There is urgent need for devising social protection mechanisms for domestic workers in India. The reasons for this are several. First, domestic service is the largest sector for female employment in urban India. Around 3.05 million women in urban India are employed by private households. Thus, the working conditions and social protection needs in this form of work, with respect to women`s work and welfare, are of concern. Second, informality is a dominant feature of domestic work. Practically 99.9 per cent of workers engaged in private households are informal workers and, thus, with very little social protection. Third, it is a fast growing sector-the number of women engaged by the sector has increased by 222 per cent since 1999-2000. Growing urbanisation, feminisation of labour and increasing numbers of nuclear families are some of the primary reasons for the exponential growth of this sector. Fourth, women form the dominant share of workers in the sector. This is a result of a long-standing perception that domestic work is `woman`s work`, requiring no skills or training and is, thus, severely undervalued. And, finally, most domestic workers are from `backward` communities, tribal villages or scheduled caste communities, carrying the combined burden of caste, class and gender hierarchies.

A recent study on women`s workforce participation, supported by the ILO in Delhi, suggests that care-related roles and responsibilities influence women`s decisions to join the labour market. In this context, services provided by domestic workers are important in allowing greater degree of female labour force engagement. However, domestic workers often provide care services to households by sacrificing quality care in their own homes. There is a need to recognise their contribution to the economy and bring `value` to their work so that it is not merely written off as `something that women do in the homes of others to `help out`.

Domestic work is also often not considered to be `real` work, and domestic workers are not real workers. They are considered to be `one of the family`. There is need to provide social protection and legal rights that treat workers at par with other wage workers. There is need for policy to acknowledge that domestic work is carried out in conditions similar to wage work but within the confines of the private household.

Domestic work is often undervalued and poorly regulated and, thus, domestic workers remain overworked, underpaid and unprotected. Live-in work, in particular, occurs in an isolated, largely non-regulated and privatised environment. Mobility is heavily restricted and these workers do not have extended families or community based support. They are most vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse, excessively long working hours and deprivation, often working in isolation almost like bonded labour. For the live-out workers, the multiple employers, the informal nature of work arrangements and wage fixation, and lack of grievance-redressal mechanisms pose acute problems. Besides security of work and income, women domestic workers need grievance-redressal mechanisms, skill upgradation, old-age pension and child-care facilities, at the least.

There is no doubt that social security is an urgent need for domestic workers. The main issue is how this can be achieved, ensuring appropriate, efficient and quality services. Extending social security to the workers in the informal economy, particularly for women workers, is not merely a matter of extending existing formal sector schemes to new groups. The fragmented tasks and the multiple employers pose serious challenges for designing social security for domestic workers. Besides, domestic workers are commonly subject to different local labour market engagements. The existence of various layers of recruitment agents, the system of advance payments and the lack of regulation of employment agencies add to the complexities in delivering required social and legal protection to such workers.

In India, domestic workers are largely absent from state policy-be it labour laws or social policy. They are, therefore, not entitled to maternity benefits and other social security nor are their working conditions or hours of work regulated. However, some efforts have been made. The most recent Unorganized Workers Social Security Act 2008 does cover domestic workers. In certain states, minimum wages have been notified for domestic work. There have been efforts to legislate for the protection of domestic workers, including a Bill drafted by the National Commission for Women in 2008. At the state level, the Maharashtra Domestic Workers Welfare Board Act 2008 and the Tamilnadu Manual Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Work) Act 1982 envisage welfare and protection for domestic workers through the welfare board models.

The experience of welfare boards has been very positive in India, particularly for reaching social security to workers without a clear employer-employee relationship. The advantages of a welfare fund are many. First, the financing for the funds does not depend on government budgets but on the surpluses in the particular sector or trade; it is financed directly from revenue generated from the sector. Second, it has a logic that is acceptable to all, in that the benefits of the trade accrue to the workers of the trade. Third, it has strong stakeholder participation. However, one major shortcoming of the existing funds is that they have not been very effective for women workers.

Innovative amendments to the existing welfare model structure will have to be introduced to make it appropriate for delivering social security to the domestic workers. Due to the person and locale-specific ways in which wage and working conditions are negotiated by workers, there is urgent need to decentralise this process and factor in varying geographic and socio-economic profiles of the areas while setting wage fixation and working condition norms. At the very least, the welfare model will need to be changed to make it more decentralised, deliver more benefits and become more efficient. Some of the proposed bills assign a large gamut of activities for the welfare boards. Boards are to supervise the design of norms and programmes for workers as well as be responsible for facilitating the registration of workers while monitoring and allocating funds for the benefit of the workers. These are the large gamut of activities and the capacity of any institution to manage such a combination of tasks needs to be evaluated.

There is also urgent need to look into other innovative practices that can be piloted at the locality level, in collaboration with other local institutions. Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), private registered agencies, workers co-operatives and state programme units can play critical roles. For instance, the Gender Resource Centres (GRCs) designed by the Delhi government can become local, single-window facilities for registration and delivery of benefits. (The GRCs in the slums of Delhi are envisaged as instruments that bring social, economic and legal empowerment of women, particularly those belonging to the under-privileged sections of society). Residential area-based mechanisms for social security and dispute settlements can also be piloted. Local migration centres, linked to RWAs or neighbourhood services bureaus, are some other alternatives. Reconceptualising the legal framework so as to cover the domestic workers is imperative. The national labour laws need to extend recognition to domestic work as `work` through its inclusion within the ambit of minimum wage laws, dispute settlement laws and social security laws.

The invisibility of domestic workers manifests itself in several ways. Not included in the wider notion of a `worker` category, they lack the right to claim certain benefits such as social security or welfare claims. Working at home, these workers have less voice vis-à-vis employers or public authorities than other workers. Organising at the grass roots is fundamental to finding solutions to the various problems faced by domestic workers and addressing the myriad vulnerabilities that they face. Organising domestic workers, like other informal workers-for personal, social and economic empowerment; to raise their visibility as a group; and to provide a mechanism for effectively representing their interests, or giving them `voice` in their struggles around immediate issues, is the key to their empowerment. There is need to sustain and support organisations for domestic workers in order to improve their bargaining power, wages and voice. Furthermore, organising workers and providing information on basic entitlements at the local level will boost the ability of the workforce to negotiate and achieve improved wages and working conditions.

• Chandrashekar C.P, Ghosh Jayati (2007). `Women Workers in Urban India` , Macroscan, February 6th 2007 accessed on 1st May 2008, http://www.macroscan.com/fet/feb07/fet060207Women_Workers.htm
• Sudarshan, R. and S. Bhattacharya (2008) "Through the Magnifying Glass: Women`s Work and Labour Force Participation in Urban Delhi", ILO Asia Pacific Working Paper Series.