Seminar: Conversations on Social Reproduction

Improving working and living conditions of domestic workers: Reflections from research and practice in India

Speakers

Researchers at School of HumanDevelopment, IIHS:

• Antara Rai Chowdhury
• Divya Ravindranath
• Kinjal Sampat
• Nidhi Sohane
• Rashee Mehra

Abstract

The School of Human Development at the IIHS, since 2018 has published with the support of the ILO, threestudies on domestic work. The studies have examined working conditions and financial resilience - wagesand increments, terms of termination, social protection, informal non-wage benefits, and employers’practice and perception of these. But uniquely and with good reason the engagement has gone beyond toinclude examinations on health, especially maternal health, housing conditions, and mobility. We reflect onour findings and the experiences of unions in two Indian states to suggest strategies and approaches to themobilization of domestic workers and the design and framing of policy and legal frameworks for the sector.This aids in underlining the existing gaps among state actors and state capacity to understand, engage andintervene with domestic workers

Some reference studies

1. Dynamics of paid and unpaid work in urban India

2. Recovery as Resilience

3. Rental Housing Arrangements for domestic workers

The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946). For more information about the project, please email: Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.