Placement and After
Is there a market for trained domestic workers? In the two months I have spent as an intern with the domestic workers program, I have learnt that there is in fact a market for trained domestic workers. The domestic work market, furthermore, is highly differentiated, in terms of services, experience, and living arrangements. As India’s urban centers grow, so does the need for domestic workers to run the homes of the country’s nuclear families, and employers turn to domestic worker organizations to provide household help. Placement, therefore, is never problematic – several organizations I spoke with have waiting lists of hopeful employers and Maitri experiences a similar phenomenon.
Deepanjali Sharma, who employs two of Maitri’s graduates, referred to the difference in the quality of work of Maitri’s women and untrained workers as enormous. She said Maitri’s workers had a sense of responsibility, were punctual, understood their duties and performed their tasks well.
More problematic than placement is retention. In this volatile sector characterized by vast numbers of employers and employees and easy entry into and exit from the labor market, retaining a domestic worker in the home of an employer proves challenging. Domestic workers commonly quit because they are not satisfied with the pay or treatment they receive, or must give up work for cultural, religious or familial reasons, and others are discharged by their employers.
While employers acknowledge that they must pay Maitri’s Sahayikas Rs. 3500 monthly salary, the treatment Sahayikas receive varies across homes and is difficult to monitor and standardize, and consequently, it is difficult to ensure happy work settings. Maitri’s Sahayika Sanyogi Scheme is an innovation that might help improve retention by using domestic workers’ networks to source trainees who intend to stay in the same job for at least six months and use the influence of their social groups to enforce this commitment. Of course, such an arrangement comes with the potential hazard of women staying in jobs that they are not satisfied with. To counter such a possibility, Maitri repeatedly impresses upon its Sahayikas that they can contact the organization’s staff in the case of any prolonged difficulties. However, since the scheme is only one and a half months old, its success in retention is yet to stand the test of time.
Speaking with Sahayikas who have remained in their jobs for at least six months, I saw the necessity for flexibility. It is not uncommon for domestic workers to arrive late to work or require days off, particularly because they must also manage their own homes, and the longest enduring placements are those in which employers understand this reality. Domestic workers, similarly, must occasionally be willing to stay longer hours and perform extra duties to help their employers. Thus, in seeking to formalize this sector that has traditionally seen little regulation, it would be an error to strip it of its human dimensions, of the very personal understanding between employer and employee that proves key to successful retention.
Once its Sahayikas are placed, Maitri conducts the monthly Second Saturday Meeting, primarily a community-building endeavor. Of Maitri’s 400 Sahayikas, at least 150 to 200 attend these gatherings, which comprise of singing, the reiteration of Maitri’s ethical code of conduct, and a fun activity such as a lottery, talent show, or fancy dress competition. The meeting also provides a forum for domestic workers to share their experiences with a wider audience and provide feedback and file complaints. Despite the distance from their homes to Maitri’s office, the women prefer to make the journey rather than have smaller and more local decentralized meetings, to see their classmates from the training. Maitri’s monitoring and evaluation staff also make monthly visits to new Sahayika placements, followed by biannual visits absent any employer or employee complaints that require intervention.
Maitri, however, is conscious of the likelihood of fomenting a relationship of dependence amongst its Sahayikas. To empower them to address their own challenges, Maitri is looking at a model of decentralized meetings, organized by and for the domestic workers. Perhaps Maitri can play an invaluable role in training a first set of organizers and counselors from the Sahayikas, and subsequently assume a supporting part, lending the expertise of its personnel.
In response to the additional services they might need from Maitri, several Sahayikas cited a need for help opening bank accounts and obtaining PAN cards and healthcare insurance. Perhaps, then, another function of organizations in this sector can be to facilitate the flow of information about existing government benefits and other schemes to domestic workers. In this function, one can adopt the approach of BeAble, a New Delhi based domestic worker social enterprise, which circulates a graphic newsletter with information pertinent to the sector.
Though my time at Maitri was brief, it was clear to me that the organization’s focal strength is its sophisticated understanding of the social and economic circumstances of Guwahati’s domestic workers and its robust relationship with this community. In developing a program that focuses on domestic workers, I believe there is much to learn from Maitri’s experiences. In particular, it would be expedient to capitalize on the extensive personal networks of informal sector workers, rather than concentrate on developing more formal channels to spread information. Furthermore, to truly empower domestic workers, we must remember that they cannot simply be cycled through training and placement organizations; any sustainable program requires the commitment of its members, and therefore, the creation of a sense of community amongst domestic workers is vital. The extent to which the skill development organization ought to be responsible for this creation and its maintenance is a distinct question, open to debate. And finally, from the perspective of recruitment and retention, skill development organizations will do well to operate in frameworks broader than training, by facilitating financial stability and good health amongst domestic workers while taking care to avoid fomenting relations of dependence.
With at least 4.2 million domestic workers in India and the ever-increasing demand for household help, the domestic work sector stands to gain enormously from organizations like Maitri that provide skills training and better working conditions to transform what has been a traditionally stigmatized and invisible sector into dignified, meaningful work.
Radha Sarkar is a fourth-year student at Princeton University, New Jersey, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science. She is interning with AIF’s MAST program, focused on skill development in the domestic work sector. In the recent past, in order to address the needs of the millions of women who work informally in homes, AIF has begun to understand and champion for the professionalization of domestic work under its MAST program.
