Saturday, July 23, 2022

India: Angel in the house: Editorial on marriage market's indifference towards working women | The Telegraph, July 24, 2022

Editorial on marriage market's indifference towards working women

A study of matrimonial websites shows that India loves the wife who does not work

The compliant wife, the dutiful daughter-in-law, the goddess of the hearth — so to speak — is India’s ideal woman

File Photo (Representational Image)

The Editorial Board | Published 24.07.22, 03:21 AM

Inherited attitudes may sometimes fall flat, especially when circumstances have changed with time. But India’s attitude towards its women remains rigidly upright, because it springs from pure dislike. Indians do not like women: they refuse to allow them the space of fully functioning human beings who are free to develop their abilities at work and at home with the support of changes in the law, values and available facilities. That India’s development would leap forward if women worked and earned on the same principles as their male colleagues becomes immaterial in the face of this obduracy. This is not merely a denial of equal opportunities, but a desire to keep women under control, subjugated to social structures and expectations emerging from a system that makes men its crown. These are most obvious in marriage. A recent study has shown that women who work make fewer matches through matrimonial websites than women who do not. Would-be brides are alluring without jobs, so they win in the marriage race, while working women who are willing to become homebodies after they meet the in-laws of their dreams rank second.

The compliant wife, the dutiful daughter-in-law, the goddess of the hearth — so to speak — is India’s ideal woman. She does not aspire to an independent existence or expect equal duties and equal treatment in her marital home; she does not earn, hence poses no threat to the fantasies of ownership and control. Education will remain toothless as long as women pay this price. Only women with a high income attract suitors; love of the good life seems to overcome the annoyance and insecurity of having a working wife. Generally, however, the Indian home is inhospitable to the working wife and mother, one reason why women’s participation in the labour force in India is a miserable 20 per cent. Much of women’s labour is invisible too, since most women work in the unorganised sector. Invisibility makes women more vulnerable to exploitation and deprivation — they may not even be counted in the labour force.

While the marriage market in India is busy penalising women who dare to work and want to continue working after marriage, countries which support them have a better chance of prosperity. Flexibility and targeted facilities in the workplace could bring more women into the labour force even in India, but defeating the resistance to working wives is a different challenge. Or a set of challenges. For matrimonial websites have a class-specific relevance; there are numerous couples beyond their reach. Women who could be employed in the unorganised sector need support too, from security in the workplace to medical insurance. Economic stability would overcome the need for a demure wife if safety nets are in place. But matrimonial websites are naturally not interested in safety nets or workplace facilities for a working mother. They offer the greatest safety net of all — marriage. Happiness is meant to follow. Ever after.

Monday, July 11, 2022

India: Placement agencies for care-domestic labour | Shalini Grover (Modern Asian Studies, 2022)

Placement agencies for care-domestic labour: Everyday mediation, regimes of punishment, civilizing missions, and training in globalized India

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2022

Shalini Grover

Abstract

Survey data on Indian labour points to a rapid expansion of the care-domestic economy, currently the main employment avenue for urban women. Hitherto, studies on domestic service portray the unequal class structures of master–servant relationships and the escalating phenomenon of live-out and part-time hired help. This article shifts the focus to under-researched, yet increasingly visible, placement agencies, which regulate care-domestic markets and provide diverse services, from specialized ‘patient care’ to the training of subaltern communities. The article discusses how these service providers denote prominent shifts in skill sets, intra-household care arrangements, forms of medical assistance, and new (and old) mechanisms of authority. The ethnography expands our knowledge of everyday mediations around hiring and training between agencies, employers, and care-domestic workers in New Delhi. The article puts forward innovative conceptualizations of service provider approaches through juxtaposing the informal practices of local (or Indian) agencies with formalized and ‘civilizing’ agendas developed by Euro-American intermediaries. The formal–informal dichotomized framework of service provider relationships adds to critical scholarship that contrived dualisms which need historical scaffolding and nuanced engagement. I argue that, while informal and formal approaches appear markedly different for the care-domestic economy, they also overlap. Significantly, both approaches are unjustly weighted against the workers who lack the potential to democratize labour relations. Local agencies reinforce exploitative care-domestic relationships, while Euro-American intermediaries, who espouse modern values, formalization, and civilizing experiments, promulgate punitive regimes and stigmatized futures for their Indian subjects.

