Organizing for Empowerment: Exploring the Impact of Unionization on Domestic Workers in India

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.

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.