to those who do housework for a fee is -- domestic workers.
India has an estimated five crore domestic workers, most of them women. Bengaluru has four lakh such workers, many of whom are migrants to the city in search of livelihood and food.
In March and April of 2020, with having to let go of house-help suddenly, many of us got a taste of the grind it is to keep our own houses clean. We got to see how sinks ‘manufacture’ plates and spoons after you had washed an entire set just then.
This had opposite outcomes – one set of people got sensitised and developed a new respect for the working class; the other got so paranoid about the virus that they treated their own domestic workers of years like one.
Why is it that we need their work, but do not give it any worth?
In May last year, the Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) and two other organisations surveyed 2,396 domestic workers of Bengaluru: 87% of them were told not to come for work; till this day, they remain uncertain over their jobs; 50% of all workers above the age of 50 lost their jobs entirely during the lockdown. Left unable to pay rent, bills or their kids’ school fees, with no option of WFH either -- a luxury their employers had.
But there are those who set examples on humane practices. BAF, the Bangalore Apartment Federation, a registered body that caters to 1,040 apartment associations covering over two lakh households in the city, issued an advisory to not cut salaries of domestic workers even if they could not take them in. Vidya Goggi of the governing council shared how residents formed volunteer groups to raise funds for not just their service staff but also dhobis and others like those who delivered flowers. The volunteers also accompanied them to open bank accounts to avail of government assistance.
DWRU’s Geetha Menon, who has spent three decades working for the rights of those workers, says the new generation -- especially those who have travelled abroad -- is better in some ways, and more sensitive.
Hopefully, there will be the kind of people who will get a visiting card made for their domestic worker if she doesn’t have one. And forward it to friends with their own good words on her work, minus the mocking laughter.
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