Keywords

Care-domestic labour placement agencies punishment civilizing missions training

Type: Research Article
Information: Modern Asian Studies , , pp. 1 - 29

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X21000585[Opens in a new window]
Creative Commons: This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright: Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

In its simplest form, a placement agency is a service provider that employers can approach to hire care-domestic workers and through which workers may seek employment opportunities. For the management of the care-domestic economy, two approaches are conceptualized and form the subject of interrogation in this article. The first is represented by local (or Indian) agencies which retain the core characteristics of casualized, informal sector work. These local agencies offer informal care arrangements, which I call ‘pay-as-you-go’ services (my emphasis), that are symbolic of a sort of convenience, whereby users are absolved from long-term, tenured, or stable commitments.Footnote ¹ The employer does not pay an advance for a specific amenity and the worker's employment remains undocumented and typically casual. Work arrangements in this model are based on oral agreements, adept mediation, and a hierarchy of labour roles. The second is a Euro-American (or expatriate) exemplar, whereby attempted formality with a civilizing mission is introduced into an otherwise informal sector. This is a purported model of modernizing labour relations that offers documentation practices and professional care-domestic work.

For most of the twentieth century, modernity has been characterized by attempts to formalize social relations.Footnote ² Misztal outlines ideal features of formality that are reliant on official and legal roles, and structures of power.Footnote ³ Post-colonial and postsocialist societies are generally more allied with informal economies and their unofficial open secrets, tacit rules, and hidden practice.Footnote ⁴ In the sociological literature, following Goffman's conception of ‘role distance’, informality and formality are typically considered opposites.Footnote ⁵ In two recent volumes, however, scholars have challenged the formal–informal dichotomy, emphasizing overlaps and interdependence across the world.Footnote ⁶ These collections stress the value of informal practices as invisible yet central to human societies rather than as a disadvantaged residual of the formal economy. They also question the supposedly ‘unregulated’ nature of informal sectors,Footnote ⁷ while critiquing the notion that formality plays into the hands of those it is meant to defend or represent.Footnote ⁸ With regard to service providers and debates on the care-domestic economy in contemporary India, this article reassesses modernization claims and perceptions of formality as ‘good’ and informality as ‘bad’.Footnote ⁹

Indian labour markets have historically been dominated by informality.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the studies of industrial labour by Holmström, Breman and Harriss in the 1970s–1980s were key to unlocking the rigid boundaries between formal and informal jobs.Footnote ¹¹ From the 1990s onwards, Gooptu and Parry instrumentally portray how the formal sector is being ‘deformalized’.Footnote ¹² The latter is reproducing inferior working conditions resembling those found in the precarious informal sector, while cheap contract labour has increasingly replaced the permanent workforce.Footnote ¹³ At the same time, especially with the informal care-domestic economy having gained visibility,Footnote ¹⁴ discussions around formalization have permeated feminist debates.Footnote ¹⁵ The exploratory nature of these conversations is whether a framework for formalization, at its lowest bar represented by a written contract, ensures better conditions for workers.Footnote ¹⁶ The formalizing of casualized labour is indeed being attempted by embassies, placement agencies, hospitals, universities, and the corporate sector. Gooptu's work is salient for its minutiae of how labour in India's private corporate sector has meant vast mobilization, recruitment, and training of workers in a highly organized manner, usually involving the state.Footnote ¹⁷ Under the neo-liberal ascendency, low-level marginalized service workers are now subjected to formal systematic training, grooming, and socialization, in a radical break from the past. Gooptu's caveat is that what is rendered as formalization is ‘performed formalization’. She underscores how formal and informal processes exist within the same labour regimes. This article contributes to the theoretical contention that formal and informal approaches have their meeting points. Significantly for the care-domestic economy, both approaches reinforce inequalities for workers who lack the potential to democratize labour relations. The practices of service providers direct us to the immediacy of colonial legacies, exploitative work relationships, punitive regimes, and how the employers’ class position remains privileged.

[ . . . ]

FULL TEXT HERE

Thursday, July 7, 2022

India: Labour reforms will hurt employment | R Karumalaiyan (Jul 06, 2022 )

