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
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.
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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
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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.
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