Abstract
This article seeks to illuminate the impact of unionization on a group of domestic workers in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai. We argue that, as a result of being unionized, these domestic workers have been able to initiate a process of personal empowerment or “power within” which has, in turn, led to changes in how they perceive themselves and their place in the world. These changes which have led to an enhanced sense of self-worth and self-efficacy are related to changes that have occurred in the lives of the women at three levels: gaining formal recognition and social citizenship, experiencing changes in the cognitive domain and emotional habitus, and the development of collective solidarities. We demonstrate how these changes have unfolded in an iterative and mutually constitutive manner. We also argue that, while unionization and being part of collective movement has driven a process of personal empowerment for the domestic workers, this has not necessarily resulted in a willingness by these women to initiate and sustain collective acts of social action around self-defined concerns and priorities.
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Notes
Area leaders are those domestic workers elected by the other workers who live in their neighborhoods/areas and function as the leader of the entire area or slum community.
Cognitive liberation is a term developed by Doug McAdam, which he defines as “A transformation of consciousness within a significant segment of the aggrieved population. Before collective protest can get under way, people must collectively define their situations as unjust and subject to change through group action” (McAdam 1982, p. 51).
The Domestic Workers Welfare Board is tripartite structure which comprises representatives from state, the employers, and domestic worker groups. Although this welfare board was established in Maharashtra in 2008, it was dissolved in 2015 after the present Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in India came to power in 2014.
In India, ration cards (issued under the Indian Public Distribution System or PDS) are used primarily by the poorer sections of the population to purchase subsidized foodstuffs (wheat and rice) and fuel (kerosene) from fair price shops which are known as ration shops. The poor also use these cards as proof of their identity.
The office bearers of the union are the President, Secretary, and Treasurer. While the President is a domestic worker, the other two posts are held by two of the senior organizers of the union. The senior organizers of the union are the three All India Trade Union Congress members who established the union in 2005. The volunteers, three in number, who form the next level in the chain of command of the organization, are mainly responsible for implementing the different programs and activities of the union. However, the senior organizers are also closely involved in implementation of union activities and spend a great deal of time in the field working directly with the domestic workers.
The union helps the workers to get the ration cards which are issued by the state. Research from other parts of India and the world has shown that helping domestic workers meet their practical needs such as obtaining official documents which in turn help workers to access state services and benefits is not uncommon (see Menon 2013; Kabeer et al. 2013).
At the time when the interviews took place, the welfare board was still operational, but it closed down in 2015. We do not discuss this development in this article as the fieldwork, on which this article is based, ended in July 2014.
While some of these claims such as ration card are legally sanctioned rights that the state has to provide to all citizens, others such as pension for domestic workers are claims but not legally sanctioned rights yet. However, the domestic workers of this study describe these claims as rights that they should get from the state.
Some domestic workers are given certain benefits from their employers such as a bonus on Diwali, loans to meet their needs, old/new clothes, food, money to meet educational expenses of their children, and so on. These are not legally enshrined rights but more gestures of benevolence carried out by employers in order to retain the services of their employers and ensure a satisfactory level of service (see Barua et al. 2017).
Elder sister in Hindi.
As mentioned above, these forms of collective action such as rallies and demonstrations were not self-initiated on the part of the domestic workers but were organized by the union organizers and the domestic workers participated in and attended these events.
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Appendix: Details of Fieldwork
Appendix: Details of Fieldwork
Interviews with all the domestic workers were conducted at their homes and were in Hindi. The process of interviewing the domestic workers was neither a linear nor a straightforward process. As is in the nature of ethnographic fieldwork and research, interviews in the formal sense of the term did not take place immediately after establishing contact with the women but emerged organically over a period of time. Initially, I just spent time with the women and their families having chats during informal visits which enabled the process of them getting to know me and vice versa. This led to the emergence of a basic level of mutual trust and recognition. After the first meeting wherein I established contact with the workers, a second meeting was arranged with the intention of conducting interviews on that visit. However, in the case of a few women, these second visits, once again, took the form of social calls where I sat and chatted with the workers and their family members (and more often not, neighbors would also drop in for a chat seeing that a new person was in the neighborhood). So, the formal interviews were often conducted on these second visits or in some cases, on third visits.
The interviews conducted with the domestic workers varied from between one to two hours. I developed a guide for the interviews which revolved around the themes of their experiences of working with their employers, their attitudes and beliefs towards their own work and the way their employers related to them, their daily work routines, their experiences of being unionized, whether they noted any changes in their lives post-unionization, their relationships with other union members and union organizers, their expectations from the organizations, and so on. This guide was used in a very flexible way in that the participants were allowed to digress from the questions asked, to pursue issues that they felt were important in the course of the interviews. When these digressions went very far and continued for a while, I guided the discussion back to the themes that were important for the study.
There were four focus group discussions conducted with the domestic workers in Mumbai, each of which lasted for about one and a half hours approximately. The number of participants in each discussion ranged from eight to twelve workers and these discussions were conducted in Hindi. The focus group discussions were very revealing in that they elicited some information and attitudes that were not so easily accessible through interviews and observations alone. For example, in the discussions I facilitated with the domestic workers, more of them were willing to reveal negative experiences that they had had with their employers than in the individual interviews. Topic guides were used for the FGDs covering the overarching themes of experiences of working as domestic workers, relations with employers, experience of being part of the organizations, benefits (if any) of being a union member, and expectations from the organizations. These topic guides were not followed very rigidly but were used more as a guide to elicit participation and steer the discussions with the women.
I both observed and sometimes, participated in two types of meetings during fieldwork—one was the meeting of all the domestic worker leaders with the union organizers which was held in the union office, and the second was area meetings conducted in the neighborhoods and homes of the domestic workers. While the first type of meeting was only attended by the domestic worker leaders, the second type of meeting was attended by most of the domestic workers who were union members and who lived in the different slum neighborhoods where the union works. I attended a total of eight such meetings. All these meetings were led by the organizers and staff of the organizations. The number of domestic workers who attended both type of meetings ranged from between ten to thirty, with a greater number of women present for the area meetings. While the leaders meetings typically lasted from between one to one and a half hours, the area meetings lasted for approximately one hour. These meetings were extremely important as they gave access to insights pertaining to the relationships between the domestic workers and union organizers, among the domestic workers themselves and also the collective attitudes and beliefs of the workers. These insights would have been difficult to glean from interviews alone.
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Barua, P., Haukanes, H. Organizing for Empowerment: Exploring the Impact of Unionization on Domestic Workers in India. St Comp Int Dev 55, 27–47 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-019-09291-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-019-09291-4