Domestic helps need to work in six households to make minimum wage

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: A recently released study has found that domestic workers in Bengaluru and Chennai have to work in over six low-paying households to earn the minimum wage mandated by the state.

More than half of the employers, about 55 per cent of them in Bengaluru, were of the belief that they paid their domestic workers “generously”, while 51 per cent in Chennai opined that they paid “adequately” for the service.

The study was conducted by Indian Institute of Human Settlements, an educational institution based in Bengaluru, which takes a deep dive into sustainable, equitable and efficient transformation of Indian settlements. Domestic workers are paid depending on the tasks they are assigned to perform, from food preparation to other chores like cleaning and upkeep.

The time spent also acts as a factor in setting the wage. Unlike other professions, skill, reputation and experience are not considered when wages are being decided on. The study has found that recruitment takes place based on trustworthiness, punctuality and hard work, and on the other hand, caste, religion and the place of origin of the worker are “not important at all” to the majority of households in both the cities.

The three-portion study surveyed 9,636 low, medium and high income households in both the cities. While about 54 per cent of them in Bengaluru hired domestic workers, 32 per cent of them in Chennai did so too. Domestic work is classified as informal, and only 10 of the 31 states and union territories in India have included domestic workers in the schedule of Minimum Wages Act, Karnataka is one of them.

Wages inadequate

Domestic workers in Bengaluru are paid within the range of Rs 2,000 to Rs 13,000. However, the minimum wage for domestic workers in Karnataka ranges from Rs 12, 241 to Rs 14,711, pointing that a domestic worker in Bengaluru will have to work in six lowest-paying households to reach the mandated minimum wage.

The state-wide minimum wage on the other hand is not appropriate to take into consideration in the context of a metropolitan city like Bengaluru, where the cost of living is significantly higher. To make a fair comparison, one must take into consideration the minimum wage set in a city-state like Delhi.

Workers in Bengaluru would have to work over 7-14 houses in order to earn the minimum wage on par with that of Delhi’s. Since a large population of the households believed that they paid the workers “generously”, the argument of increasing the wages has low chances.

The study also noted that increments were granted to the workers only in return for an increase in the number of tasks assigned or the time spent in the work.

Caste 'irrelevant', religion 'significant factor'

As many as 32 per cent of respondents in Bengaluru said that they would prefer to discontinue the services of a domestic worker if she got pregnant but would compensate by offering a lumpsum amount. When it comes to a weekly day off, 68 per cent responded that they would provide their domestic worker a paid day off.

Over 59 per cent of households supported paid sick leave and 41 per cent of households said they would support the expenses of the treatment if their worker fell sick. In Bengaluru, over 12-14 per cent of households said that a domestic worker’s caste is not important. However, a worker’s religion is more significant to households in Bengaluru when compared to Chennai.