Business Line

Opinion

Labour reforms will hurt employment

R Karumalaiyan | Updated on: Jul 06, 2022

Labour laws’ deregulation has worsened labour productivity and incomes, thereby hurting economic growth
Labour Minister Bhupender Yadav, in the article ‘Labour reforms and the rise of jobs’ ( BusinessLine, June 24), argues that “India’s labour regulatory framework has been rigid and hindered the growth of output, investment and employment expansion”. He buttressed his arguments with the reports of four big employer associations — Assocham, CII, FICCI and PHDCCI — along with a study of VV Giri National Labour Institute.
He then cites the labour reform undertaken by the BJP government in Rajasthan in 2014-15 and how that has paid off. Before getting into the debate on labour reform vis-a-vis the growth stories that have repeatedly been dished out since the 1990s when the LPG (liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation) policies were first rolled out in India, it would be relevant to assess the current unemployment scene. The Minister has portrayed a rosy picture, whereas the reality is alarming.
Thirty-one years after that watershed moment in India’s socio-economic history, the country is battling acute unemployment and job losses.
Informal sector jobs
In a 2019 report, data analysts at IndiaSpend reveal that the country had not created adequate jobs since liberalisation, and 92 per cent of jobs created were in the informal sector.
Thus the unemployment situation has been alarming even before the huge dislocation unleashed by the unplanned lockdowns imposed in 2020-21 in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Much before the pandemic, the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) reported a 6.1 per cent unemployment rate in 2017-18, the worst in over four decades. The picture has become more dismal in the ensuing months since April-May of 2020.
For instance, in December 2021, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) estimated that nearly 53 million Indians were unemployed, a large proportion of whom were women. The unemployment rate was hovering at 7.91 per cent in December 2021.
The recent agitations by the youth against the Agnipath scheme are a reflection of the gravity of the situation. Recently, the Railway Recruitment Board received 1.25 crore applications for a mere 35,000 posts. Many a time a few government jobs, that too at the bottom level, have attracted thousands of applications.
Clamour for govt jobs
Why is there this scramble for government jobs? Labour historian Prof Maya John says it stems from the fact that bulk of the jobs in the private sector is characterised by high job insecurity (easy hire and fire), poor basic pay, and long hours of work. Historically, only a small number of employer-employee work relations — associated mostly with the formal sector — have been subject to state regulation. However, in recent decades, there has been a steady decline of even that.
This deregulation has been coupled with a concerted push towards rapid privatisation of the public sector.
Together, these developments have contributed significantly to periodic and permanent mass unemployment among both skilled and less skilled workers.
In addition, avenues of gainful employment for new entrants in the job market have fallen drastically.
Contrary to the Minister’s claims, the VV Giri National Labour Institute study (No 122/2017), led by Sanjay Upadhyaya and Pankaj Kumar, did not find any evidence that previous labour law reforms initiated in Rajasthan and other States had succeeded in attracting investment and boosting investment leave alone create jobs.
Rather it had concluded that that “so far as expected outcome/impact is concerned from the effected amendments in these States… the strains on labour are already clearly visible which warrant attention to ameliorate and to offset the resultant hardships and uncertainty faced by the workers at least in the interim period.”
Rajasthan’s labour reforms
As the Minister has referred to the Rajasthan experiments in labour law deregulation as the most ideal, it would be in order to cite a more recent research on this. The Azim Premji University’s Centre for Sustainable Employment has done an exclusive study on the Rajasthan experiments under the title ‘Labour Reforms in the Indian State of Rajasthan; a boon or a bane?’, by Diti Goswami and Sourabh Paul and published as the CSE Working Paper in January 2021.
In this paper, the authors conclude thus: “Our empirical analysis shows the reforms to have an unintended consequence of the decline in labour use... The implications regarding employment are similar to those presented by D’Souza (2010); Kapoor (2014); Chandru (2014); Chatterjee and Kanbur (2015); Deakin and Haldar (2015); Roychowdhury (2019); Roy, Dubey and Ramaiah (2020) in the sense that higher flexibility (of labour laws) is associated with weaker employment growth. Also, worryingly, the increased flexibility results in a disproportionate reduction in the directly employed workers. Heyes and Lewis (2015) and Avdagic (2015) find similar results for the European Union.”
Importance of human capital
According to the ‘Ease of Doing Business’ study published by the World Bank in 2014, only a little over one-tenth of the respondent firms in India had perceived labour regulations as a major constraint (World Bank Group 2014).
Research by Kucera (2002) showed that core labour standards of the ILO produce better human capital (that is, the elimination of child and bonded workers), greater efficiency through the labour cost-productivity nexus, and more social and political stability via freedom of association and collective bargaining. Freeman and Medoff (1991) have argued that trade unions contribute to the productive efficiency of a firm through voice channels and also contribute to equitable outcomes in them.
Hence, to accelerate growth and provide jobs to all the aspirants in the labour market and, thereby, reap the huge demographic dividend, there’s a need to get rid of pro-corporate, both domestic and foreign, policies. Economic growth and employment have nothing to do with labour reform. They are more specifically related to demand constraints, which entail more redistributive measures.
Thus, the implementation of the labour codes and rules has no potential to accelerate India’s journey to lead the world’s strongest economies; rather, it would lead to the enslavement of our workers, besides aggravating the choking of consumption and contributing further to the slump in the job-market as well as employment generating investment. India has achieved higher rate of growth before 2014 without any drastic deregulation in the name of labour law codification.
The writer is National Secretary, CITU
Published on July 06, 2022