Working at Others' Homes

Book excerpt: The specificities of domestic work in relation to the workplace alongside the intersections of gender, class, and caste indicate a complex picture in India. Though domestic workers have become a significant workforce in all large cities and even in small towns, not much information on the specificity and complexity of the sector and its challenges is available. The papers in this volume address interesting dimensions of the domestic work section, including exclusion of domestic workers, the reluctance and discomfort in accepting domestic workers as "workers," alternative approaches to unionizing and the specific experiences in organizing taking up the challenge of negotiating personal relations, and the specificities of work. A critical analysis of state policies and regulation of domestic work alongside specific issues of legal intervention is also attempted in this collection--both specific to existing legislation as well as in the broad framework of labor as well as women's rights. This study emphasizes the need to locate undervaluation and poor status of domestic workers in the devaluation of house work within capitalist development, an issue that feminist scholarship has raised time and again.